Sections:

While much of the media industry focused on the churn of headlines, we became increasingly interested in the undercurrents beneath them: the hidden systems, infrastructures and ideologies shaping events across borders and over time.

Again and again, our reporting led us back to the same realization: for a long time, the struggle over information was understood primarily as a question of censorship or access. Who controls information? Who gets to publish? Who gets silenced?

Those questions still matter. But they no longer fully describe the world we live in.

Today, the struggle over information is about who builds the systems through which reality is organized, distributed and trusted. From state propaganda to algorithmic feeds, from platform monopolies to AI-generated noise, the battle is not over facts. It is over the infrastructures that determine which narratives spread, which voices are amplified and which communities remain connected.

Over the past year, these questions led to a collaboration between Coda and The Continent, the pan-African newspaper founded in Johannesburg by Simon Allison and Sipho Kings. Although our reporting emerges from very different histories and geographies, we found ourselves arriving at remarkably similar conclusions about power, fragmentation and the future of journalism in an age of informational instability.

This two-chapter essay is the beginning of that collaboration, and marks the start of a new project called The Atlas. Pilot edition is available here — please feel free to share with friends, family and colleagues, preferably in its entirety.

In Chapter One, I return to the world of my Soviet childhood: propaganda, samizdat and the search for trustworthy signals through noise.

In Chapter Two, The Continent co-founder Simon Allison presents the Parable of Sinn Sisamouth: the story of how some of the greatest songs ever written were nearly lost, and then found, and then lost again. 

Taken together, these essays ask what journalism becomes in a world where information is no longer organized primarily to inform, but to capture attention, manufacture reaction and shape perception at planetary scale.

The Atlas grows out of that question.

Chapter One: Through the Static

Whenever I am asked why I decided to become a journalist, an image from my childhood pops into my head. It’s dusk. I am 10, sitting in the kitchen with my mom. She is glued to a shortwave radio. Outside, the Soviet Union is on the cusp of collapse. Georgia, where we are, is on the brink of civil war. We didn’t use the term back then, but fake news was all we got through official channels. Real news — coming from the West — felt like a lifeline. I was in awe of the crackling radio that held my mother’s full attention. I wanted to become that voice.

Years later, I got my dream job at the BBC and spent much of my adult life moving between wars, uprisings and authoritarian states. Again and again, I found myself in places where truth was contested terrain: Baghdad, Damascus, Donetsk, Sana’a. But over time I realized something fundamental had changed. Modern authoritarianism no longer relied primarily on suppressing information. It had discovered something more effective.

Information could simply be drowned out by static.

That realization became stark for me in eastern Ukraine in the summer of 2014. I arrived in a field of bright yellow sunflowers where the bodies from Flight MH17 still lay scattered across the ground. A Russian missile had blown the passenger plane out of the sky, killing all 298 people on board. Yet almost immediately, the Kremlin flooded the information space with competing explanations. It was a Ukrainian fighter jet. A failed assassination attempt on Putin. The plane had been filled with corpses before takeoff. Each theory contradicted the next, but that hardly mattered. The point was not to persuade, it was to exhaust. It was to create so much noise that truth itself began to feel unstable.

Over the following years, I watched versions of the same logic spread far beyond Russia. Social platforms transformed public conversation into a permanent stream of outrage, performance and distraction, collapsing vastly different kinds of information into the same endless feed. War footage, propaganda, conspiracy theories, journalism and gossip all began competing inside systems designed not to inform people but to capture and hold attention.

Noise became the new censorship.

And increasingly, I found myself thinking about the world of my childhood again. Not because history was repeating itself neatly, but because the emotional landscape felt strangely familiar: confusion, exhaustion, distrust, the constant sense that reality itself was becoming slippery. Back then, people searched desperately for clear signals through the static of Soviet propaganda. Today, we are drowning in a different kind of static, but the instinct, the search for clarity feels remarkably similar.

In the Soviet Union, people developed ways of navigating that confusion. Among my strongest memories from that time is the sound of my parents’ typewriter late at night. Friends would pass around copies of banned Soviet literature and my parents would sit at the kitchen table all night, retyping them page by page so they could be shared again. It was my first encounter with samizdat, although I didn’t know the word then.

Looking back now, what strikes me is that samizdat was never simply about forbidden texts. It was about building trusted alternative systems of circulation when official systems had lost credibility.

At Coda, we have spent years building journalism against the logic of noise. We slowed stories down. We followed themes instead of headlines. We built a reporting system designed to connect events across borders and over time, helping readers see patterns instead of fragments. But as our globally distributed newsroom adapted to an increasingly fractured information landscape, it became clear that journalism alone was not enough. Distribution shapes understanding as much as reporting does.

Around the same time, in Johannesburg, Simon Allison, Sipho Kings and their team were building something that challenged many of the assumptions dominating digital media. The Continent, their pan-African newspaper, spreads largely through direct sharing networks: passed from reader to reader rather than pushed by algorithms.

Different histories had brought us to remarkably similar questions. What does journalism look like when trust is collapsing, attention is fragmented and the systems that carry information have themselves become instruments of power?

Out of that convergence came The Atlas: a new publication that brings together Coda’s methodology of following systems across borders and over time with The Continent’s radically distributed model for reaching readers beyond algorithmic feeds.

The Atlas is built on a shared conviction: as fragmentation, distrust and informational overload spread across the world, some of the clearest ways through will come from places that have already spent decades navigating propaganda, instability and contested reality. Places once treated as peripheral are becoming essential to understanding the defining question of this age: how can meaning survive systems designed to overwhelm it.

Chapter Two: The second silencing of Sinn Sisamouth

Imagine if your favourite song disappeared, forever. 

Almost every album I have ever loved was recommended to me by my friend An-Rui. A few months ago, he sent me a track by the undisputed King of Khmer Music, the Golden Voice, the Cambodian Elvis himself – Sinn Sisamouth.

I had never heard of him.

I didn’t respond at first, so he nudged me. That night, after the kids were asleep, I put on my headphones, sat in the garden and immediately lost myself in Cambodia’s psychedelic rock scene of the 1960s and ‘70s. I don’t know enough about music to explain exactly what I fell in love with, but within weeks I was, according to Spotify, among the top one percent of Sinn Sisamouth listeners worldwide.

An-Rui had added a note to his recommendation. “the songs are happy but since i know what his fate was and i don’t understand the words, it sounds incredibly sad to me”.

The story goes something like this: A small-town boy with an extraordinary voice moves to the big city, and conquers all before him. He writes hundreds of songs, bridging Khmer musical traditions with new western influences: jazz, rock & roll, bossa nova, blues, the Beatles, and, of course, Elvis Presley. He toured the country. He toured the world. He made music with an actual King, Norodom Sihanouk, and became Cambodia’s most beloved rockstar.

Then, in 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power. In the course of committing a genocide, the communist regime disappeared Sinn Sisamouth, and banned his music. He has never been seen, or heard from, again.

But his music never died. It lived on brittle records, hidden for generations under floorboards. It lived on scratchy cassettes, passed hand to hand among the diaspora.

It was only decades later that his music was digitised and remastered, and made available on streaming platforms to the likes of me.

When I listen to Sinn Sisamouth, I can’t help but think about how easily we could have lost his masterpieces entirely. And I wonder what else might have been lost that we have not been able to recover.

And then it happened again.

There’s a particular track that I like to play in my car, where I can turn the bass up as high as it goes. I was driving one afternoon and looked for it on Spotify. It was gone, even though the rest of the album was there. 

I looked again on my laptop at home. Nothing. Gone from Spotify. Gone from Apple Music. Gone from YouTube. Like it had never been there in the first place. I started to wonder if I had gone crazy, and maybe imagined the song entirely. And then I started to panic: What if I never heard it again?

Eventually, I found a bootleg YouTube version, using a different transliteration of the Khmer title – Kanlang Pnheu Pran, instead of Konlong Phner Bran. Before I tracked that down, I had to wade through dozens of AI-generated Sinn Sisamouth ‘cover versions’, all uploaded to YouTube within the last few months. If I had never heard it before, I would never have been able to tell which was the original.

It’s not unusual for songs to disappear from the Internet, especially when the music is from non-English-speaking countries. I’ve had similar experiences with the music of Sharhabil Ahmed, the Sudanese jazz legend, and Ethiopia’s Tilahun “The Voice” Gessesse.

In fact, it’s not unusual for other kinds of information to disappear from the internet; to be edited after the fact; or to be simply lost among all the digital noise. Digital information is incredibly precarious, and becoming more so by the day. AI slop is taking over social media platforms. Algorithms determine what information we can and can’t see, shaping our cultural and political preferences. And powerful interests are becoming increasingly bold when it comes to brazenly manipulating information in their favour – or, of even greater concern, restricting the flow of information across borders.

Amazon changes the contents of books on people’s Kindles without telling anyone. News websites quietly alter critical stories, post-publication, to remove evidence of wrongdoing (my favourite example: the Financial Express published a story critical of India’s richest family; only to replace it with a glorified press release a few days later. They neglected to amend the URL, however, which contains the original headline). Governments shut down internet access on a whim, or legislate which apps and websites are available to specific populations.

For journalism, this is an existential threat. Our job is not just to hold power to account – it is also to write the first draft of history. But if we can’t preserve that first draft, or distribute it effectively, then what, exactly, is the point?

The Continent and Coda Story are working together to try something different. We want to publish news about the world, produced and verified by humans, that cannot be edited after the fact; and to distribute it in a way that dramatically decreases our reliance on unaccountable algorithms or search engine optimisation. The Atlas — pilot edition available here — is our answer to the precarity of information online. It’s a work in progress.

Stay tuned: if we’re going to succeed, we’ll need your help. And if we do succeed, the secret of our success will be those very same transnational networks that kept the music of Sinn Sisamouth alive. Communities of like-minded people, of friends and families will always find a way to stay connected, no matter how vast the distances between them, or how great the obstacles. So what does a global newspaper look like if we design it with exactly these communities in mind?

As soon as I found that bootleg on YouTube, I ripped an MP3 copy and sent it to An-Rui on Signal. “KEEP THIS SAFE,” I told him. I don’t know what happened to the song on Spotify, or if it is ever coming back. But I can’t take the risk of never hearing that bassline again. And here it is, in case you want to hear it too.

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The post The new samizdat appeared first on Coda Story.

Sara’s story: 

I became an exile in 2015 when I had to leave Syria. I'm originally from the South, but I was studying in Damascus at the time. By 2015, things had become really complicated. Bombs were falling every day. I love my homeland. But there was something I noticed—people didn't see the future anymore. And that was much scarier. People were in survival mode. There was no more looking forward to anything. I just needed to build a better future, but I never expected to become an exile.

When I was a child, I didn’t have any notion of borders. Back then, we had family in Lebanon because my grandfather was born there before the Sykes-Picot agreement [the 1916 treaty that carved up the Ottoman empire between Britain and France], and as kids we travelled easily between the two countries. My Lebanese aunt and cousins visited us often, and we visited them. These borders existed, but to me they felt light, almost invisible, there was always this connection, and I never questioned it. After 2011, everything changed. My father was on his way to Lebanon for my cousin’s funeral when someone warned him to go into hiding because the Assad regime was after him. That moment marked the first time we felt the border as a wall, the first time we were cut off from part of our family.

The moment I left, in my head it was simple: I'm leaving for a few years, I'll study, things will get better, and I'll come back. I never imagined it would be this difficult. I didn't have much knowledge about exile beforehand. In those first years in France, I was just adapting.

When I had to leave Syria in 2015, each border became an obstacle to cross, each one a huge ordeal—two months spent trying to cross them to reach my mother in France. The situations were often dangerous, sometimes requiring long walks. I developed this very physical connection to borders. We would wait in camps for days. You see the border, a gate that opens and closes controlled by others and they decide when you can pass. You just sit and wait, sometimes for hours, and then when it opens you go. This was the case between Greece and Macedonia.

But today—it's going to be almost ten years now—I question this a lot. What is exile? Especially with the policies around it in Europe. Why do I have to prove my existence every day? I try to integrate in all the ways that are expected of me. I speak the language fluently, I completed my studies, I learned the culture, I work, I pay my taxes, everything that is supposed to make me a "good refugee," a good example. I have done all of it.

But belonging is something else. It cannot take root in a society where I am constantly asked to justify myself, to tick every box, and still it is never enough.

As a political refugee, I only have a travel document. I have no Syrian papers. And it clearly states that I cannot go to Syria. If I enter the country, I lose my residency. I would have to give up the life I've built here just to visit my family, to see my father, to be present when my grandfather died. I don't have the option to go back and forth, to keep any real connection with home.

At first I tried to accept it—I told myself that living here means losing certain privileges. But going home is not a privilege. Seeing your family members for the last time is not a privilege—it's simply life, the bare minimum. Laws that deny this are profoundly dehumanizing.

When I think about borders, for me it's not only geopolitical—they are actual walls. I have no choice; it stands right there, impossible to cross. That's the real meaning of a border: the physical, unyielding reality of it. It's a block.

Photography is my way of giving form to things. Exile is not a physical space, it's not tangible. I live in exile. But where is that? What is that? And yet it's real. I don't feel connected to any physical place. But photography allows me to materialize something. I create a space through these photos. I'm trying to visualize exile.

The day I left Syria, the night before, my phone broke and deleted all of my images. I left Syria with nothing—no photos of my life with my friends, no memories. I had lost everything. During the journey from Syria to France, I chose not to document anything because I didn't want it to be part of my life. So I refused to record it.

A few years later, as I realized I was starting to forget, I began to panic. My fear wasn't only about forgetting the events—it was about losing the feelings, the personal experiences that give them meaning. I thought about the importance of documenting and archiving—not just for myself, but for collective memory. If I forget, and no trace remains, what happens to our struggles, our narratives? What happens to the shared memories, to the archives?

I don't know if art or photography can really make political change, but they help me connect with people who share similar experiences. Understanding these stories helps me process my own, it supports me mentally. Sometimes people here say, "You're lucky—you have a story to express." And I think, please, take my story and give me a normal life instead.

If I had a normal life, I wouldn't hold onto these themes so tightly. I cling to them because they're my reality—I don't have another choice.

Of course, I think it's important to work on these subjects, to talk about exile and displacement. But it's equally important to remember that the real hope is that one day no one will have to live these stories in the first place.

I'm 29. I came here when I was 19. In February it will be 10 years. I was talking with a friend who visited from Syria recently. She lives in Damascus, she's a filmmaker. I feel guilty when I talk to Syrians who are still inside. I feel like I left them or abandoned them. Because of that guilt, I'm always careful when I talk about my suffering in exile, since many people see living in Europe as a kind of privilege. But she was telling me that after traveling for just a week, she felt exhausted and thought, "I need to go home." And I told her, if you want to understand my feelings, it's exactly what you're feeling now, but for 10 years. I never stopped feeling like I'm traveling. It never stops.

The post On the edge of home: A Syrian photographer’s story of exile appeared first on Coda Story.

I was at a park near where Florida A&M University and Florida State University campuses overlapped in Tallahassee some forty years ago, enjoying the warm air and easy company of friends, when I overheard a white student waxing nostalgic about the Civil War.

“The South should have won,” he said wistfully, as though mourning a missed opportunity rather than a moral catastrophe.

My friends and I exchanged glances. As the outspoken one in the group, I called back, “We beat you last time, and we’ll do it again.”

At the time, I was a sophomore at FAMU, an Historically Black College and University, immersed in African and U.S. history, surrounded by a vibrant, intellectual, Pan-African community that shaped my view of the world.

It was an oasis—an environment where I could think deeply and freely about the past and its implications for the present.

That encounter seemed trivial then, but in hindsight, it revealed something festering beneath the surface of American life: a refusal, especially among some white Americans, to reckon with the legacy of the Civil War.

A family that defied the script

Years later, I would revisit that moment when I went to pick up my daughter at school. She bears the richness of two heritages—mine rooted in Haiti’s resistance, her mother’s Midwestern sensibilities.

Upon seeing me in the courtyard, one of her friends called out that her nanny was here to pick her up. Irritated, she shouted, “That’s my daddy, not my nanny.”

I smiled at her spunkiness. But I also knew that moment crystallized what I had always sensed: our very existence as a family disrupted someone’s idea of what America should look like.

In 1996, I wrote about our marriage for Essence Magazine. The stares. The quiet bewilderment. The feeling that our presence broke an unspoken rule. “Our very existence,” I wrote then, “disrupted someone’s idea of what America should look like.”

It still does.

A fire long smoldering

Four decades after that afternoon in Tallahassee, I’ve come to believe we’re in the midst of the Civil War’s final battle—not a clash of soldiers on a field, but a sociopolitical and cultural war threatening to tear the nation apart.

A fire is roaring through America’s foundations. It didn’t start yesterday. It wasn’t sparked by Black Lives Matter or the 2020 election or any single migrant crossing a border. No—this fire has been smoldering for generations, lit by the unfinished business of the Civil War.

“This is not a war between North and South or red and blue. It’s a war within whiteness itself.”

It’s a reckoning between two factions of white America:
– One trying to build a country where power is shared and history confronted.
– The other desperate to preserve a fantasy where they remain the sole heirs to the republic.

People of color are the excuse, not the cause. The rest of us are just trying not to get burned.

The arsonists and the alarm sounders

January 6 wasn’t just a riot—it was a flare from a deeper blaze.

When white Americans stormed the Capitol waving Confederate flags, Jesus banners, and Trump signs, they weren’t attacking a building. They were rejecting a future that no longer centers them.

They were not fringe. They were family—teachers, cops, veterans, neighbors—willing to overturn democracy to preserve supremacy.

On the other side are white Americans lighting different kinds of fires: truth-telling ones. They’re teaching real history, confronting privilege, tearing down monuments to lies.

But they’re outgunned by grievance—weaponized, monetized, and televised grievance. And nothing in America spreads faster than white grievance wrapped in the flag.

A fire fueled by fear

What drives this isn’t just racism—it’s fear.
Fear of losing centrality.
Fear of becoming “just another demographic.”
Fear that the stories they were told about greatness might be myths.

Equality feels like oppression when you’ve never experienced either.

This fear is tangled with economic despair and a longing for a past that never truly existed. As the promise of American prosperity falters, anger searches for a scapegoat. Immigrants. Black people. Queer youth. Anyone but the systems that failed them.

The refrain becomes familiar: “America is changing too fast.” But the truth is, America is finally starting to look like itself.

Witness from the margins

I write this not only as a journalist who has covered American democracy for decades, but as a Haitian immigrant who has lived its contradictions.

I arrived as a Black boy with a French accent, navigating the strange hierarchies of race in America. Later, I married a white woman from the Midwest. We raised biracial children in Brooklyn—a borough that celebrates difference in a country that often doesn’t.

For those of us not born here, the message is double-edged: assimilate into a crumbling house, or help rebuild it from the foundation up.

The Currency of Whiteness

For generations, whiteness has been an invisible currency—buying safety, authority, dominance. Now, that currency is losing value. The country is changing its exchange rate.

Some white Americans are hoarding what they can while they can. But people of color aren’t seeking revenge; we’re seeking balance. We don’t want to become what whiteness once was—we want to build something better.

But we can’t rebuild while one faction is holding a flamethrower.

The front lines

Go to any school board meeting, and you’ll see it. Parents shouting about “indoctrination,” demanding books be banned, LGBTQ kids erased.
Go to any legislature, and you’ll see laws crafted to silence, restrict, and erase.
Go online, and you’ll find young white men radicalized by digital preachers of hate.

This fire is not spontaneous—it is fed, stoked, and monetized.

Redefining whiteness

“What does it mean to be white in America without being supreme?”

That’s the question white Americans must face.
Without supremacy, whiteness becomes a blank page. Some see emptiness. Others see possibility.

The hope lies with those writing a new script: one rooted in solidarity, not superiority. But this new identity won’t be born in classrooms—it’ll be forged in discomfort, in truth-telling, in choosing democracy over delusion.

America’s burning house

America today is a house on fire. The flames were set long ago—some rooms built on slavery, others on exclusion, others on stolen land.

Some white Americans are the arsonists, some the alarm sounders, and the rest of us are tenants wondering whether the fire will reach our floor before the builders arrive.

This is the metaphor of our time: a burning house still under construction. We can let it collapse—or rebuild it stronger and fairer.

The Final Battle

The final battle of the Civil War is here.
Not with bayonets but ballots.
Not with cavalry but algorithms.
Not in Gettysburg but in Georgia, Michigan, Texas—and in living rooms across the country.

And now, with the reins of power once again in his hands, Donald Trump is no longer shouting from the sidelines.
He’s using the full weight of his office to bend democracy to his will—purging dissenters, weaponizing institutions, rewarding loyalty over law.

He has become less a president than an arsonist-in-chief, pouring accelerant on the nation’s divisions and daring America to burn.
Each provocation—each threat, each insult, each abuse of power—is another match flicked at the dry timber of grievance that’s been piling up for generations.

The question now: Will America finally douse the flames—or stand mesmerized as the house collapses around us?

The memory returns

Sometimes, I think back to that afternoon in Tallahassee, when a college kid wistfully claimed the South should’ve won.
I wonder where he is now—did he grow out of that fantasy or dig deeper into it?
Is he among those cheering today as Trump fans the flames from inside the house?

I’ll never know. But I do know this: the war he romanticized never ended—it just changed its weapons and its uniforms.
And now, as the smoke thickens and the fire climbs higher, we are all living in the house they built.

Whether it stands or burns will depend on who chooses to rebuild—and who keeps feeding the fire

A version of this article was first published on Garry's Substack and Coda's Sunday Read newsletter. Sign up here.

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Vox’s anti-migrant messaging connects it to the values of a broad swathe of right wing groups across the world. In context, Las Marifachas views represent and reflect a trend that has been growing across Europe, from France to Germany to the U.K., for a decade now – the alliance between some gay men and far-right parties, brought together by their shared hostility towards immigration, particularly Muslim immigration.  

Gay conservatism is not new, of course. Its roots go back to the 1950s and the leadership purge at the once progressive, Communist-inspired Mattachine Society. In 2024, JD Vance felt confident enough to predict that he and Donald Trump would win the “normal gay guy vote.” He was wrong. An unprecedented proportion of LGBTQ voters voted Democrat, even as more voters than ever identified as LGBTQ. In Europe, though, immigration has been a more pressing concern for some LGBTQ voters, driven by misinformation and polarizing online content about homophobic immigrants. It is a widespread fear. 

That’s why in May, Las Marifachas traveled to the Romanian capital Bucharest, livestreaming election reports from the headquarters of the populist Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). The election was being rerun after far-right candidate Călin Georgescu’s victory last November was annulled due to allegations of Russian interference. The controversy meant the Romanian election had become a right wing cause célèbre. Even ‘Make America Great Again’ representatives had traveled to Bucharest to throw Donald Trump hats into crowds of cheering supporters.

Part of this global right, Las Marifachas had to be in Bucharest, crowdfunding their first “international mission” and ignoring the perplexed glances from local, flag-waving AUR supporters whose party has said it opposes “homosexual marriage” and “publicly-funded trans-sexual surgery and other Freudo-Marxism-inspired 'innovations' meant to fluidize, relativize, and eventually abolish the traditional moral paradigm.”

Still, whatever AUR’s professed anti-LGBTQ beliefs, Madame in Spain insists Muslims pose a greater threat. “I can’t understand how the LGBTQ community, feminists and this damn woke movement can support Islam,” Madame says. “Because they don’t come to integrate, they come to destroy us.”

Back in Spain, Las Marifachas have been promoting their new song, ‘Bocadillo de jamón’ (literally, ham sandwich), a dig at Muslims who don’t eat pork. “In every Spanish home,” reads the title of one of the Marifachas’ YouTube videos, “there must be a leg of ham.” It’s the kind of sentiment that increasingly resonates with Spanish voters.

After a surprisingly mediocre showing in the 2023 Spanish general election, recent polling shows that Vox is regaining momentum. It is currently the most popular party in the country among men and among younger demographics, with 27.9% of 18-24 year olds and 26% of 25-34 year olds saying they will vote for Vox in the next general election, according to a poll in Spanish newspaper El Pais. Though it is not until 2027, Elon Musk has already declared on X that “Vox will win the next election.”

Musk’s support echoes that of Donald Trump, with Vox leader Santiago Abascal securing a spot alongside Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Argentina’s Javier Milei as MAGA’s most prominent overseas supporters. While Vox currently holds just 33 seats out of 350 in the Spanish parliament, its influence on the national agenda far exceeds its political presence.

In September, at ‘Viva Europa’, a Vox conference, attended virtually by Meloni, Orbán and Milei, Abascal wore a white ‘Freedom’ t-shirt in tribute to Charlie Kirk, the prominent MAGA activist, who had been assassinated just days earlier while speaking at Utah Valley University. Delegates embraced Kirk as a martyr for free speech. “Some point and others shoot,” Abascal said. “Since censorship isn’t enough for them, they resort to murder.” He was also quoted as saying, the left “do not kill us for being fascists – they call us fascists in order to kill us”.

Eorope's homonationalist wave

In contrast with much of the rest of Europe, the Spanish government has been welcoming of immigration, acknowledging its economic advantages and the need for immigrants in an ageing country with one of the lowest birth rates in the world. But this year Spain overtook Germany as the top EU asylum destination, and anti-immigration sentiment has been growing.

 It reached boiling point this summer. On July 9, a 68-year old man in the southern Spanish town of Torre-Pacheco — where about a third of its 40,000 inhabitants are migrants — was brutally beaten up by three young men. Far-right groups were quick to use the beating as an opportunity to spread fake videos and misinformation on a Telegram group called “Deport them Now Spain”. Among the racist, anti-migrant invective were calls to “hunt” down North Africans and “reunite them with Allah”. 

The violent clashes between protestors and police echoed riots in other European cities in recent summers, including last year in the United Kingdom after the killing of three children in a mass stabbing was falsely blamed on Muslims and asylum seekers. Using a new tool called FARO, developed to detect hate speech, the Spanish government found that the Torre-Pacheco incident fueled a wave of 33,000 messages containing hate speech towards immigrants posted in a single day.

When I asked Carlitos, of Las Marifachas, about the role of social media in driving real-life violence against immigrants in Torre-Pacheco, he said that it was not the Telegram group that was the problem. People on the streets, he argued, now feel empowered to act. “I do generalize,” he said, “that the Islamic religion is homophobic.”

It is a belief many LGBTQ+ voters across Europe have shared. In France, Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally party (RN) received strong support from gay voters during her runs for president. In 2017, polling showed that Le Pen was, remarkably, more popular among LGBTQ voters, which make up 6.5% of the French electorate, than she was with straight voters. This, despite her party’s traditional opposition to LGBTQ+ rights.

A 2024 study from the London School of Economics showed that in the U.K., a growing number of people profess progressive views on homosexuality alongside anti-immigrant sentiment, a combination that became prominent during the Brexit debates back in 2016. And much more recently, in the run-up to the German elections in February this year, a survey by the LGBTQ dating app Romeo showed that the majority of the 10,000 people polled favored the far-right Alternative for Germany, led by the openly gay Alice Weidel. 

In the Netherlands, the late-1990s rise of Pim Fortuyn, a gay academic turned hardline anti-immigrant, was an early example of the coming together of progressive views on homosexuality with conservative views on immigration. Dutch scholars have tracked how Fortuyn’s framing of Muslim migration as a threat to Western openness and liberalism changed populist politics.

The above are all examples of “homonationalism”, a term coined two decades ago by Jasbir Puar, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University. Her work describes how far-right actors instrumentalize LGBTQ rights to spread anti-immigrant messages by creating a binary narrative in which Islam is pitted against homosexuality. Originally focused on post-9/11 America, European scholars have since used Puar’s framework to document similar patterns in multiple countries.

"Across Europe, it has proven effective for promoting anti-immigrant policies and gaining gay voters," says Guillermo Fernández Vázquez, a political scientist at Madrid's Complutense University. "While the LGBTQ community has always been told that the far-right is a threat to their rights," he told me, "actors like Las Marifachas argue that 'no, it's actually the immigrants, so the far right is not your enemy, it's your main defender.'" The far-right becomes, paradoxically, the main ally of European gays because, he adds, "they claim to be the only ones tough and determined enough to kick out the supposed aggressors."

The algorithm advantage

Social media platforms play a crucial role in amplifying this messaging and making once obscure political positions mainstream, especially since companies like Meta eliminated their fact-checking operations. Far-right content is inherently more compatible with social media algorithms that prioritize confrontational and populist material, explains Petter Törnberg, a University of Amsterdam professor studying social media polarization.

Las Marifachas are part of Spain's "Fachatubers" — a portmanteau of "facha" (fascist) and YouTuber. These creators have mastered how to use coded language to evade detection while conveying extremist messages.

Much of Las Marifachas' content discusses violent crimes in Spain, emphasizing assaults on LGBTQ individuals and the nationalities of the alleged perpetrators. “This discourse criminalizes all immigration and has nothing to do with LGTBIQ+ rights or wellbeing,” says Francesc Álvarez, head of  the Barcelona-based advocacy group Ram de l'Aigua. "Right-wing groups exploit the false premise that all migrants are homophobic and no LGBTQ immigrants exist, when Spain actually serves as a destination for those fleeing persecution over sexual orientation.”

Las Marifachas distance themselves from the LGBTQ movement, which they claim is “woke” ideology separate from homosexuality. Both Madame and Carlitos describe themselves as deeply religious, promoting Christian and traditional family values. They oppose homosexual adoption and don't object to Vox's anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ policy proposals.

"We've contributed our grain of sand,” says Madame, “by uncloseting a lot of homosexuals who didn't dare say that they support the right." According to Guillermo Fernández Vázquez, "the primary function of this type of group, apart from surprising and entertaining, is to break things apart — to disperse, to fragment." In the medium and long term, he adds, "it's a strategy to ensure that there won't be a LGBTQ community that's united against the far-right."

Historically, he said, “the far-right has not exactly been supportive of LGBTQ rights, but when it turns out that it can benefit from LGBTQ support in pursuing anti-liberal, anti-Muslim, anti-migration aims, it is happy to adopt those values."

On 23 September, Donald Trump delivered an incendiary speech at the United Nations general assembly hall in New York, castigating European countries for failing to “stop people that you’ve never seen before, that you have nothing in common with.” It’s an anti-immigration message that should, arguably, resonate with Las Marifachas, a message that Vox appears intent on delivering to the Spanish electorate.
On October 11, Las Marifachas plan to be in Miami. It is the next stop, after Romania, on their “international mission” to get people to see things their way, to persuade people to drink from their fizzy cocktail of anti-immigration rhetoric, support for the pro-MAGA Vox party, and current-day homonationalism. Their goal in Miami, as they talk about censorship in Spain, will be to persuade their audience that the future is best served through an alliance with the far-right, in lying with the devil you know. Is fear proving stronger than traditional solidarity among marginalized groups.

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The post Meet Las Marifachas, Spain’s queer conservatives appeared first on Coda Story.

The dictatorship I was born in – the Soviet Union – was old and senile, much like the succession of its fossilized leaders who would appear at a plenary session one day and drop dead the next. By then, the bankrupt communist system was in its final throes, allegorically lampooned in film and literature while the nomenklatura played a desperate game of whack-a-mole with the ideas of freedom and nationalism that popped up in every corner of the exhausted empire.

Now in my forties, I’m watching a dictatorship return, watching it metastasize across the body of my country, Georgia, and eat away at the precious freedoms gained in the intermission.

“Georgia will never be Belarus,” was our presumptuous little mantra. We Georgians were too rambunctious, too freedom-loving to allow autocracy back in our midst. Since 1991, Georgia has had several  presidents and a dozen prime ministers. The Belarusians have had one bewhiskered man in charge for the last 30 years. Perhaps our post-Soviet peers up north are simply not feisty enough to put up a proper fight. But to put us temperamental southerners under some mustachioed strongman’s thumb? Ooh, we’d like to see you try.

We even chanted this Belarus refrain when we poured into the streets of our capital, Tbilisi, last fall to tell our all-powerful oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili, that he does not own our country. We do. Squaring up to riot police, we held up posters and shook our fists, denouncing the oligarch-controlled government’s betrayal of the constitutionally-mandated pathway towards integration with the European Union and, with it, the betrayal of the promise to build a modern democracy.

After many arrests and fractured facial bones, we no longer chant that mantra with the same certitude in our voices. Dozens of young protesters are locked away in prisons, some still showing signs of the brutal beatings they suffered while in custody. Meanwhile surveillance technology, including facial recognition software, has been used to track down demonstrators and drown them in hefty fines.

Courts churn out guilty verdicts robotically and an opposition-free parliament is cranking out repressive laws to choke off dissent. From the prime minister down, Georgian government officials kowtow to Ivanishvili, the oligarch-in-chief and founder of the ruling party, who does not sport a mustache or have a formal position in the government but does own this country.  

IIt is true that Georgia was never a blossoming democracy. My country was indeed institutionally ill-equipped to resist privatization by one (extremely) rich man. But most of us also thought that we were way past the stage when a regress into authoritarianism and isolation was possible. Ironically, it was in fact a democratic breakthrough that brought us to this juncture. 

Thirteen years ago, when the nation’s richest son came down from his futuristic, hilltop castle in Tbilisi to announce his political ambitions, too many were fooled by his promises of freedom and prosperity. Political groups of every hue and stripe joined the army of the discontented that Ivanishvili raised to unseat President Mikheil Saakashvili, a pro-West reformer who caught the autocracy bug toward the end of his rule.

The oligarch’s alliance, Georgian Dream, became an unstoppable juggernaut as it rolled towards parliament, with respectable opposition figures and intellectuals hopping onboard in anticipation of key posts in the prospective new government. The billionaire’s manner suggested that he was not, as Russians are wont to say, exactly scarred with intellect. So his complacent new allies assumed that he did not have the experience, the sophistication, and the vocabulary to run the country on his own or bend it to his will. 

A few Cassandras did offer routine warnings that behind a simpleton’s façade was a tough man with a Machiavellian mind. It shouldn’t have been hard to guess. After all, Ivanishvili managed to make his fortune in the dog-eat-dog world of 1990s Russia and, unlike many from that crop of oligarchs, lived to tell the tale.

Aware of Ivanishvili’s penchant for philanthropy, voters across our cash-strapped nation were overcome by hope that the billionaire’s riches would trickle down to them. He encouraged these expectations. In one campaign stunt, his lieutenants placed glass boxes in the streets, asking passers-by to write their wishes on little cards and put them in the boxes for the wealthy Santa Claus to review at his leisure. Lines quickly formed and the boxes brimmed with Georgian dreams.

Saakashvili, though, was not going down without a fight. But Georgia’s American and European friends took him aside for a lecture on democracy. You can’t be serious about joining the democratic club, they said, without ensuring something as basic as the peaceful transfer of power. Saakashvili accepted defeat. And Ivanishvili took note: maintaining friendships with the West and accepting their rules was problematic to anyone planning to acquire and hold onto power.

The election of 2012 resulted in Georgia’s first-ever democratic transfer of power – previously, revolutions and civil wars were the preferred modes of operation. The country soon came to boast of a highly pluralistic environment. Groups and individuals of all backgrounds and political persuasions filled legislative and executive seats. A cacophonic multitude of media outlets became free to pursue every story and angle.

In contrast to Saakashvili, who shunned critical media, Ivanishvili spoiled us journalists with hours-long, everyone-is-welcome press conferences, where he fielded every question and told awkward jokes. Soon the EU agreed visa-free and customs tax-free deals with Georgia, and the popular desire for membership in the bloc finally seemed within reach. Freedom and democracy were here to stay and there was no going back. 

Fast-forward a decade and you will find journalists and opposition politicians in prison. Critical media, human rights groups and corruption watchdogs are harassed and demonized. Politicians with values and minds of their own are banished from governance, and the Georgian Dream party has been reduced to a featureless monolith of yes-men.

The bid for EU membership is suspended. Georgia’s longtime partners, the EU and U.S., have been shown the door and requested to end their long-running support for democracy-building in Georgia. Moscow, once public enemy number one for Georgia, has become a source of inspiration for repressive ideas and pinches Tbilisi’s cheek in affectionate approval. 

Kremlinesque laws raise the cost of political dissent and threaten to scatter Georgia’s once vibrant civil society – a key driver of democratic change for years. One of the laws that Georgian Dream borrowed from Russia’s playbook requires international donor-sponsored civil-society organizations and media to register as foreign agents – a label that in the local sense primarily connotes a foreign spy – or go to prison.

In a classic authoritarian move for this part of the world, the oligarch’s government styles itself as a guardian of the heterosexual integrity of the nation in the face of gender confusion and sexual incontinence supposedly foisted upon our proud Christian nation by the West. Homophobic laws and rhetoric further demonize and disenfranchise Georgia’s long-suffering LBGTQ community. 

Somewhere in the corridors of power in Tbilisi, gathering dust, are the glass boxes full of Georgian dreams written down on cards by ordinary people filled with hope. A source with access to Georgian Dream’s offices managed to extract a handful of these cards and hand them over to me.

In these cards, people ask the oligarch for jobs and apartments, to sponsor tuition fees and medical treatment. Reading through these requests, I began to see how easy it was for one absurdly wealthy man to trick a whole country into surrendering itself to him. 

Perhaps the most painful part of Georgia’s rapid descent towards dictatorship is that you now see people you know – friends, relatives, colleagues – becoming a part of the system, or at least refusing to resist it. 

When the dictatorship of my childhood imploded, an entire generation, including university professors like my parents, found themselves lost and unneeded in the strange new world that the shattered superpower left in its wake. That world belonged to opportunists like Ivanishvili, who made fortunes in murky waters. Those who could not, migrated, streaming abroad to make a living. They drove cabs and cleaned homes in foreign cities, complaining to their eye-rolling clients that they were educated professionals – teachers, engineers and musicians – back in their obscure homeland.   

Maybe people in those cities, even now, look at Georgia and say “that could never happen to us.” They have, they reassure themselves, democratic traditions that go way back and institutions in place to guard against encroachments on their freedoms. “We will,” they might say, “never be a Georgia.” They would be wrong.

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On August 7, 2008, Maguli Okropiridze, almost nine months pregnant, fled her village of Ergneti in the Georgian region of South Ossetia.

For Maguli, who had become used to a life lived in the backdrop of bullets and artillery shells, it took a week of heavy shelling to push her out of her home. She had finally decided to flee what was now a war zone. But the stress of evacuating herself and her four children sent her into labour. With just a quarter of an hour to go before midnight, in a hospital in the small nearby town of Gori, Maguli gave birth to a baby girl, Keto. 

Just two days later, on August 9, Russian planes began bombing Gori. Maguli, still dressed in a hospital gown, grabbed her newborn daughter and, without hesitation, jumped out of the second floor window. 

"Keto is as old as the war", Maguli told me. “Every year on her birthday, I first mourn and then I congratulate her”.

Like Maguli, many Georgians believe the war began on August 7, when Russian troops crossed into South Ossetia. In Moscow, the start of the war is said to be August 8, when Russian troops apparently responded to Georgia’s shelling of Tskhinvali, 30 kilometers from Gori and now the capital of disputed South Ossetia. But Maguli’s own government disagrees with her.

In the ruling party’s version of events, the Russo-Georgian war broke out on August 8, just as the Kremlin says. 

A day’s difference might seem minor, but it flips the script. It reverses the roles between victims and perpetrators. It changes how Georgians will describe the war to future generations. And it calls into question the national memory and, in part, Georgia’s national identity.

When I was 10-years-old, wondering why fighter jets were hovering in the skies above us, my grandmother told me that Russia had invaded Georgia and annexed 20% of the country. I’d stand behind her chair, as the women gathered in her kitchen would curse Russia between sips of tea. Many had sons who were on the front line. These women, whose words I absorbed, are now being told that it wasn’t Russia’s fault that their sons had to go into battle. Since 2012, when Georgian Dream came to power, the party has maintained that its predecessors brought the war upon themselves by provoking Vladimir Putin.

As recently as April this year, Georgia’s prime minister told a government-friendly TV station that the 2008 war was the fault of former president Mikheil Saakashvili, acting on orders issued by a shadowy, nefarious Western cabal. The Georgian government has authorized a public commission to investigate “the circumstances surrounding the start of the 2008 war in South Ossetia,” particularly the role of the former government, the party of war as Georgian Dream characterizes it, while referring to itself as the party of peace even as it has spent months brutally suppressing street protests since October last year.

My country is now effectively putting itself on trial, 17 years after suffering an invasion from a foreign force. 

Georgia, a tiny country in the Caucasus region, wedged between eastern Europe and western Asia, has always been at a crossroads. For centuries, its location along the Silk Road brought both prosperity and peril, with invaders chasing the same riches that trade delivered.

For the past 200 years, the invader has been Russia. And resistance against those invasions has formed a core part of Georgian identity. “For us, the field in which we have lived is non-traditional and foreign,” noted the Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili. This, he added, “is the field of Russian power which took shape, let us say, around the 17th century and reached its culmination under Soviet rule. The main idea of this field is that the state stands above all, and the person is nothing more than a servant of the state and of the state’s idea.”

The stories of Russian conquests and local defiance show up in textbooks, films, and casual dinner conversation not just as historical events, but as a lens through which the present is understood.

For much of Georgian society, the effort to preserve the memory of Russia’s past aggressions is about staying alert to patterns and remembering the lessons that help us make sense of what it means to live next to a former colonial master that never truly left. In the words of the writer Grigol Robakidze, “no one has inflicted as much harm – moral and intellectual harm – as Russia has.” The Russians, he wrote, “once they came to Georgia, immediately reached into the very soul of the Georgian people and set about corrupting it, erasing its uniqueness.”

It is this antipathy and foundational mistrust that the current government of Georgia must contend with as it sets about rewriting the story of the 2008 Russo-Georgian war.

At 27, I have lived under the same government for nearly half my life. And every protest I’ve ever attended against this government (and there have been many) has, in some way, circled back to Russia. The Kremlin’s reach, most protestors agree, extends to the highest levels of the Georgian government.

Georgian Dream emerged in 2012 as an alternative to the pro-western Saakashvili’s increasingly authoritarian rule. It had momentum and money to spend. Founded and funded by the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made his billions in Russia's post-Soviet maelstrom, the party promised citizens democracy, stability, and integration into the European Union and NATO. 

While many were wary of Ivanishvili’s intentions, given his background and ties to Russia, citizens were ready for change and his party emerged as the only viable option after absorbing much of the disjointed opposition.

The story of Ivanishvili’s authoritarian takeover is familiar across post-Soviet republics. A billionaire appears out of nowhere, cloaked in populist promises about creating wealth, stability, and in Ivanishvili’s case, giving away literal ‘free money’. He wins, and then begins to capture state institutions one by one. Only then does he reveal the long game – absolute power. By the time the public sees the full picture, the tools they might use to push back have already been taken away.

During its first term, and even for several years after, Georgian Dream largely maintained the appearance of a somewhat democratic, West-facing government. It was a necessary performance in a country where the overwhelming majority of citizens support Euro-Atlantic integration, and where openly pro-Russian politicians have had little to no chance of mainstream success.

My own doubts about Georgian Dream started around two years into its rule. I was 17, interning at a fact-checking organisation. It was 2015, the year when Russia’s ‘borderization’ policy was at its peak. 

Borderization was a euphemism for what was basically a land grab, the slow but inexorable expansion of Russian territory within Georgia. Russian forces, often in the middle of the night, would move fences or put up new “border” signs, inching the occupation line further into Georgia. Sometimes it was a few meters, sometimes more. Either way, people would lose access to their farmland, water, and sometimes wake up to a completely different reality, with their house now inside occupied territory, unable to access the ‘Georgian side’. 

One day, I was tasked to fact-check a quote from then-Defense Minister, Tina Khidasheli. She said: “20% of our country is occupied, and if Russians move the ‘border’ by two kilometers, it’s bad, but it’s also just a continuation of the same political line that has been happening in the country for a long time.”

I remember being baffled by this. For two reasons. First because she referred to the occupation line as a border. If you call the occupation line a border then you’re legitimizing it, you’re going along with Russia’s talking points. And second because she made it sound like moving the line by two kilometers was nothing, but try telling that to the people who went to bed in Georgia and woke up in Russia, or at least subject to Russia’s rules.. 

This was my first sign that the government was softening its stance on occupation. But folks older than me remember pro-Russian rhetoric surfacing even earlier.

For instance in 2013, Ivanishvili claimed Russia was not, in his view, an imperial nation interested in rebuilding its empire.  

“I don’t think and I don’t believe that Russia's strategy is to conquer and occupy the territories of neighboring countries. I don't believe that,” he told an interviewer and then went on to boast about his superior analytical skills. 

The same year, he spoke of forming an “investigative commission” on the causes and triggers of the 2008 war. In 2018, during the presidential election, the Georgian Dream-backed candidate, Salome Zurabishvili claimed that Georgia had started the 2008 war and even suggested the previous government may have struck a covert deal with Russia.

In the face of a swift backlash from the public, most Georgian Dream politicians either avoided commenting on the matter or distanced themselves from Zurabishvili’s remarks. Tea Tsulukiani, the Justice Minister at the time, even said: “Georgia’s position is singular and unchanged: it is the position we present in Strasbourg and at The Hague: that Russia started the war against Georgia.”

But in the years that followed, that “singular and unchanged” position would very much change.  

While the international community eventually understood Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia to be a dress rehearsal for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – a connection the world failed to heed in 2014 – Tbilisi took the opposite tack. On the international stage, criticism of Russia was avoided, and Georgian officials blamed NATO’s eastern expansion for provoking Moscow into war. 

Back home, Georgian Dream doubled down on a worldview seemingly lifted straight from the Kremlin.

In this world, every critic, every opposition party, and every Western-backed NGO or media outlet was just another node in a vast international plot. Georgian Dream officials and affiliated media claimed that the entire opposition was controlled by Saakashvili and his party, the United National Movement, which took its orders from a “global war party”  run by elites in Brussels and Washington. 

The goal? To create a submissive regime in Georgia which would realize the elites’ covert plans to drag Georgia into war with Russia and open another front in a perpetual war against the Kremlin. On the civic front, these same Western elites were working to erase Georgian culture — to undermine the church and traditional values, and to advance a “liberal ideology” which includes “gay propaganda.” 

Georgian Dream, rather like Vladimir Putin does for the world at large, casts itself as the last line of defense in Georgia, a guardian of peace and sovereignty and traditional values. And for these reasons, they claim, the West, particularly the EU, wants them gone.

And while the phrase “global war party” originated in Russian propaganda, similar rhetoric is part of a wider, international authoritarian playbook. When Georgian Dream saw a familiar narrative about globalist elites gaining ground in Donald Trump’s America, it rebranded its “global war party” as the “deep state”.  Soon after, soundbites from U.S. politicians began appearing regularly in propaganda outlets.

In the run-up to the 2024 parliamentary elections, Georgian Dream’s central promise was peace with Russia. Fearmongering about war saturated the media landscape. And this is when the narrative turned once again to 2008.

Party officials said that the same Western cabal that had manipulated Saakashvili into war with Russia was at work again. Georgian Dream campaigned on prosecuting Saakashvili for his “well-planned treason”. Then, Bidzina Ivanishvili declared that Georgia should apologize for the war.

This story became central to the state-sanctioned version of recent history, one in which Russia was recast not as the aggressor, but as a misunderstood neighbor. And Saakashvili was not a flawed leader defeated in elections, but a Western puppet. And the 2008 war not as an invasion, but a provocation. 

Given the violently contested election results and rampant allegations of fraud, it’s hard to measure how effective Georgian Dream’s historical revisionism was. But in December 2024, a large part of Georgian society made its position clear: when Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced Georgia was halting its EU accession negotiations for four years, the response was immediate.

Outraged, Georgians flooded the streets demanding a reversal of the decision in what became the largest protests in the country’s modern history. 

The government responded with an unprecedented crackdown.

In just six months, the no longer independent courts passed reams of repressive laws, citizens were brutally beaten by police not only at the protests but also on their own doorsteps, and attacks on independent media and civil society organizations intensified. More than 60 political prisoners now face long jail terms, and at least eight prominent opposition politicians are already behind bars.

Yet, while the already tight authoritarian screws in Georgia have been further tightened, Ivanishvili has not yet engineered a full ideological takeover. The battle over Georgia’s minds and collective memory is still being fought. 

For more than 250 days, Georgians have been fighting to preserve their versions of the truth and for their visions of the country’s future. 

The view outside my windows in Tbilisi reflects that fight. In just the last year, the building in front of me now features a portrait of Maro Makashvili, a teenage nurse killed in the 1921 Soviet invasion of Georgia. A neighboring building features a mural of Giorgi Antsukhelidze, a Georgian soldier tortured by Russians during the 2008 war. And a third building features Georgian and Ukrainian flags.

This isn’t just a fight against authoritarianism for many of us. It’s the latest episode in a 200-year struggle against Russian imperialism and it’s a struggle for the rights of Georgians to write our past and, by extension, our future. 

As the 2008 war once again became a staple of daily conversations, I found myself drawn into discussions about assigning blame. What surprised me most was hearing even those who regularly protest against the government repeat Georgian Dream’s official talking points about the conflict.

It left me wondering if I was misremembering the war, or if there was an actual coordinated effort to rewrite the past. 

We tend to think of rewriting history as reinterpreting distant events, reworking details buried in time to fit a particular cultural or political moment. But what does it mean to reshape the memory of a war that nearly every Georgian remembers?

I set out to answer two questions: What really led to the 2008 war? And how deeply has Georgian Dream’s version influenced the national memory? I spoke to former government officials, international experts, and, most importantly, the people living along the occupation line – those still living with the war’s consequences day in and day out.

My first stop was Kirbali, a village notorious for being a focal point of Russia’s borderization policy, including the kidnapping of residents. Here, the occupation line is mostly invisible, there is no barbed wire, fence, or  natural boundary, it’s only marked by occasional signs, making it largely impossible to know where the line is actually located.  

This is deliberate. It sets up  Russia’s so-called “kidnapping” tactic—with Georgian citizens allegedly snatched from their land to sow fear among the population and pressure whole communities into abandoning their homes, clearing the way for borderization. 

In a village as small as Kirbali, outsiders don’t go unnoticed. As soon as I arrived, the police flagged my car. They asked about the purpose of my visit and insisted that a patrol vehicle accompany me wherever I went.

Authorities knew whom I spoke to and which homes I entered.

I started by heading to the central square. The first thing you see is a portrait of Tamaz Ginture that appears to float in the sky. He was shot and killed by Russian troops in 2023 while attempting to visit a local church. Right below the picture, people gather to chat and play dominoes or backgammon. But as soon as I mentioned the 2008 war, their openness vanished. Most refused to talk. Two men who were willing to speak simply parroted government propaganda.

After an hour, one man who had initially brushed me off quietly invited me to his home for a coffee.

“Everyone’s afraid to talk,” he told me as soon as we sat down. “You won’t get any answers out there.” His wife nodded in agreement, as she set the table.

He explained why: one of the men I’d spoken to in the square was a Georgian Dream coordinator. No one dares to contradict the party line when he’s around.

These “coordinators” are informal, sometimes semi-formal, representatives of Georgian Dream. They’re local operatives embedded in public institutions who help the party monitor communities, manage voter turnout, and shape opinion. In election season, they mobilize supporters. Outside of it, they track who says what.

The fear they instill is real, especially in rural and tight-knit communities. Speaking out can mean losing government benefits, being fired from a public-sector job, or, in some cases, facing physical threats.

That’s the setup in most villages. But in Kirbali, the constant police surveillance made it even harder to get people to chat, to reveal their thoughts or opinions. A patrol car followed my every step.

So I moved on to Ergneti – the first village Russians troops crossed when they entered undisputed Georgian territory. It’s also where a river overlaps with the occupation line, meaning fewer kidnappings and less police presence.

It gave me a little more space to listen and for others to speak.

Around much of the world, the 2008 Russo-Georgian war came to be known as the “five day war”, the fighting taking place from August 7 to August 12, when a ceasefire agreement was brokered by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

But in Georgia, people don’t often refer to the “five-day war”. Here, the war did not feel like it lasted only five days. All the chaos, death and suffering of war were not contained in just those five days.

While the term captures the war’s most intense phase, it flattens the reality on the ground. It erases the escalation that preceded August 7, and the devastation that continued after the ceasefire was signed – when Russian and Ossetian forces looted villages, set homes ablaze, and remained on uncontested Georgian territory for many more weeks.

For those living along the occupation line, the idea that the war lasted only five days is absurd. When they speak about the war, their timelines stretch far beyond a single week – and often, far beyond 2008. 

“We have been living with this war for 35 years now,” Nadika told me as she showed me the occupation line from her window. “Many first heard about guns being fired in 2008 and the first bomb was a shock. But that was nothing new for us,” she added. 

Nadika, now in her 50s, has spent her entire life in Ergneti, a village that borders Tskhinvali, the de facto South Ossetian capital. Today, Ergneti is eerily quiet. The closer you get to the occupation line, the more houses you see standing empty. Nadika and Maguli live in the strip closest to the line, their families among the few who remain. Ergneti has no shops or pharmacies, and many residents commute to Tbilisi for work. 

Only one bus runs twice a day, covering several villages on its way. It often starts full, with people sitting on makeshift chairs, but few passengers make it all the way to Ergenti where the last stop is right in front of the Georgian patrol post. Before the 2008 war, Ergneti was not a ghost town even though for Nadika, Maguli and other residents, gunfire and shelling were so frequent they became part of the day’s sounds, like a rooster crowing in the morning. It’s why Nadika doesn’t talk of 2008 alone, when she talks about the war. She traces it back to the Soviet Union’s collapse and the wave of violence that followed in its wake, culminating in the 1991 war between Georgian government forces and Russian-backed South Ossetian separatists.

Others trace it back even further. 

On the one bus that takes you to Ergneti, I met Tamara Kviginadze, a soft-spoken philologist in her 60s who grew up in Tskhinvali. She travels to Ergneti almost every week to visit the graves of her parents who wanted to be buried close to their hometown, Tskhinvali. 

For her, the war began in the beginning of the 19th century, when the Russian Empire first arrived in Georgia.

By the end of the 18th century, Georgia was a fractured land. In the west, minor kingdoms operated under heavy Ottoman influence. In the east, King Erekle II had recently managed to shake off Persian rule, taking advantage of a succession crisis in the Qajar dynasty. But he knew the peace wouldn’t last. With another Persian invasion looming, Erekle had few options. He sent appeals to Europe. No one answered. The only door left open was to the north. Russia, then expanding southward, presented itself as a Christian ally and protector. 

So, in 1783, Erekle II signed an agreement with Russia. Moscow promised to safeguard Georgia’s independence and territory. Georgia, in return, renounced any allegiance to Persia or the Ottoman Empire.

On paper, the deal seemed beneficial to Georgia but when the Persian army came marching, there were no Russian troops in sight. And when the smoke cleared, Russia came, not to help, but to annex. By 1801, Georgia was no longer sovereign.  

For the next two centuries, Georgia only managed to gain independence only once: in 1918, after the Russian Empire crumbled. Its independence lasted just three years.

That year, 1918, also marked the first outbreak of violent clashes between the Georgian army and separatists formations in the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. 

After the February Revolution in Petrograd in 1917, which precipitated the end of the Romanovs, Ossetians and Abkhazians set up National Councils which advocated for the creation of organs of self-rule in Abkhazia and  Ossetian-inhabited areas. The councils in both regions, dominated by Bolshevik ideology, became deeply intertwined with Bolshevik forces inside Soviet Russia. 

For the Georgian authorities, these uprisings were viewed not as a fight for autonomy, but as a Soviet-backed attempt to destabilize the fragile new republic. The Georgian army eventually crushed the rebellion, but the violence left deep scars, fueling a legacy of mistrust and ethnic tension. The victory was also short-lived. In 1921, the Red Army invaded from the north and the country was forcibly absorbed into the newly forming Soviet Union. The promise of independence was snuffed out, replaced by 70 years of authoritarian rule, during which the roots of many future conflicts, including the war in 2008, took hold.

“The empire has one rule,” Tamara told me on the bus. “Divide, indoctrinate, rule. That’s it.” 

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Georgia’s first decade of independence was defined by economic ruin, crumbling institutions, and civil war in the streets of Tbilisi. A newly independent nation was rejecting its former master and looking towards the West for protection. 

In Abkhazia, separatists emboldened by Moscow started calling for independence. In South Ossetia, the goal was unification with Russia. “By the late ‘80s,” Tamara told me, “you could feel it changing – when it came to politics, we were divided.” She recalls Ossetian militias appearing in Tskhinvali around 1988. 

In Tbilisi, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a former Soviet dissident, came to power. As demands for autonomy grew, so did his nationalistic rhetoric. By 1990, in Tskhinvali, ethnic tensions were rising. Tamara’s family now slept with their suitcases packed. 

“They started marking Georgian houses with a Z – just like in Ukraine now,” she told me as she recalled her encounter with a young Ossetian boy who came to her with a warning: “He told me that he was at the base and overheard a conversation about which Georgian families were in line to be terrorized.” Seal the windows, Molotovs are coming, he said and left.

Soon, South Ossetia declared independence, Gamsakhurdia responded by revoking its autonomy. A year-long war followed. Over 1,000 people lost their lives and tens of thousands were displaced, including Tamara’s family who are still unable to go back to their home. 

Abkhazia saw even more devastation. The separatists captured Sukhumi in 1993. The war left 10,000 dead and over 250,000 Georgians ethnically cleansed – one of the largest population displacements in the post-Soviet space.

Just like in 1921, the support for separatist movements came from Russia but this time, it played the roles of both arsonist and firefighter: arming separatists, providing air support, and deploying irregular fighters who would later become a staple in Russia’s foreign wars, all while offering to broker peace.

By the end of 1990s, Georgia ended up with two breakaway regions, and Russian peacekeepers on the ground. 

Meanwhile in Tbilisi, a political transformation was underway. In 2003, mass protests – known as the Rose Revolution – toppled the old regime and brought Mikheil Saakashvili to power. Young and U.S.-educated, Saakashvili was a reformer with a clear message: Georgia would no longer orbit Moscow. Instead, it would pursue modernization, with EU and NATO membership as the ultimate goal.

Russia hit back. It banned key Georgian exports, cut gas supplies, and illegally deported thousands of Georgian migrant workers. On the ground, it expanded support for the separatist regimes, quietly increased its military presence under the cover of peacekeeping and issued Russian passports to their populations, a move that would later enable Moscow to claim protection of Russian citizens as a pretext to invade Georgia. 

In 2007, Vladimir Putin stood before an audience of Western leaders in Munich and delivered what many thought was a theatrical outburst. He railed against U.S. hegemony, accused NATO of encroachment, and warned that a unipolar world was unacceptable. The speech was blunt – but few in the West took it seriously. Instead, it was viewed as a nostalgic rant from a former KGB man still mourning the Soviet collapse.

But the Kremlin wasn’t bluffing. The Munich speech was a statement of intent. And the West’s underestimation turned out to be a strategic miscalculation.

By mid-2008, Russia was in a position of unusual strength. Oil prices were soaring. European states – particularly Germany, France, and Italy – were deeply entangled in energy deals with Gazprom. 

In Washington, George W. Bush’s presidency was limping to an end. His foreign policy legacy – Iraq, Afghanistan – had sapped both credibility and political capital. Barack Obama, still a candidate, was already talking about a “reset” with Russia. The West wasn’t ready for a confrontation, and Moscow knew it.

While the Baltic states and some Eastern Europeans were sounding alarms about Russian aggression, Western Europe remained fixated on maintaining business as usual.

Russia, though imperfect, was still seen as a partner – a regional power with whom the West could reason, negotiate, and, when needed, do business. Against that backdrop, Georgia’s young, Westward-looking president was easier to caricature. Saakashvili’s warnings of further Russian aggression were brushed off as alarmism.

So when war broke out in August 2008, that pre-existing perception – a stable, reactive Russia versus a hot-headed, unpredictable Georgia – shaped how the story was told. Western media fixated on the question of who fired the first shot, not who had laid the groundwork or moved troops into another sovereign country. And Western leaders, unwilling to jeopardize fragile ties with Moscow, leaned into the narrative that Georgia bore at least partial blame.

This mindset shaped the “Tagliavini Report”, the EU’s official post-mortem on the war written by a team led by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini and published in September 2009, just over a year after the war. While the document acknowledged years of escalating provocations, Russia’s disproportionate use of force, and the presence of the Russian army in Georgia  prior to August 8, it also placed significant responsibility on Tbilisi for launching the first full-scale military assault on Tskhinvali. It was a legal framing that ignored the broader political climate – in which Russia had been undermining Georgian sovereignty through proxy forces, passportization, and military buildup for years.

The result was a narrative that satisfied diplomatic caution: both sides bore blame, so the West wouldn’t have to choose. And by the time Russian troops settled into new military bases deep in Georgia’s breakaway regions, the world had already moved on. Obama went on to push the ‘reset’ button, while EU countries continued selling military equipment to Russia, some of which would later appear on the frontlines in Ukraine. 

Subsequent reporting and analysis would complicate that picture with Western analysts later publishing satellite images that appeared to support Georgia’s timeline, showing large Russian convoys already moving through the South Ossetian mountains on August 7. But first impressions are hard to shake. For many outside observers, the image of Georgia shelling a breakaway capital – regardless of the context – became the war’s defining moment. That framing, cemented in early news coverage and echoed by the Tagliavini report, continued to shape international opinion.

The international view of the 2008 war shifted only after 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Suddenly, Georgia was seen less as an isolated case and more as a test run. Yet even this re-examination was half-hearted. It wasn’t until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that the implications of Russia’s actions in 2008 became impossible to soft pedal.

Governments that had once blamed both sides for the Georgia war now spoke of “patterns”. Think tanks drew direct lines from the Roki Tunnel to the Donbas. Many experts in the West now saw 2008 as the opening move in a long campaign of revanchist warfare. But while the international community was re-contextualizing 2008 as the beginning of something larger, Georgia’s own government was trying to prove otherwise. Georgian Dream has organized what they call a “Nuremberg trial” in Georgia that will show that it was the previous government, in other words the Georgian state, which bears primary responsibility for starting the war.

For hours on live TV, retired generals and ex-officials have been grilled on minute details, on exact locations, timelines, on who participated in what meeting. Each session was packed with people spewing dense detail about military plans and discussion inside the corridors of Georgian power at the time. The questions being asked appeared laced with accusation and insinuation. The aim seemed to be to lay the blame squarely on Saakashvili and his allies, while also absolving the military of guilt. 

Several politicians who refused to attend the hearings have been arrested.  

For now, it seems the government's efforts are already paying off. On what is now the 17th anniversary of the war, people remember those five days in starkly different ways, shaped not just by their lived experience but by competing narratives. 

Nadika remembers the shelling and the chaos. But her memories are laced with suspicion. She’s come to believe that the war was staged; part of a plot by Saakashvili’s government. “They were bought off,” she says. “From the very first day, they were on TV boasting about how the army took this village or that one.” She thinks Georgia provoked Russia, maybe even invited the invasion. “Why did the commanders run?” she asks me, citing a conspiracy theory that is not rooted in any evidence. More recently, she’s begun echoing another popular Georgian Dream line: that the West once again tried to pull Georgia into another war in Ukraine. “They were pushing for a second front,” she says. “Even Ukrainians were calling on us to join.”

But not everyone in Ergneti buys into that version. Maguli, who gave birth during the bombardment, says she has no loyalty to Saakashvili, but she remembers who shelled her town. “I’m not a supporter of this government or the previous one,” she says. “But I had to jump out of a hospital window with my hours-old baby while the town was being shelled. And I’m still the one to blame?” She wants peace but not historical revision. “I can’t go along with people rewriting history,”she tells me, adding that she’s been trying to bring together historians, researchers, and neighbors to revisit what really happened.

Tamara, meanwhile, outright rejects the notion that Georgia could have started the war. “How can we be the ones to start a war on our own land, while bombs are falling and the [Russian] army is invading?” she asks, incredulous. She remembers, she tells me, what she saw, what she witnessed happen – bombs going off and Russian soldiers crossing into Georgia on August 7. 

Three women. Three versions of the same war. Three memories shaped by where they lived, what they lost, and increasingly what they’ve been told happened. Their stories show how even recent history can splinter under the weight of competing truths. Their stories show how collective memory can be pulled in competing directions by politics, fear, and the calculated reconstruction of events long after the bombs stop falling.

Authoritarian leaders have long understood the power of history. It is by recasting the past that authoritarians reinforce their hold on the present and even the future. 

While the details of stories differ, the playbook is often the same: simplify the past, claim things were once great until the bad people ruined it. For Georgian Dream, it is the previous government that brought the 2008 war with Russia to Georgia. But its narrative has the effect of blaming Georgia as a whole for poking the bear.

I spoke to the American historian, Timothy Snyder, who has long warned of the authoritarian tenor and tone of Donald Trump’s presidency. Referring to Georgian Dream’s version of the 2008 war, he said: “The problem with the story is that Georgia is not really the subject. The story is about how Russia is innocent and how poor Russia was provoked by Georgia. This is not a native authoritarian phenomenon, but a foreign one being reproduced as a native story.” 

So how does this story benefit Georgian Dream? The most common explanation is that they are using their version of the past to discredit local rivals and prolong their rule. If Russia is rational and only violent when provoked, then Saakashvili’s government appears irrational, reckless, and responsible for the war. And remember, in Georgian Dream’s political rhetoric, all opposition to it is affiliated with Saakashvili. 

But it’s hard to believe that this is the entirety of Georgian Dream’s intent. To me, the larger goal seems to be dismantling anti-Russia sentiment in Georgia – a goal that’s reflected in other attempts at rewriting history.

Take, for example, the ruling party’s adoption of a new political icon: the 18th-century king, Erekle II who signed a treaty with Russia that effectively led to Georgia’s subjugation. 

Since 2022, Erekle’s name has been intrinsic to Georgian Dream’s slogans. And a statue of Erekle II is set to rise on the Kakheti Highway, near the headquarters of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Erekle is being celebrated as a symbol of pragmatism, a savior of Georgian Christianity, and proof that alignment with Moscow is Georgia’s historic path. But Georgian Dream ignores Erekle’s pro-European efforts, until he felt he had little choice but to turn to Russia for protection from Persia, and Russia’s betrayal of that very treaty. 

Another example is the rewriting of the April 9 tragedy in 1989, when Soviet troops violently suppressed a peaceful Georgian protest, killing 21 people. This year, the government’s official statement replaced the word “Russia” with “foreign power,” the term officials often use for the West. Putin’s Russia, the argument seems to be, must not be conflated with the Soviet Union.

But why might some Georgians go along with the idea that we started the war?

Because memory is fragile. Every time we recall the past, we reshape it, filter it through what we’ve heard, what we’ve lost, and what we choose to believe. Repeated messages from those in power can overwrite what we thought we knew. Even if it’s victim-blaming on a national scale. “No one, no serious future historian is ever going to contest that Russia invaded Georgia, or Ukraine,” Snyder told me. “But if you can make it hard for people to say basic truths, because you have another big narrative in the mix, then you make it hard for people to recognize one another.” 

Tamara, whom I met on the bus to Ergneti, said something about this collapse of shared reality that continues to haunt me: “This is truly the feeling I have, that I’m walking around looking for a homeland inside my homeland. I need help because I feel lost.”

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The post Erasing August: How Russia rewrites Georgia’s story appeared first on Coda Story.

It was in this world that I found myself, the latest addition to the city's English-speaking press corps. I had landed as the BBC's correspondent, but unlike most of my on-air colleagues at the time, I had an accent no one could quite place and a backstory most of my fellow foreign correspondents would have struggled to map. Except for Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, the other accented foreigner in Beirut's lively foreign correspondents group.

In Beirut, like all foreign correspondents Ghaith and I were outsiders to the country we were reporting on, but we were also outsiders trying to break into an industry that was reluctant to accept us. I remember at one particularly loud Beirut media party, a middle-aged man shouted into my ear that the new BBC correspondent's accent was a disgrace, an act of disrespect to British listeners. He didn't realize he was speaking to that very correspondent. 

Ghaith meanwhile had made his way from an architecture school in Baghdad (evident in the skill he brings to his sketches) onto the pages of The Guardian, somehow transforming the drawbridge of the British media establishment into an open door.  But it wasn’t our struggle that we bonded over – it was bananas. Or, more precisely, the scarcity thereof.

In Saddam’s Iraq, I learned from Ghaith, much like in the Soviet Georgia of my childhood, the lack of bananas turned them into more than a fruit. They were a symbol of luxury, a crescent-shaped promise that somewhere life was sweet and abundant. Most kids like us, who grew up dreaming of bananas, set out to chase abundance in Europe or America as adults. For whatever reasons, Ghaith and I chose the reverse commute, drawn to the abundance of stories in places that others wanted to flee. 

Ghaith and I decided to turn our community of two into a secret club we called “Journalists Without Proper Passports”: JPP, or was it JwPP. We couldn’t quite agree on the acronym, but it became a running joke about the strange calculus of turning what you lack into what you offer. Our passports, while pretty useless for weekend trips to Europe or getting U.S. visas, worked miracles for getting into places like Libya, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Burma, and Iran.

On a trip to Afghanistan, Ghaith left his Beirut apartment keys with a fresh face who had just arrived in the city: Josh Hersh. Josh, I only recently learned, had been agonizing over whether he should move from New York to Beirut, coming up with excuse after excuse not to make the leap. "In April, I'm gonna be in Afghanistan," Ghaith had told him when they met. "You can stay in my apartment, no problem." Just like that, Josh had no more excuses. And so, while Ghaith was in  Afghanistan, Josh was settling into Beirut's rhythm, discovering what the rest of us already knew: that the city had a way of making you feel like you belonged, even when you clearly didn't.

Josh had a keen reporter’s eye for things the rest of us missed. I remember one night at Barometre – a sweaty, crowded Palestinian bar where men spun in circles to music that seemed to defy gravity – Josh and I slipped outside for air. He pointed at my beer and said, "You aren't really drinking that, are you?" Just like that, he'd guessed my secret: I was pregnant. That was Josh's gift – listening and watching harder than anyone else, catching the detail that unlocks the rest of the story.

The gift was on full display when, almost two decades after they met, Ghaith and Josh sat down in Tbilisi at ZEG, our annual storytelling festival. Josh was interviewing Ghaith at ZEG for Kicker, his podcast for Columbia Journalism Review.

The conversation happened at a moment when the Middle East was literally on the brink of a wider war. The old fault lines – sectarian, geopolitical, generational – were shifting beneath our feet. And Ghaith's words felt both urgent and timeless, a reminder that beneath every headline about good guys and bad guys are people making desperate choices about survival. Unlike many of us, who eventually scattered to desk jobs at a comfortable distance from the action, Ghaith is still the one regularly slipping into Damascus and Sana’a, telling stories that – as Josh put it “refuse to moralize”, to categorize people as heroes or traitors, insisting instead on the messy, human reality of survival. 

At ZEG, he talked about Mustafa, a young man in Damascus who became a "reluctant collaborator" with the Syrian regime – not out of ideology, but out of a desperate calculus for survival. "My rule number one: I will never be beaten up ever again," Ghaith recounted Mustafa saying. "And of course, he gets beaten up again and again and again." It's a line that lands with particular force now, as the region cycles through yet another round of violence, and the world tries once more to flatten its tragedies into headlines.

Ghaith also spoke about the legacy of violence that shapes the region's present – and its future: "That's the legacy, the trauma of violence, that is the biggest problem in this region, I think. It is an organic reason why these cycles perpetuate themselves."

And then there was his insight into how the West – and the world – misunderstands the Middle East: "At one point, I realized there is no one conflict crossing the region from Tehran to Sana'a via Baghdad and Damascus. But a constellation of smaller conflicts utilized for a bigger one… It's so much easier to understand the conflict in the Middle East as Iran versus the Sunnis or the Jihadis versus Israel. But if we see it as a local conflict, I think it's much more difficult, but it's much more interesting."

"My anger with Americans is not only destroying Iraq, not only committing massacres and whatnot, and not a single person went to jail for the things they did in Iraq. Not George Bush. Not Nouri al-Maliki. No one has ever stood and said, well, I'm sorry for the things we've done. We will never have a proper reconciliation because the same trauma of violence and sectarianism will be repackaged and will travel to Syria, to Yemen and come back to haunt this region. And that's my problem. And this is why I'm angry."

Josh, with his characteristic gentleness, pressed Ghaith on these patterns and the craft of reporting on them. And Ghaith, ever the reluctant protagonist, brushed aside the idea of bravery: "I'm scared all the time. Not sometimes, but all the time. But also, I think it's not about me. I want to tell the story of Mustafa, of the other people on the ground. I don't want to be distracted by my own story, reading “War and Peace” in a Taliban detention cell."

When the session ended, people didn't leave with answers – they left with better questions. There was that electric feeling you get when a conversation has broken something open, when the neat categories we use to understand the world have been gently but firmly dismantled. In that room, for an hour, we weren't talking about "the Middle East" as an abstraction, but about the weight of history on individual lives.

In a moment when the region is once again at the center of the world's anxieties, when the language of "good guys" and "bad guys" is being weaponized by everyone from politicians to algorithms, we need conversations that refuse to let us off the hook. We need the kind of journalism that Ghaith practices, journalism that insists on the messy, contradictory reality of people's lives, that sees the individual inside the collective tragedy.

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

Listen to the full conversation on The Kicker. If you're curious about the stories that shaped it, pick up Ghaith's book, and join us at the next ZEG, where the best conversations are always the ones you didn't expect to have.

The post What we miss when we talk about the “Middle East” appeared first on Coda Story.

 Living in an authoritarian state is a performative juggling act, an act of camouflage, of deflection, of concealing your true preferences, opinions and thoughts. Blending in, rendering yourself invisible increases your odds of leading a functional life.

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, watching from London where I now live, I find myself reminded of the self-censoring and isolationist culture of 1980s Bulgaria. Every time I ask friends in the U.S. how they are doing, I receive remarkably familiar, self-distancing responses. “I’m trying to steer clear of all the information,” says one. “I guess I’m going insular and trying to focus on my family and what I can control,” says another. “I can’t cope with the news”, says a third. “I know that sticking our heads in the sand is not helpful,” a fourth one tells me, “but I feel helpless and scared and I’m not sure what I can do. Call it self-preservation.”

And there it is. The antibiotic-resistant superbug I and everyone around me grew up with. I sense it. Smell it. Feel it. Fear.

At my school in Sofia, no one was spared from scrutiny. For girls, three conformity boxes had to be ticked: aprons not too short; nails not too long or painted; hairstyles deemed neat and, if you were particularly unlucky, unceremoniously, publicly checked to be certified free of nits. If the staff decided you had failed on any of these parameters, you were reprimanded. Too many of these and you would find yourself with a reduced mark for “behaviour” at the end of term. If you graduated from school with a less than “excellent” behaviour mark, you could not apply to university, even if you’d achieved the highest possible academic grades. A short apron, fancy nails, messy hair or a smart mouth could cost you your future.

I have always been one to talk back. An ambassador’s daughter who grew up in Bulgaria, Switzerland, Afghanistan and Ethiopia before being accepted into the only English-teaching selective high school in Sofia at the age of 14, I insisted on speaking my mind at every opportunity. It was a bad, even dangerous habit. Freedom of speech in any shape or form was not a concept anyone dared entertain. The periods of terror in the late 1940s and ‘50s had made sure of that, though at the time I knew nothing about them. The terror and multiple purges were a state secret, undiscussed in books and not a topic for even private conversations. Their legacy was an atmosphere of inherited fear and mute obedience.

In hindsight, I realize that what I struggled with most at school was the uniformity of thought and the unwillingness to question the status quo that the teachers demanded from us. The rules were understood, without being explicitly written down – “never talk politics, even with friends and extended family”; “never be heard criticising Todor Zhivkov,” Bulgaria’s leader from 1954 until his eventual removal from office in 1989. There was always a certain distance between people. What we said at home, mild as it was, could not be repeated outside, which meant always being guarded around others. And that is exactly how the ruling Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) wanted it.

With sorrow, I see now that my American friends, who grew up on the progressive side of the iron curtain, suddenly have much more in common with me than we ever imagined we would. It is hard to comprehend that the United States of America -- that most coveted destination for young Bulgarians who dreamed of basking in unrestrained freedom, self-made wealth and the coolest pop, rap and grunge music scenes of the 1990s – could be clamping down on self-expression in the 21st century. 

Like me, Americans now know what it is to feel an insidious fear of the state. To experience that ever-present fear of punishment and retribution, a fear that incessantly obstructs and eventually destroys social cohesion. A fear that is evidently penetrating deep within the ranks of even the Republican party. Lisa Murkowski, a longtime Republican senator from Alaska, recently made a startling public admission: “We are all afraid,” she confessed at a conference in Anchorage. A courageous statement that reflects the mood of the nation. A national poll from the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School conducted among 2,096 18 to 29 year-olds between the 54th and 66th day of Trump’s second term revealed astonishing levels of fear among young Americans across gender and education status. Six in 10 of those surveyed, whether college-educated or not, admitted to being fearful for the future of America.

In Bulgaria, the trust in those around you, which is the social glue in every society, was stripped away, destroyed through the repeated post-1945 purges. Like Musk’s DOGE purges of the federal government across multiple sectors, these had eliminated or rendered destitute thousands of “bourgeois”, police and civil servants, military personnel, workers and anyone who opposed the ruling party. Informants were encouraged, not unlike Trump’s administration threatening government workers to either report DEI initiatives within their departments or face the “consequences”.

The news of immigrants being deported to El Salvador despite having no criminal records, as well as the recent disappearance of a Venezuelan legal immigrant who had been detained in Texas reminded me of Bulgaria’s Belene labor camp, an island on the Danube whose existence I only learned about long after the communist regime was gone. Thousands of people targeted by the regime were marooned there over the decades, sometimes disappearing altogether, never to be seen again.

Fear of the state affects everything, every relationship. I know, because in my adolescent years it even crept into my relationship with my late father. The son of ethnic Bulgarian refugees from Greece, who had settled in a small southern Bulgarian town in the early 1900s, my father finished his professional career as an ambassador, which placed our family within the small minority of privileged Bulgarians allowed to travel abroad.

Like all those in governmental or high-profile jobs, my father was a member of the BCP. But he was also a compassionate man who truly believed in the ideals of equality and social justice. Unlike many others, he did not use his status to profiteer, taking pride instead in the integrity reflected in our two-bedroom apartment, which I shared with my parents and sister. My parents had no holiday villas, no second flat, and none of the other substantive material possessions typically enjoyed by the nomenklatura.

Kind though he was by nature, my father could be uncharacteristically hard on me. He was particularly critical of my outspokenness and worked hard to tame it during my teens. For years, I took his harsh words at face value and felt somewhat deficient. At the turn of the century, I became one of the hundreds of thousands of young Bulgarians who left Bulgaria to move to the West – the land of freedom, democracy and self-expression. I transformed my deeply instilled feeling of deficiency into hard work and determination to succeed in the most libertarian city of all - London.  I explored unfamiliar ways in which humanity was celebrated in the U.K., including practicing critical and creative thinking, and attending gigs and personal growth courses to name a few. Following a ruptured marriage, I even embarked on personal therapy, which was and perhaps still is a somewhat foreign concept in Bulgaria.  

In therapy I frequently explored the wound that my father’s judgements had inflicted on me, along with my distorted relationship with power, control and visibility derived from the regime with which I grew up. For some time I blamed the patriarchy for my father’s harshness towards my younger self. After all, feisty girls and women have never been in fashion anywhere, at any time.

It was only recently that it dawned on me that this was far from being the whole story. My father wasn’t just conditioned by patriarchy but by authoritarianism too. What he had feared above all was that my desire to name things as they were, to say it as I saw it, would endanger my future in a country that demanded unquestioning loyalty, obedience and conformism. He had been trying to protect me. I was surprised I hadn’t made the connection earlier. As the authoritarian regime in Bulgaria fell at the end of 1989, so did my father’s harsh stance towards my way of expressing myself. He softened dramatically, encouraged me to study, to develop professionally, and travel, his natural kindness coming to the fore as he got older.

Since Trump returned to power in January, many journalists, columnists, political pundits and academics have been stunned by the speed and brutality with which he has grabbed American society by the scruff of the neck and is marching it head down towards what some call authoritarianism, others autocracy, competitive authoritarianism, oligarchy,  patrimonialism, kleptocracy or more pejoratively kakistocracy. Whatever the exact version of the oppressive regime Trump is thundering towards or will be allowed to settle on, the one thing he is already circulating is the currency of fear – the currency in which all authoritarian regimes trade.

To succeed, repression requires submission. What more efficient way to achieve it at national scale than by instilling widespread fear of loss of income, status and freedom, and personal reprisal? In the words of the prominent Bulgarian political commentator Ivan Krastev: “Make people fear the future and democratic institutions are paralysed.” Once fear sets in, the boundaries that protect us from the state’s all-encompassing control can completely crumble.

In authoritarian Bulgaria the state held sway over how you looked, what you learned, and how you behaved, all with a view to ensuring that you complied with the party’s need for a surrender of individual agency. My friends and I still lived our teenage lives, fell in love, slacked on homework and had fun, but we, and our parents, were always looking over our shoulders.

To avoid the danger of any form of organised resistance or independent thinking, extracurricular clubs, beyond the odd choir or orchestra, did not exist in our high schools. Art and music and critical thinking were not part of the curriculum. What was mandatory, however, was introductory military education (IME) in which students were taught how to handle a Kalashnikov.

Reading through the journals I kept between the ages of 16 and 18 has revealed many of the tensions I held deep inside. Amidst the predictable descriptions of my relationships’ peaks and troughs, I discovered much yearning for freedom and longing for resistance and courage. I also discovered fear, humiliation and disempowerment - the polar opposites of freedom and courage. The humiliation and disempowerment did not belong to my generation, but had been inherited, creeping into my worldview through the buried experiences of those before me. My 1989 journal was peppered with quotes from books I had read, alluding to freedom and courage or fear and cowardice:

 “If I am fear-struck and sensible enough

And yet I still die

Do not look for bullets in my skull.

Do not look for a knife in my belly.

Do not look for potassium cyanide in my blood.

Pay attention to my knees.

If you find scars from crawling –this was my death.”

[my translation]

I had copied this from the 1962 poem “The Real Death” by Stefan Tsanev. 

A Bulgarian saying warning against resistance also found its way into the pages of my journal: “Many ahead of their time have been forced to wait for it in very uncomfortable places.” Another Tsanev quote also warns of the cost of rebellion: “The murdered quietly lay under the pedestals, the murderers stood on the pedestals.” But I also copied down a Bulgarian saying condemning the meek acceptance of one’s fate: “Like a bomb hidden in your pocket, silence is dangerous.”

In recent years I have been pondering the damage that Bulgaria’s almost half-century of authoritarianism (preceded by centuries of enslavement under the Ottoman empire) has caused subsequent generations. The three greatest barriers to societal and individual flourishment I have identified are these: the inherited terror of visibility, passed down through the generations, that perpetuates self-repression; the severed trust in institutions and each other which makes democracy permanently volatile; and the underdeveloped ability to ask each other meaningful questions for fear of “prying”, which is a prerequisite for intimacy and social cohesion. Sometimes I close my eyes and fantasise about where Eastern European societies might be if they hadn’t inherited authoritarianism’s straitjacket.

And then I turn my gaze to the U.S. in the hope that this traditionally free society can avoid this crushing straitjacket, no matter how bad things seem now. Having grown up in a regime which institutionalised voicelessness, I find myself in imaginary dialogue with all Americans, and my friends in particular, pleading with all those who understandably feel fearful, worried and consequently apathetic not to mute their voices just yet.

Having lived through authoritarianism with its controlled planned economy, I remain optimistic that the US, the oldest democracy functioning within a free economy, is well placed to resist the Trump administration’s brisk march towards authoritarianism. This would require more individuals, whether CEOs, academics, lawyers, business owners, news journalists, ordinary Americans or any other civil society actors, to be brave and to choose to resist (overtly or covertly), despite feeling fear. In fact, robust research of over 300 violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1900 to 2006 which resulted in government overthrow or territorial liberation shows that a successful campaign for political change requires a remarkably small proportion of the population: just 3.5 percent. In the US this would still amount to over 11 million people mobilising.

It’s been rewarding to witness the power of the free market economy and the voice of the consumer in action in the United States. They have already made a difference by punishing Elon Musk’s Tesla for his widely damaging leadership of DOGE. Market analysts have recently concluded that the 71% year-on-year drop in Tesla profits has been driven at least in part by Musk’s role in the White House, causing a branding crisis for Tesla. Consequently, he will be curtailing his role in DOGE which is exactly what those giving up their Teslas or Tesla orders wanted. This development could have never happened in any planned economy, like the one in Bulgaria during the second part of the 20th century. I hope this news serves as a strong impetus for ordinary Americans who deem themselves powerless to take a stand. For example, what better way to resist than supporting the free press by donating/subscribing to news outlets or to non-profit organisations like CPJ and ICFJ whose mission is to protect press freedom and the truth. In an act of defiance, Sheryl Crow not only publicly discarded her Tesla but also chose to donate to NPR who have been continuously attacked by Trump’s administration.

Under deep state surveillance, you learn not to ask questions or share much about yourself as a way of staying safe. Now I consider it a joyful expression of a free existence to ask questions.

In hindsight I realise that what helped my parents to not profiteer from the corrupt communist system was having moral clarity and actively choosing to act with integrity. In the current context this means choosing whether to be a Harvard or a Columbia University, a Murkowski or a silent Democrat or Republican senator. For remaining neutral is choosing a side, the enabler’s side. The anti-democratic assault Trump is inflicting on American society cannot survive without the apathy of every citizen who chooses to remain silent. To feel more resolute I remind myself of Martin Luther King Jr.’s wise words that “our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”  

One of the most efficient ways in which authoritarianism in Bulgaria managed to maintain obedience was through destroying the existence of small communities. Those who were afraid, worried, or anxious lacked not only town halls to turn to but also local communities where they could just speak to one another. We had no way of finding out what the true preferences of those around us were because we did not meet regularly in bigger groups. So to me, the single most defiant and joy-inducing action an American citizen could take would be to create or participate in activities that strengthen social cohesion at the local level. Whether it’s joining local community social events, choirs, sports activities, arts or other clubs, participation strengthens the social glue that keeps democracy alive at a grassroots level and has the potential to weaken false narratives and government control.

Whenever I went back to Bulgaria during my first decade of living abroad, I was often surprised by how few questions everyone asked each other. At times I felt frustrated and was judgemental, rolling my eyes every time I heard someone admitting to not having asked an important question for fear of being deemed nosy. I had mistaken this underdeveloped skill to ask questions for a lack of interest in those around them. Until one day I realised that this too had been a legacy of authoritarian times. Sharing or finding out the “wrong information” in an era of deep state surveillance could cost you your freedom. You therefore learned not to ask questions or share much about yourself as a way of keeping yourself and your family safe. This insight ignited my passion for deep conversations. Now I consider it a joyful expression of a free existence to ask profound questions. In times of a heightened threat of authoritarianism, asking deeper questions is a way of truly understanding yourself and connecting with those around you. Practicing the art of conversation is a defiance of authoritarianism.

Being creative, producing any form of art (and yes, everyone is intrinsically creative!) and supporting arts institutions is another powerful form of resistance against authoritarianism. To keep us subservient, my generation of Bulgarians were deprived of the opportunity to express themselves creatively throughout high-school education. This came at a high cost to us all, the cost of believing that being creative was the preserve of the lucky few.  By its very definition, creativity resists conformity and repression while neuroscience tells us that creativity is also an antidote to anxiety. Embracing our creativity is a way of maintaining a free spirit.

The lack of freedom of speech in authoritarian Bulgaria was reflected in the news media being reduced to a propaganda machine. Its sole role was to legitimise those in power every day and in every way. For this reason, I feel a twinge of sadness every time I hear my friends anywhere in the world voicing their temptation to completely switch off from the news. Knowing the truth is not a given, but a consequence of tenacious and hard-fought journalism operating in a functioning democracy. Turning away from the news is exactly what authoritarian leaders like Trump want us to do because it enables them to act without restraint. While I understand the need to limit the consumption of breaking news as a way of protecting our mental health, I know too well how profoundly discomfiting a world with no truthful news can be. Not switching off the news is perhaps the most subtle yet powerful way to defy authoritarianism.

Like many around me, I too sometimes find it challenging not to feel defeatist and to remain hopeful for the future of my children. When such moments descend on me I take solace in their transience and, more importantly, in history. I look back and remind myself that no dictator, tyrant or autocrat has ever irreversibly crushed the human spirit or won the long-term battle for a better world and greater justice.

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These seemingly eccentric obsessions with exotic animals reveal a fundamental truth about how power itself works. The zebra collection isn't merely decorative – it's emblematic of a system where the arbitrary whims of the powerful become reality, where resources that could serve many are instead directed toward personal indulgence. Orbán admires Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream party, which has steered the country away from EU integration. Trump openly praises Orbán. These men create a web of mutual admiration, exchanging not just tactics but symbols and sometimes even PR consultants – as we learned when Israeli media revealed that Benjamin Netanyahu’s advisers had orchestrated a covert campaign to counter negative discourse around Qatar. Those same advisers were also tasked with cleaning up Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić's public image.

Years ago as a BBC correspondent in Central Asia, I remember staring with bemusement at a massive golden statue in Turkmenistan of the former president, Saparmurat Niyazov, the self-styled ‘Turkmenbashi’, the ‘father of all Turkmen’. The statue rotated to always face the sun. We journalists used to dismiss it as the eccentricity of a dictator in a little-known corner of the world. These weren't mere quirks, though, but  early warning signs of an authoritarian pattern that would spread globally.

Last weekend, we gathered voices who have witnessed authoritarianism's rise across continents for our event "The Playbook." Their unanimous observation: the patterns emerging in America mirror what they've already witnessed elsewhere.

Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, who has faced multiple criminal charges and arrest warrants in the Philippines for her journalism, described her own sense of déjà vu watching events unfold in the United States. Democracy dies not in one blow but through "death by a thousand cuts"—media capture, then academic institutions, then NGOs, until the entire society bleeds out, Ressa warned.

Bill Browder, the architect of the Magnitsky Act that holds Russian leaders to account for human rights violations – which he lobbied for after his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was murdered in Russian custody – mapped how Vladimir Putin perfected symbolic terrorization through selective targeting. He saw this pattern being repeated in the U.S.: "This attack on law firms, as an example, going after Covington & Burling, Perkins Coie, and Paul Weiss... what's the message to every law firm in America? Don't go after the government." He pointed to judges facing impeachment threats and green card holders being threatened with deportation as classic examples of the Putin playbook unfolding in America – striking fear into entire sectors through selective prosecution.

Many audience questions focused on resistance strategies, with particular frustration directed at the Democratic Party's seeming inability to mount an effective opposition. "Why are they so quiet about this?" Armando Iannucci asked, voicing a common concern about the lack of a coordinated response.

Yet Browder managed to see a bright side in America's chaotic, decentralized resistance: "The Putin model is to find the leader of the opposition and then destroy them," he noted. "But if you don't have a leader and resistance comes from everywhere, there's no way to stop it." He pointed to student-led protests in Serbia and Georgia, where grassroots movements without central leadership proved remarkably resilient.

Few know more about resistance than anti-apartheid era South African activist Kumi Naidoo, who served as head of both Greenpeace and Amnesty International. While he offered practical resistance strategies, Naidoo also emphasized something crucial: "We have demonized people who do not agree with us," he cautioned. "We cannot move forward in this moment where we find ourselves unless we consciously build bridges to the people that are not with us." This doesn't mean compromising on principles, but rather understanding the genuine concerns that drive people to support authoritarian figures.

"The worst disease in the world that we face,” Naidoo said, “is not HIV/AIDS or cancer or influenza—it's a disease we can call affluenza." This pathological obsession with wealth accumulation creates the perfect environment for would-be dictators, as ordinary people mistakenly see oligarchs not as threats to democracy but as aspirational figures. The zebra-collecting billionaire becomes someone to admire rather than fear.

Every speaker at our event expressed a haunting familiarity with America's unfolding crisis – they've all seen this movie before, even though no one, right now, can possibly predict how it ends. Iannucci, creator of “The Death of Stalin” and “Veep – so, someone who has, literally, written the script – said the current reality might put him out of the job. How do you parody something already so absurd? 

“Trump,” he said, “is a self-basting satirist in that he is his own entertainment." Still, Iannucci underscored why humor remains vital in dark times: "Dictators and autocrats hate jokes because laughter is spontaneous, and they hate the idea of a spontaneous reaction that they have no control over."

Far from mere entertainment, Iannucci argued that storytelling itself becomes essential resistance. He challenged us to move beyond speaking only to those who already agree with us: "We must tell authentic stories which are rooted in reality. And understand that to stand a chance to get through this moment we're in, we have to invest equally on the objective side as well as the subjective side."

As authoritarians build their global networks of mutual admiration, from private zoos to public policy, the countering networks of resistance become all the more crucial.

Maria Ressa's powerful assertion that "when it is a battle for facts, journalism becomes activism" particularly resonated with me. As a journalist, I've been trained in objectivity and balance. Yet we now face a moment where the foundations of free thought that my profession relies on are themselves under direct assault. This isn't about choosing political sides – it's about recognizing when factual reality itself is being deliberately undermined as a strategy of control.

I also found myself enthusiastically agreeing with Kumi Naidoo who emphasized that we must genuinely listen to those who support authoritarian figures, not to validate harmful policies but to understand the legitimate grievances that fuel support for them. From Manila to Moscow to Washington, the pattern is clear but not inevitable. The script is familiar, but we still have time to write a different ending – one where free thought and factual discourse prevail over manipulation and fear.

If you would like to become part of conversations like this one, we have news: we have just launched a brand new membership program connecting journalists, artists, thinkers and changemakers across borders. Join today to receive the recording of this event and access to future gatherings where we'll continue connecting dots others miss.

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

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

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

Still, the parallels between them are unmistakable:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IN HIS OWN WORDS

Yasser Abu-Jamei as told to Kira Brunner Don

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Fear and hope in wartime Gaza appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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At the start of 2023, Germany’s far right descended on Dresden for its annual “March of Mourning.” Their show of force was a fist meant to punch a hole in Germany’s traditionally subdued “silent commemoration” of the anniversary of the firebombing of the city by the Allied forces in February 1945. “It’s part of an attempt to create an idea of Germans being not perpetrators but victims,” Stephan Petzold, a lecturer in German history at Leeds University, explained to Alexander Wells, who wrote a piece on the subject for us.

In May, Coda Story teamed with the investigative outfit Lighthouse Reports to mine a year’s worth of Instagram and other social media posts of Russian oligarchs and their families. Their accounts, once monuments to unashamed excess, reflected the desperate tactics they used to resist the sledgehammer of Western sanctions, which cost oligarchs a combined $67 billion in the first year of the war alone.

In October, Coda Story took a close look at dissent in Russia. Katia Patin, Coda’s multimedia editor, reported on Memorial, the decentralized human rights organization that had been ordered “liquidated” by Russia’s judges but is still operating out in the open, giving sold-out walking tours of the country’s history of repression in Moscow.

And in December, Coda staff reporter Isobel Cockerel returned from Sweden’s Arctic wilderness to unfurl a wrenching story that explores the fault line between the existential defense of an Indigenous people and a vision of carbon-free mining, a technofix that could help save our warming planet.

These are four of Coda Story’s best stories of 2023. They all began life by asking the same urgent questions that all of our journalism asks: In what places are abuses of power manifesting? How are new forms of authoritarianism impacting people’s lived experiences? What is at stake and why does it matter?

1. Dresden doesn’t know how to mourn its past: A symbol of moral ambivalence and the cost of war in general is transformed into a rallying cry for Germany’s far right.

2. Putin’s Oligarchs: A year in the sanctioned lives of Russia’s richest men: In partnership with Lighthouse Reports, an analysis of 69 publicly accessible accounts on Instagram and other social media platforms of Russia’s wealthiest families under sanctions gleaned unique insights into their lives before and after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

3. Surviving Russia’s control: The downfall of Russia’s most important human rights group has been greatly exaggerated.

4. In the Swedish Arctic, a battle for the climate rages: In Sweden, everyone is aware the climate is in crisis. And everyone has very different ideas on how to fix it.

By contesting historical understanding, undermining empirical science, subverting known facts, deploying technologies to roll back liberties, and operating with impunity across sovereign borders, authoritarians are rapidly adding all manner of cudgels to their toolkit. In 2023, these four stories and others listed below pried open people’s lives in more than a dozen countries to reveal how the unrelenting intrusion of the continuous present (to use Gertrude Stein’s observation about "Mrs. Dalloway") makes impossible the enjoyment of going about their days.

• Around the world, an estimated 100,000 people work for third-party contractors that supply content moderation services for the likes of Meta, Google and TikTok. In Kenya, content moderators are fighting back against their disturbing conditions.
• A secretive network of wealthy wildlife preservationists are returning species back into Europe — without asking permission first. 
• The contested region between China and India is a fulcrum for the national aspirations and self-identity of both countries, as well as emblematic of the new ways strongmen governments are redefining international borders.
• A little known agency enables European Union member states to carry out operations along EU borders with much less transparency, accountability or regulation than what would be required of any EU government.
• Australia searches for national identity in the trenches of World War I and finds a warning for the United States.
• The surveillance cameras of Colombia’s police are no match for the hundreds of “eyes” employed by street gangs.
• An investigation into New Mexico’s child welfare agency finds an overreliance on software meant to safeguard children from harm.
• The medical establishment has a long history of ignoring patients with “unexplained” symptoms. Then came long Covid.
• How American-made surveillance tech helped protect power — and the drug trade — in Honduras.
• A movement to empty Hindu pilgrimage sites of their Muslim residents gains momentum with help from the Indian government.

The post Year in review: Coda’s best stories of 2023 appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The police had called off the rally, “Berlin’s Children for Gaza’s Children,” five hours before it began because of “the imminent danger that at the gathering there will be  inflammatory, antisemitic exclamations; the glorification of violence; [and] statements conveying a willingness to use violence and thereby lead to intimidation and violence.” Since October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel, this formulation of alarming possibilities has been used to preemptively ban about half of all planned public protests with presumed Palestinian sympathies.

“It was for dead kids,” I heard one woman say to another, in a kind of disbelief that this could have been objectionable. The rally disbanded peacefully — but at that night’s other canceled protest, a gathering of 100 people outside Berlin’s Reichstag, police deployed pepper spray and forcibly detained 74 people.

The woman’s shock registered a new reality that is coalescing in Germany. What happens when basic rights seem to conflict with Germany’s vaunted culture of “coming to terms with the past”  — often interpreted as a call for anti-antisemitism? Recent events have raised troubling questions about who is considered part of the nation and what, exactly, Germany has learned from its history.

Following the October 7 assault in which Hamas massacred 1,400 men, women, and children, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz expressed his condolences for the victims, condemned the attacks and proclaimed his solidarity with Israel. He reasserted the 2008 proclamation of his predecessor, Angela Merkel, that the protection of Israel is part of Germany’s “Staatsraison,” or part of the country’s reason for existence. The German government has remained steadfast in its support, even as Israel's bombing campaign on Gaza has injured and killed high numbers of civilians — the latest death toll sits at 10,022 people, more than 4,000 of them children.

There has been little official sympathy for the plight of Gazans. But Germany is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe — an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 people — and people across the country have come together in solidarity with Palestine for both spontaneous and registered protests since the beginning of the conflict. In response, cities across Germany have tried to clamp down on these demonstrations, though the courts have overturned several of these attempts as illegal. In Berlin, bans have been issued against protests with titles such as  “Peace in the Middle East”; “Jewish Berliners Against Violence in the Middle East,” a rally organized by Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, a Jewish organization; and “Youth Against Racism,” which was called after a high school teacher hit a student who had brought a Palestinian flag to school. Throughout, there have been shocking scenes of police brutalizing protestors.

Those who advocate for the bans point to incidents of people gathering on Sonnenallee, a central avenue in Berlin’s Neukoelln district, in support of the Hamas attack on October 7. One especially notorious event involved about 50 men who responded to the call of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network “to celebrate the victory of resistance” by sharing baklava on the street. Berlin’s police treated it as a potentially criminal matter, noting on X, formerly known as Twitter, that they would “carry out the necessary measures.” Newspapers reported that the Israeli ambassador, Ron Prosor, called the men who had gathered “barbarians.”

Beyond these incidents, German politicians have seemingly competed among themselves to see who can promote anti-antisemitism the loudest — and who can be the harshest on the Muslim minority. Nancy Faeser, a government cabinet minister, urged that the government “use all legal means to deport Hamas supporters.” The leader of Germany’s center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union, Friedrich Merz declared, “Germany cannot accept any more refugees. We have enough antisemitic men in this country.” Scholz, the chancellor, piled on: “Too many are coming,” he said. “We must finally deport on a grand scale.”

These are not wholly new tendencies in Germany. Last year, authorities in Berlin banned all public commemorations of the Nakba, the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 after the founding of the state of Israel. Earlier this year, German police admitted in court that when they were enforcing the ban, they had simply targeted people who “looked Palestinian.” However, Berlin schools’ decision to forbid students from wearing the keffiyeh and other Palestinian symbols is an escalation that led even a member of Scholz’s own party to question if it could possibly be legal.

Since reunification in 1990, Germany’s national identity has been founded upon “coming to terms with the past.” That is, taking collective responsibility for the Holocaust and taking steps to ensure that it cannot happen again. Central to this protection of Jews has been the enforcement of anti-antisemitism at home, and, internationally, the support of Israel: Germany’s “Staatsraison.”

This culture of remembrance, however, holds little room for non-ethnic Germans. Coming to terms with the past requires that everyone shares the same past. The Muslim minority, for instance — most of whom arrived after 1945 — have found themselves freighted with the accusation of antisemitism for failing to identify with German guilt for the Holocaust. This is not to say that there is no antisemitism within the Muslim minority, but when the center-left Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck insisted in a recent speech that Muslims must distance themselves from antisemitism — or, in some cases, face deportation — he reinscribed the idea of the Muslim minority overall as antisemitic until proven otherwise. Muslims, and particularly Palestinians, have to prove that they deserve to be part of Germany.

The German press has inflamed the situation. Der Spiegel has peddled base stereotypes about Germany’s Muslims, and Bild has published a manifesto declaring that “we are experiencing a new dimension of hatred in our country — against our values, democracy, and against Germany.” But it isn’t just conservative publications pushing these narratives — the left-leaning Die Zeit recently published a piece that questioned whether Muslim immigrants could ever become “civilized.” And the leftist newspaper Taz has published editorials that purport to connect Palestinians with hate and Nazism. When during a speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek pleaded for the ethical imperative to think about both Israelis and Palestinians, he was accused of defending Hamas’ crimes.

Highly publicized antisemitic incidents — a Molotov cocktail thrown at a Berlin synagogue and Stars of David painted on homes — has further roiled Germany. Some Jews have said they are afraid to visit their temples. “Germany is a safe country for Jews,” Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews, recently affirmed, noting his approval of Germany’s anti-Palestinian measures. “In my eyes, the security forces are doing everything to make sure that doesn’t change. Even if the threat in Germany currently comes more from the Arabic side than from the extreme right.”

However, other Jews in Germany have argued that Schuster misrepresents the real threat. A recent open letter from more than 100 Jewish artists and intellectuals in Germany — full disclosure: I am a signatory — cited the government’s own statistics, which paint a different picture about the risk of pro-Palestinian protests: “the perceived threat of such assemblies grossly inverts the actual threat to Jewish life in Germany, where, according to the federal police, the ‘vast majority’ of anti-Semitic crimes — around 84 percent — are committed by the German far right.”

For Palestinians, cultural institutions have largely shut their doors. An award ceremony for Palestinian writer Adania Shibli at the Frankfurt Book Fair was indefinitely postponed. In Berlin, Maxim Gorki Theater called off upcoming performances of its long-running and much celebrated “The Situation,” which gave voice to the experiences of Arabs, Palestinians and Jewish Israelis. A letter about the decision described how “war demands a simple division into friend and enemy.” Berlin’s Haus für Poesie canceled an upcoming launch party for “The Arabic Europe,” a collection of poetry edited by the Syrian-Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun.

A Palestinian doctor and activist told me that the situation of Palestinians in Germany is one of “collective loneliness.” He asked to be called Nazir — there is a risk of professional repercussions for showing support for Palestinians. “The feeling is not only that we are losing family,” Nazir explained, “not only that a genocide is being done, not only that we have so much to fight with our own losses and pain, but we are not even allowed to mourn publicly. We are not allowed to speak up. We are not allowed to make demonstrations for the ones who are being killed in silence. And this is a whole different level of oppression, this state of oppression in Germany.”

The center of Arabic-speaking life in Berlin is Neukoelln’s Sonnenallee, sometimes known to Germans as the “Arab Street.” The district has long been demonized — along with its neighboring Kreuzberg — by the German right. Recently, some have spoken of the district as a “little Gaza.” It was in Kreuzberg where a group of men handed out pastries to celebrate the Hamas attack. And the neighborhood since has been the site of various gatherings to show support for the people of Gaza under bombardment — and several confrontations with police. On October 18, an officer in riot gear stamped out tea lights at a vigil for those killed in an explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital. Later that night, parts of the street were on fire — in what Bild called a riot.

Since October 7, police have arrived most nights in riot gear, patrolling in force. On October 23, in just the two blocks between the restaurants Risa Chicken and Konditorei Damascus, I counted more than two dozen officers in full suits of riot armor and eight police vans. At the corner of Pannierstrasse, I spotted a group of six police who had detained eight people. “They tried to cross the street when it was red,” a man said to me, smiling in disbelief, pointing to two of the men in custody, who could be described as vaguely Middle Eastern, standing against the wall. “Can you believe it?” a woman with a gray hair covering exclaimed, nearly leaping with indignation. “How can you hold them for that?”

As a crowd gathered, a pair of teenagers walked past, one wearing a puffer jacket, the other in a Puma sweatshirt. As the signal turned green and they stepped onto the crosswalk, I heard one of them say to the other, “Artikel 8: Grundgesetz.” Article 8 of the Basic Law.

I had just heard that phrase for the first time earlier that evening. A protester in Hermannplatz, the square that lies at the mouth of Sonnenallee, had been reading out that very section of the Grundgesetz, which is the German constitution. Article 8 says, “All Germans have the right — without having to register or receive permission — to assemble peacefully, without weapons.”

The teenagers might have misread the situation. After all, the police were not detaining these men because they were protesting, but rather were arbitrarily detaining them for the minor infraction of jaywalking.

“Why is everyone speaking now about Article 8?” Clemens Arzt, a professor of constitutional and administrative law at the Berlin School of Economics and Law, repeated my question before answering. “Because every half-educated person knows that Article 8 protects the freedom of assembly.”

Germany, he explained to me, recognizes assembly and speech as two distinct rights, as opposed to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution where they are intertwined. In Germany, Article 5 deals with freedom of speech and Article 8 with freedom of assembly. The practice of shutting down protests before they even begin really began with the pandemic, said Arzt, “when we preemptively implemented bans on gatherings at a mass scale.”

I mentioned to Arzt how I have repeatedly seen police demand that protesters put away their Palestinian flags. Is this legal? Arzt said that the police are given broad latitude to make these decisions, but only in the case of “imminent danger” to public safety — something that October’s demonstrations did not often entail. But he suggested that making these decisions on the spot can be so difficult for the police, that one reason for the bans might have been that it was simply easier for them to pull the plug completely despite questions about legality. 

The second reason for the bans, he said, has to do with Germany’s relationship with Israel. These protests are being broken up in the name of “Staatsraison.” While recognizing Germany’s important relationship with Israel, Arzt sees this current application as a problem. “It appears to me,” he said, “that, partially, the basic idea of the protection of Israel — this Staatsraison — results in taking priority over gatherings that cannot, actually, from a sober legal perspective be disbanded or forbidden.”

“If you meet 20 people or if you meet 10,000, the empowerment you feel after a big demonstration is a whole different level,” the Palestinian doctor Nazir told me with a grimace. “And Germany knows exactly that. And that is why Germany is banning the protests.”

“They fear the growing rise of solidarity happening in Berlin.”

Nazir has been in Berlin for most of his adult life, where he has cared for the sick, paid his taxes and participated in Palestine Speaks, an antiracist advocacy group dedicated to Palestinian rights. Since October 7, he has lost 19 members of his extended family to Israeli bombs. He wakes up every day, he told me, hoping that his parents and sister in Gaza remain unharmed. “This is the question with which I wake up every day,” he said, “and hope that answer is still ‘yes, they are alive.’”

“It's one of the most schizophrenic situations I have found myself in,” he said. “I am good enough to pay taxes and to work in a hospital, to do intensive care and to hold the hand of grieving people and to give hope and optimism to parents and their children that we are going to overcome their health crises.” All of this, he said, “while you are dehumanized and while you are expecting every minute to get a note that your family does not exist.”

When we spoke, Palestine Speaks had begun to register their protests with more generic names like “Global South United”; that particular demonstration ended up drawing around 11,000 participants, one of the largest pro-Palestinian rallies in German history. Still, even when the protests happen, the police seek to disrupt them, Nazir said. He told me about a protest the previous weekend at Oranienplatz called “Decolonize. Against Oppression Globally.” There, he said the police had removed their speakers after the police translator misinterpreted a statement. Still, he said, it was a relief to feel the support of so many people during a time when the environment in Germany has become so deeply anti-Muslim.

“They are making house raids,” Nazir said of the German police, an assertion echoed by other activists with whom I spoke, who noted that referring to the events of October 7 as “resistance” online could result in a visit from the police. He emphasized how Germany’s treatment of Palestinians is only one part of the nation’s rightward shift, and how the current wave of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian discourse is a symptom of Germany’s failure to learn from its past. “The most important question is not what's happening toward Palestinians alone.”

“Germany needs Israel as a replacement nationality,” he said, referring to the idea of German identification with Israel as a nationality that Germany can feel unrestrainedly proud of. He cautioned that Germany also needs Israel to be “rehabilitated in the international community.” “Israel is the so-called proof that Germany learned a lesson from its history and that the denazification was a successful process.”

“But let’s be honest and point out the elephant in the room,” said Nazir. “The second biggest party in Germany is the AfD.”

The Alternative for Germany party, the far-right party notorious for its Islamophobia and xenophobia, has consistently received 20% of German support in polls, second only to the right-drifting Christian Democratic Union.  

“It seems like everyone is really just trying to compete with the AfD at the moment,” said Wieland Hoban, a noted composer and chairman of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, an anti-Zionist Jewish organization. He described the situation in Germany as having turned starkly to the right.

“The biggest warriors against antisemitism,” Hoban told me, “are conservatives and right-wingers who are doing that because they're using antisemitism just to live out their anti-migrant racism by saying ‘OK, all these Muslims and Arabs are antisemites so let's deport them all in order to fight antisemitism.’”

German society’s hypocrisy is exposed, suggested Hoban, in its tolerance of antisemitism among those who are already recognized as Germans. Hoban cited Hubert Aiwanger, a far-right politician and former schoolteacher in Bavaria, who was found to have distributed antisemitic and pro-Nazi pamphlets in his youth and only became more popular because of it, which he spun as a victory over “cancel culture.”

Hoban, disclosing the many instances of “police thuggery” he has witnessed while on the streets in recent weeks, argues that the presence of Palestinians is an inconvenient truth for German memory culture. “It’s just kind of obvious that any human, depending on their situation, can be a victim or a perpetrator,” said Hoban. “But it’s unbearable for some Germans, this idea that the Jews could have been their victims. But then in another context,” he said, referring to Jews, “we’re perpetrators.”

Esra Ozyurek, a professor of sociology at the University of Cambridge, understands the difficulty people have in dealing with the mutability of roles when it comes to the highly emotive topic of memory culture, with “coming to terms with the past.” She described how the issue of memory politics often devolves into a competition, “a little bit like supporting teams in a soccer match.”

“I was at a talk,” she told me, “and then a young woman came to me and said, ‘I read your work, but I’m on team Israel.’ I said, ‘Wow, I’m not on any team.’”

Rather than thinking tribally, the broader ethical question is, she emphasized, “how we can live in a plural society, how we can deal with difference.”

Germany, she said, is hardly alone in its marginalization and repression of its minorities — even if its pretext for doing so is unique. This is typical of “big nationalist projects,” she said. “It is always their fear that the minorities find comfort in each other, and then they unite. So this big nationalist project is always about dividing the minorities and making them enemies of each other. This is not the first time this is happening. It is just so sad that is happening in the name of fighting a form of racism.”

Ozyurek described how German society sees Muslims as the carriers of German antisemitism— a view that draws its support from German scholarship that claims antisemitism was exported to the Muslim world first by 19th-century missionaries and then by the Nazis in the 20th century. Meanwhile, Germany, by accepting its responsibility for the Holocaust, has become a modern, tolerant democratic nation. “It’s a very Christian narrative,” she said. “You start with your guilt and then you come to terms with it. You accept it, and then you're liberated.”

Germans expect the Turkish and Arab minority to relate to the history of the Holocaust by identifying with the German majority and thus work through the guilt of what is called “the perpetrator society.” Like Germans, they are supposed to find ancestors to atone for — like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a Nazi collaborator — in order to be accepted as full members of German society.

But, of course, the Muslim minority does not follow the German script. “Everyone relates to the story from where they are standing,” said Ozyurek. “They relate to it as minorities.”

Palestinians are not only a minority in Germany, but many of them came to Germany stateless as refugees. In the eyes of mainstream Germany, however, these conditions are disregarded as "self-victimization" — which places Palestinians in competition with Jews for the status of victim. “What is interesting,” Ozyurek said, referencing how Germans for many years believed themselves to be the real victim of World War II, “is that the qualities that are attributed to them are also qualities Germans have gotten over.”

“It's just a Catch-22 situation,” said Ozyurek. “If you don't have the Nazi ancestors, then how are you going to apologize for their crimes?” She added, “if they cannot join the national conversation, how can they feel they belong?”

Related stories

Poland’s ruling party demands Germany pay reparations to score political points

Amanda Coakley

Dresden doesn’t know how to mourn its past

Alexander Wells

Germany’s historical reckoning is a warning for the US

Erica Hellerstein

The post The crackdown on pro-Palestinian gatherings in Germany appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Three of the books, including the critically acclaimed graphic novel “Maus,” were flagged for review by the Nixa school board for potentially violating a new Missouri law that makes it illegal for school officials to provide minors with sexually explicit material. Librarians and educators who run afoul of the rule, which applies primarily to materials with strong visual components, like graphic novels and illustrated books, can face up to a year in prison and up to $2,000 in fines. The law did not apply to the other four books under consideration, which were flagged by community members for review by the board.

As I reported in April, Missouri’s law is part of a growing national movement, led by conservative parents’ rights groups, aimed at restricting access to books about gender, sexuality and race in public schools. In the first six months of the 2022-23 school year, state and local policymakers banned 874 books from classrooms and school libraries across the U.S., according to the nonprofit PEN America, which ranks Missouri as one of the nation’s top book-banning states. Since Missouri’s sexually explicit material law was enacted in August 2022, librarians fearful of criminal prosecution have removed nearly 300 titles from school library shelves.

In Nixa, a conservative town in southwest Missouri, a group of high schoolers decided to fight back against local efforts to ban books. Over the last 18 months, this student movement has led a campaign to defend books under siege by reading challenged titles, surveying students about their support for book bans and speaking up in support of contested books at school board meetings. Two of these students — Meghana Nakkanti and Glennis Woosley — attended the Nixa board’s June 20 meeting, where school officials voted on whether the Missouri law applied to three graphic novels: Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust memoir “Maus,” an illustrated adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Blankets,” a coming-of-age autobiography by Craig Thompson. The board ultimately voted to retain “Maus” but decided to ban the other two books as well as four text-only novels that parents and community members challenged. 

What is it like to be at the frontlines of one of the nation’s most divisive culture war battles? I spoke to Nakkanti and Woosley to find out and to ask what they have learned from the rage of the book banners. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Both of you attended the June 20 meeting. The board decided not to ban “Maus,” but they did choose to ban “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Blankets.” The board also banned the young adult novel “Unpregnant,” which is about pregnancy and abortion, and the children’s book “Something Happened in Our Town,” which is about police brutality. Which of these books generated the most conversation? 

Woosley: The conversation on “Unpregnant” was long. It’s the story of a girl, coming from a Christian conservative family, finding out that she is pregnant, and she’s a teenager. And so she and her friend try to get an abortion for her, and it takes place in Missouri in a very similar town as Nixa. So that’s why this book is so big and important around here. And she has to go to New Mexico to get an abortion. It’s a comedic book. And a lot of school board members were saying that they were taking the subject of abortion and making it light-hearted and normalized in ways they didn’t agree with. That was the main thing they talked about. Some of them also said that it was encouraging abortion, and they didn’t want students to be encouraged to have abortions. 

Did any students speak up? Was there space for that? 

Nakkanti: During their deliberation process, we were just flies on the wall. We weren’t allowed to say anything. But it was a very random conversation. One of the school board members took issue with the fact that Planned Parenthood is mentioned throughout the book and proceeded to describe how Planned Parenthood was created by a eugenicist. This was a fictional book, and it was like, that point has little to no pertinence to the subject matter at hand. And the same school board member took issue with the fact that there were no books about teenage girls who were pregnant and went to pregnancy centers. It was very bizarre. 

Woosley: She specifically had this mindset of, ‘there are books that are anti-police.’ So she was saying, ‘Why don’t we have books that are pro-police in our library if we have a book like that?’ 

Proponents say that the whole point of this law is to protect students from explicit sexual material. You are students. What’s your take? 

Woosley: I don’t like the law because it’s extremely vague. And because of that, what I don’t like is that some of these books that I am actually interested in reading I’m being restricted from reading. Thankfully, I come from a family that can provide me with those books. But I know a lot of my friends can’t do that. That’s why I don’t like the law, and I don’t think it’s benefiting us. It’s restricting people who want to read books from reading them. 

Nakkanti: I think the student body acknowledges that most of us don’t read. As high schoolers, we’re so busy with life and homework that we often don’t find the time to read. We say this all the time: Why do these people care so much? There are all these adults who probably have never even set foot in the high school or who have kids that are eight, who won’t be in the high school for six years, worried about this book that they think these kids are reading. It’s really not that serious.

Glennis, you will be a sophomore next year. You’re on break, you didn’t have to go to a long school board meeting over the summer. What’s motivating you to become involved in this? 

Woosley: My dad is a member of U-Turn in Education, which is one of the parent groups around here that is pro-books. And when I got into my freshman year in high school, I knew all about what was already happening. I heard about how all these students were going to meetings and speaking and keeping up with what has been happening. So I thought, I want to go and I want to try to help. Even if more books get banned, at least students are speaking out against what is happening. I think there’s real value in student voices being heard. 

Meghana, you’re going to go to college next year in another state. If you want to leave all of this behind, you probably could. I’m curious what you’re taking from this situation with you. 

I think the biggest thing that I’ve walked away with is the fact that speaking out isn’t always easy. And I know that a lot of people who live in environments where student advocacy is very welcome can’t necessarily relate to that reality. But here, some of us have to see if we’re being followed on the way home from board meetings. That’s not a reality for so many of the other school districts that we’ve been hearing about. Because they are in these urban centers that are primarily filled with groups that agree with them. 

I don’t think we’ve had a single win. We go to these meetings and we speak, and we lose every single time. But we show up anyway because we show up on principle. The school knows that there’s attention on them. Not only do we pay attention, but the country is paying attention as well.

You say you haven’t had any wins, but the board could have banned all the books.

Nakkanti: I guess they could have, but I think they’re trying to make everybody happy. Now it’s become very much like a two-party system in the worst way, where the individuals that need to be heard in my opinion — the students — are being completely disregarded because the board wants to appease these two pro- and anti-book-banning adult groups. Two groups that can vote and use their dollars to support their reelection campaigns. So it just becomes this game of politics with our library. It’s frustrating, but I guess it’s a microcosm of Washington.

At the same time, this spotlight on students can be sort of a double-edged sword. Meghana, you said some students have to worry about being followed home from school board meetings. Can you talk more about the pressures students have faced from adults because of their advocacy?

During the board’s May 2022 meeting, an adult came up to a person who was 16 at the time and told her that he could easily find her address and that she should ‘watch out.’ At this meeting, there was booing, jeering and clapping. Some of my friends weren’t sitting with students, and that’s where we heard all of this horrible commentary that these adults were making about kids who were minors at the time. I don’t think we took it too personally because they’re like 50 years old, and they’re making fun of children. So ultimately, we’re still winning. These adults can’t figure out how to process their frustration in a manner that doesn’t degrade the existence of other people.   

I think that meeting really damaged the credibility of the pro-book-banning folks because they were yelling at and threatening children. While there are some voices on the book-banning side that are loud, angry and even violent, I think there are a lot of good people who are pro-book ban but might be misguided. I think it’s made me more empathetic in many ways. I believe that the vast majority of these people are just fighting for something they believe but don’t acknowledge the harm of their actions. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buying history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celebrating war

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All in the family

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

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

In loving memory

Of my great great great uncle

Gone but never forgotten

I thank you all for that you

Sacrificed for my freedom

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

The memorial also serves in the construction of a national narrative. Above all, according to Sumartojo, the emphasis on family names — coupled with the language of inheritance and the close focus on WWI — reinforces a national identity based not in civics and democracy but in ethnic kinship. This national kinship is, of course, slanted in favor of those whose family histories in Australia go back past 1918. “As an immigrant to Australia, and as a biracial person myself, that's one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by Anzac: It's this really powerful narrative, but I don’t think it actually holds space for contemporary Australia very well, because it's so masculine and settler-colonial and white,” Sumartojo said.

At Villers-Bretonneux, memory follows the logic of inherited valor. I happen to have my own family connection here, although it’s not listed on the wall. My great-grandfather served Australia as a stretcher-bearer on the Western Front, where he was injured — so the family story goes — by a shell explosion that buried him, rendering him mostly amnesiac, left for dead and wandering lost. Eventually, he found his way to a company of Canadians who, recognizing his accent, passed him on to Australian forces in Belgium. From there, he was sent home to Australia where, gradually working off his trauma, he became gainfully employed and started a family — our family.

For most of my life, my family’s wartime history did not interest me at all. (My grandfather was in the army, too, having served in the Pacific against Japan.) Growing up in Australia of the 2000s, being descended from Anzacs meant occupying a privileged position in the national narrative — but I never felt comfortable accepting it. For one thing, this badge of honor felt like something I had done nothing to earn. For another, the way Anzac was discussed under the Howard government did not at all match the diverse Australia I knew.

Only recently did I discover the urge to learn more about my great-grandfather and his life. I had only ever known two things about him. He had been anti-war, hence his decision to enlist as a stretcher-bearer rather than a soldier, and he had been blown up on the Western Front. It suddenly struck me as a terrible irony that this man, who hated war so much that he cried when his son enlisted for WWII, would be remembered by his descendants only for being a soldier. Peppering my mother with questions, I learned that my great-grandfather was a man of remarkable gentleness. He loved birds, especially magpies. He was a whiz at fixing radios. And he was a committed pacifist.

My previous incuriosity is nobody’s fault but my own. Still, I cannot help but think that the Anzac legend offered me no viable narratives for thinking about my ancestors except the one that centered war. My pacifist great-grandfather, who never participated in Anzac Day, didn’t fit into the narrative, so I scarcely thought about him. 

What happens to a society when war stories — even gruesome and sad ones — dominate its self-image? I wonder this as I follow the signs out of the National Memorial and toward its 21st century extension, the Monash Centre. These signs lead me down into a series of trench-like walkways, where bits of retro Aussie slang (cobbers, diggers, mates) are carved into the walls and speakers blaze with noises of gunfire and shells. This place, it seems, is at once a cemetery, a museum, a monument and a reenactment experience — a reflection, perhaps, of the Anzac legend's own crossed purposes.

Entering the Centre, I am greeted by a friendly Australian docent. She recommends hurrying so I have time for The Experience, which, she assures me, is very immersive and very moving. The interactive app guides viewers through the exhibits, triggering massive screens that show historical photographs and ultra-high-definition reels of actors who, dressed in WWI garb, either reenact key moments from the war or deliver quotes taken from soldiers’ letters and published testimonies. These screens, interspersed with boxes of objects, tell a version of the Anzac experience that heavily emphasizes Western Front victories. Hardly any space is dedicated to Australia’s decision to enter the war. No space at all is allotted to the vigorous peace movement — or, indeed, the two tremendously divisive conscription referenda that were voted down during the war. One follows the Anzacs’ narrative arc from excitement and confusion through the shock of gory early battles to the Aussies’ triumphant mastery of trench warfare. When it is suggested that Anzacs were defending the democracy and freedom of Australia and its allies, I begin to wonder if the Centre’s organizers have got their world wars mixed up.

Bongiorno has described how images of Anzac changed during the postwar decades, from the celebration of successful warriors toward the increasingly funereal tones of the 1980s and 1990s, when Anzacs started being represented primarily as sufferers. This mournful tone — and the accompanying gruesome portrayals of war — has been offered as a defense against accusations that Anzac’s prominent role in Australian memory culture is essentially militaristic. Yet, at the Monash Centre, battles are referred to as being among “the greatest” on the Western Front, with John Monash branded the “greatest” general. War is where nations are forged, where men are made and where a community’s heroic status can be secured for eternity. As William James once wrote: “War is the strong life; it is life in extremis.” If all the focus is on how the war was “won,” not on why it was fought — and who tried to stop it — then military engagement becomes the only viable form of courage.

As I enter the Centre’s middle chamber, and the video-game jingoism of The Experience gets underway, it becomes clear how easily the ostensibly anti-war strains of earlier Anzac memory culture can slip into the full-on glorification of violence. The French-Australian military historian Romain Faithi has been an outspoken critic of the Centre’s lurch toward national chauvinism. “Sometimes I just wonder what the men who are under would think about it,” he told me. “Would they be touched that thousands of people remember them, or would they be like, ‘You are so wrong. Fighting this war served no purpose except killing millions of people.’”

The Monash Centre reflects the broader imbalance of war and peace in Australian public memory. Throughout the 2010s, former Prime Minister Howard’s opposition to historians and the arts was taken up by successive Liberal governments, which inflicted crippling austerity on national cultural institutions and the main public arts funding bodies. To the academic and journalist Ben Eltham, this represents a kind of “implicit cultural policy” whereby arts budgets are cut while comparatively massive waves of funding are directed towards Anzac-style war commemoration.

Eltham also emphasized the war memorial’s enthusiastic courting of corporate sponsorships from defense companies, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing. (The ex-Liberal leader Brendan Nelson, who ran the National Memorial from 2012-2019, was chosen as the president of Boeing Australia in 2020.) I asked Eltham if it was surprising that military contractors were eager to contribute to a cultural mythology that still emphasized the goriness of wartime suffering. “I think it makes perfect sense,” he said. “In every nation, there seems to be a pretty direct relationship between the veneration of these old dead young soldiers and the glorification of future conflicts.”

The Monash Centre, and Australian memory culture more broadly, offers a warning for the United States. The U.S. author and former Marine Phil Klay has written eloquently on the limitations of a culture that offers veterans showy rituals of gratitude but remains essentially indifferent to the soldiers themselves and to the emotional and physical costs of war. James Fallows has noted in The Atlantic that politicians and the press typically discuss the military with “overblown, limitless praise,” while pop culture emphasizes the “suffering and stoicism” of the troops without ever venturing to learn about them. Outsiders, Fallows concluded, view the military “both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions.” One example of the funereal turn in American military memory culture came in the debates over Colin Kaepernick’s NFL protests. When commentators accused Kaepernick of “disrespecting the troops,” they typically pointed not to U.S. military successes but to the immensity of the veterans’ sacrifice and suffering. His then-teammate Alex Boone said that Kaepernick "should have some fucking respect for people who served, especially people that lost their life to protect our freedom.”

A national soldier cult, it seems, serves nobody — not even the soldiers. And an iconography of suffering offers no protection against militarism. Leaving the Monash Centre, I remember the story Romain Faithi told me about Alec Campbell, the last living Anzac who experienced the battle at Gallipoli. Campbell was a socialist and trade unionist. He warned against the glorification of Gallipoli and was bemused by the frenzied media attention he received in old age. “When he was the only one left,” Faithi said, “the government approached him for a national funeral and he said, ‘Heck no, I used that part of my life. Don’t go to war!’ But of course it was bigger than him. So when he died, the government used him anyway.” Alec Campbell’s state funeral took place in 2002. His casket was placed on a two-piece gun carriage and led by a military Dodge truck, preceded by four riders on horseback wearing WWI uniforms.

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The month-long manhunt for Amritpal had led to an internet blackout in Punjab and protests outside Indian embassies in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and Australia. On social media in India, decades-old arguments about Sikh secessionists were being revived.

Last week, before Amritpal’s arrest, a video went viral across Indian social media. It featured a young woman, an Indian flag painted on her face, ostensibly being turned away from the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, the most important religious site for the world’s 30 million Sikhs.

Off camera, a man asks a temple guard why the girl was denied entry. The guard, carrying a steel tumbler, says something barely audible about the flag on her face. “Is this not India?” asks the man off camera. “This is Punjab,” the guard says. 

The tense 40-second exchange unleashed a social media storm. “India is seeking an explanation and action,” tweeted Rajan Tewari, the vice president of the local Delhi chapter of the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s governing party. Anshul Saxena, a self-described “news junkie” with a following of 1.1 million people, said the flag on the girl’s face was the reason she had been stopped from entering the temple.   

“Well,” he wrote in a Twitter thread, “Khalistan flags & posters of terrorist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale are allowed inside the Golden Temple.” The video was evidence enough, apparently, of lingering pro-Khalistani sentiment in Punjab. 

Amritpal had become the face of this allegedly revived Khalistani movement. Since March 18, he had been on the run from the Punjab police. He was wanted for storming a police station with his supporters in February, leaving six officers injured. The chaotic official crackdown on Amritpal left Punjab on edge and caused a backlash from the Sikh diaspora across the world that has had diplomatic repercussions. Earlier this month, Indian officials were reported to have “disengaged” from trade talks with the United Kingdom because India wanted a stronger condemnation of “Khalistan extremism” after a demonstration outside the Indian embassy in London.

Until the February attack on the police station, few in India had heard of Amrtipal Singh. He had emerged from obscurity seemingly fully formed and ready to take on the leadership of Waris Punjab De, a fringe political organization that was founded in September 2021 by the Sikh actor Deep Sidhu to fight for the rights of Punjab’s farmers. Sidhu died in an accident in February 2022, leaving his newly formed party rudderless. Amritpal stepped into the breach, though Sidhu’s family refused to give him their backing.  

The idea for Waris Punjab De was born as Indian farmers took to the streets in huge numbers two years ago. For several months in 2020 and 2021, farmers, especially from Punjab, the bread basket of India, protested against three bills passed in the Indian parliament that they said would leave small farmers at risk of being destroyed by large corporations. The length and ferocity of the protests shook the Modi government. In January 2021, India’s attorney general claimed that “Khalistanis have infiltrated” the farmers’ protests. 

It was an attempt to link Sikh farmers to a separatist movement whose leaders the Indian government has described as terrorists. When climate change activist Greta Thunberg and the pop star Rihanna tweeted about the farmers’ protests, the Indian media, quoting “sources in the security establishment, claimed they had been paid millions of dollars by Khalistan supporters and India’s foreign minister tweeted darkly about “motivated campaigns targeting India.”  

Last month, Coda reported that the Punjab government shut down the internet across the state as it launched its search for Amritpal. The government blocked the accounts of local journalists, a local member of the legislative assembly and alleged supporters of the Khalistan movement and restricted access inside India to accounts belonging to a Canadian politician and the bestselling Canadian poet Rupi Kaur. But Amritpal continues to elude the police even as hundreds of his associates have been arrested.

I traveled through Punjab to report on the effects of the government crackdown. Parminder Singh, a retired professor in Amritsar, where the Golden Temple is located, told me that the “excessive show of strength” from the authorities had backfired. It meant, he said, that Sikhs feel as if they are being bullied and that the “scaremongering” media and the state government were succeeding only in stoking partisan passions.

Many Sikhs I spoke to, regardless of age or gender, had sympathy for Amritpal. They didn’t necessarily buy into his politics — most Sikhs are not interested in a separate state. But they believed that the authorities were overreacting and that the use of anti-terror laws, the indiscriminate arrests and the information blackouts were a throwback to the darkest days of the 1980s. 

The movement for Khalistan in Punjab, a region that stretches across the border into Pakistan, petered out in the 1990s after a period of convulsive violence. In 1984, the Indian government, led by Indira Gandhi, sent the army into the Golden Temple to root out Khalistan-supporting separatists. The battle inside the temple lasted for four days. The separatists were led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who was killed during the fighting. 

While official numbers are hard to come by and disputed, the Indian government acknowledges that about 500 Sikhs were killed, including civilians. In October 1984, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. It was, the Indian government said, revenge for what had happened at the Golden Temple in June that year. She was India’s first, and so far only, female prime minister and the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. 

After Gandhi’s assassination, Sikhs were targeted by roving mobs and murdered, often in broad daylight. Over 3,000 Sikhs were killed in Delhi. Senior leaders of the Congress, the political party in power at the time, colluded with the massacre. In the elections held at the end of December, just two months after Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the anti-Sikh riots, her son Rajiv swept to power with an unprecedented and still unmatched parliamentary majority.

Despite the Congress failing to properly atone for or even acknowledge its responsibility for the anti-Sikh riots, it has continued to win elections in Punjab at the state level. The Congress  governed Punjab for 10 of the last 20 years, from 2002 to 2007 and then again from 2017 to 2022. In between, the Shiromani Akali Dal, a Sikh-centric party, ruled for a decade in partnership with the BJP. In the 2022 elections, a third political force, the Aam Aadmi Party, founded in 2012, swept to power with an emphatic majority. The Aam Aadmi Party (Hindi for “the Common Man’s Party”) also forms the local government in Delhi, where it has been a thorn in the side for the Narendra Modi-led federal government. 

It is the Aam Aadmi Party that has been in power in Punjab as the Khalistan movement has made the headlines over the last month. Ironically, the party’s political opponents have frequently accused it of being funded by Khalistan supporters living abroad. Meanwhile, India’s federal government is run by the BJP, a party that Sikhs believe has been fueling unrest in Punjab since the farmers’ protest two years ago.

A common complaint I heard from Sikh people I spoke to in Punjab was that the Indian government has failed to listen to Sikh concerns on issues ranging from farming to the water crisis to widespread drug use in Punjab. Simranpreet, a young Sikh law student in Amritsar, told me that Amritpal was popular because he “represented the community’s concerns, was preaching about the rights of Punjab.” 

In Jalandhar, an old, culturally vibrant Punjabi city, a filmmaker told me that young, charismatic men like Amritpal, Deep Sidhu and the internationally successful rapper Sidhu Moose Wala, who was murdered in May 2022, had become youth icons because they represented the Sikh desire to have their voices heard. “People are emotional about Sikh and Punjabi identity,” she said. “And if they feel someone who represents that identity has been wronged, they will stand by them.” 

Amritpal seemed particularly aware of the meaning to Sikhs of Bhindranwale, who was killed by Indian soldiers in the Golden Temple in 1984. He dressed like Bhindranwale, posed with armed men like Bhindranwale and, according to lurid rumors in the Indian press, has had plastic surgery to look more like Bhindranwale. Amritpal supposedly had this plastic surgery while he was in the Caucasus, receiving training from Pakistani intelligence services. 

Gurtej Singh, an elderly historian based in Chandigarh, the Le Corbusier-designed capital of Punjab, told me that he and Bhindranwale had been friends. His reputation as a feared terrorist in the rest of India, Singh said, was at odds with his reputation among Sikhs. “Bhindranwale is venerated as a martyr,” Singh told me, “because he died while protecting our holiest shrine.”

By straining so hard to make Amritpal seem like a national security threat, the authorities are showing their hand, he says. Chasing Amritpal, Singh argued, was less about catching Amritpal than it was about suppressing Sikh political protest by associating it with Khalistan.  

Respect for Bhindranwale, Singh says, does not indicate that Sikhs support Khalistan or want to secede from India. It means that there is a disconnect between the Sikh minority and the increasingly Hindu nationalist Indian mainstream.  

The disconnect is evident in much of the social media response to Amrtipal Singh. For many in the Hindu nationalist right wing, Sikhs needed to disavow Amritpal and Khalistan as a simple matter of patriotism. Sikhs, naturally, bristle when they are told they need to prove their loyalty and commitment to India. 

Pride in Punjab and in Sikhism are often subverted by Hindu nationalists on social media to suggest support for Khalistan. After the video of the woman being turned away from the Golden Temple went viral, an official from the committee that manages the temple was forced to defend Sikh patriotism. In a video, he said he was shocked at the allegations about support for Khalistan. “When you need people to go to the border to fight China, who do you send?” he asked. “You send Sikhs. Are they also Khalistanis?” Sikhs, who make up around 2% of India’s population make up close to 10% of its army.

An independent Khalistan is now largely symbolic for Sikhs in India, a rallying cry for Sikh and Punjabi pride rather than a realistic goal. But for the large Sikh diaspora, especially in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, Khalistan remains a powerful idea. Sikh emigration has ebbed and flowed since the 19th century, but it was the Indian government’s violent suppression of the Khalistan movement in the 1970s and 1980s that politicized the diaspora. Writing in the Guardian on the 25th anniversary of the 1984 attack on the Golden Temple, the journalist Sunny Handal, who has Sikh roots, observed that it was “difficult to overstate the impact that 1984 had on Sikhs and their politics, even in Britain.” It was, he wrote, described by some in the community as the “Sikhs’ Kristallnacht.”

In Canada, the Sikh diaspora enjoys considerable political clout. There are an estimated two million Canadians with Indian heritage, 34% of whom identify as Sikhs and 27% as Hindus. The unresolved trauma of the riots of 1984 sometimes spills out onto Canadian streets. Last year, in November, a Sikh separatist group, classified as a terrorist organization in India, organized a referendum in Toronto on the creation of an independent Khalistan. The Modi government described it as "deeply objectionable that politically motivated exercises by extremist elements are allowed to take place in a friendly country." Just days before the referendum, on October 24, Diwali night, in the Canadian city of Mississauga, about 500 people were filmed brawling in a parking lot. Some were carrying yellow Khalistan flags, others the Indian tricolor. 

Inevitably, Amritpal has become a celebrated figure within the Sikh diaspora. The police manhunt led to attacks on Indian consulates in London and San Francisco and to protests in Canada and Australia. On April 18, India’s National Investigation Agency said it would be examining the attack on the Indian embassy in London for evidence of Pakistani involvement.

After some 35 days of investigations, raids and hundreds of arrests, Amritpal was finally found and has been moved to a prison cell in the eastern state of Assam where, under the provisions of India’s stringent National Security Act, he can be held for up to a year without charge. A man with a relatively meager following has been elevated to the status of a revolutionary. And the pressure ordinary Sikhs now feel to publicly embrace their Indian identity — even as Hindu nationalist politicians openly call for India to be remade as a Hindu nation — is reopening old, still festering wounds.

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The post India reopens its Khalistan wounds appeared first on Coda Story.

Gurinder Dhillon still remembers the day he realized he had been tricked. It was 2009, and he had just taken out a $16,000 loan to start a new life. Originally from Punjab, India, Dhillon had met an agent in his home village who promised him the world. 

“He sold me this dream,” Dhillon, 45, said. A new life in Europe. Good money — enough to send back to his family in India. Clothes, a house, plenty of work. He’d work on a farm, picking fruits and vegetables, in a place called the Pontine Marshes, a vast area of farmland in the Lazio region, south of Rome, Italy. 

He took out a sizable loan from the Indian agents, who in return organized his visa, ticket and travel to Italy. The real cost of this is around $2,000 — the agents were making an enormous profit. 

“The thing is, when I got here, the whole situation changed. They played me,” Dhillon said. “They brought me here like a slave.”

On his first day out in the fields, Dhillon climbed into a trailer with about 60 other people and was then dropped off in his assigned hoop house. That day, he was on the detail for zucchini, tomatoes and eggplant. It was June, and under the plastic, it was infernally hot. It felt like at least 100 degrees, Dhillon remembers. He sweated so much that his socks were soaked. He had to wring them out halfway through the day and then put them back on — there was no time to change his clothes. As they worked, an Italian boss yelled at them constantly to work faster and pick more.

Within a few hours of that first shift, it dawned on Dhillon that he had been duped. “I didn’t think I had been tricked — I knew I had,” he said. This wasn’t the life or the work he had been promised. 

What he got instead was 3.40 euros (about $3.65) an hour, for a workday of up to 14 hours. The workers weren’t allowed bathroom breaks.

On these wages, he couldn’t see how he would ever repay the enormous loan he had taken out. He was working alongside some other men, also from India, who had been there for years.  ”Will it be like this forever?” he asked them. “Yes,” they said. “It will be like this forever.”

Ninety years ago, a very different harvest was taking place. Benito Mussolini was celebrating the first successful wheat harvest of the Pontine Marshes. It was a new tradition for the area, which for millennia had been nothing but a vast, brackish, barely-inhabited swamp.

No one managed to tame it — until Mussolini came to power and launched his “Battle for Grain.” The fascist leader had a dream for the area: It would provide food and sustenance for the whole country.

Determined to make the country self-sufficient as a food producer, Mussolini spoke of “freeing Italy from the slavery of foreign bread” and promoted the virtues of rural land workers. At the center of his policy was a plan to transform wild, uncultivated areas into farmland. He created a national project to drain Italy’s swamps. And the boggy, mosquito-infested Pontine Marshes were his highest priority. 

His regime shipped in thousands of workers from all over Italy to drain the waterlogged land by building a massive system of pumps and canals. Billions of gallons of water were dredged from the marshes, transforming them into fertile farmland.

The project bore real fruit in 1933. Thousands of black-shirted Fascists gathered to hear a brawny-armed, suntanned Mussolini mark the first wheat harvest of the Pontine Marshes. 

"The Italian people will have the necessary bread to live,” Il Duce told the crowd, declaring how Italy would never again be reliant on other countries for food. “Comrade farmers, the harvest begins.”

The Pontine Marshes are still one of the most productive areas of Italy, an agricultural powerhouse with miles of plastic-covered hoop houses, growing fruit and vegetables by the ton. They are also home to herds of buffalo that make Italy’s famous buffalo mozzarella. The area provides food not just for Italy but for Europe and beyond. Jars of artichokes packed in oil, cans of Italian plum tomatoes and plump, ripe kiwi fruits often come from this part of the world. But Mussolini’s “comrade farmers” harvesting the land’s bounty are long gone. Tending the fields today are an estimated 30,000 agricultural workers like Dhillon, most hailing from Punjab, India. For many of them — and by U.N. standards — the working conditions are akin to slave labor.

When Urmila Bhoola, the U.N. special rapporteur on contemporary slavery, visited the area, she found that many working conditions in Italy’s agricultural sector amounted to forced labor due to the amount of hours people work, the low salaries and the gangmasters, or “caporali,” who control them.

The workers here are at the mercy of the caporali, who are the intermediaries between the farm workers and the owners. Some workers are brought here with residency and permits, while others are brought fully off the books. Regardless, they report making as little as 3-4 euros an hour. Sometimes, though, they’re barely paid at all. When Samrath, 34, arrived in Italy, he was not paid for three months of work on the farms. His boss claimed his pay had gone entirely into taxes — but when he checked with the government office, he found his taxes hadn’t been paid either. 

Samrath is not the worker’s real name. Some names in this story have been changed to protect the subjects’ safety.

“I worked for him for all these months, and he didn’t pay me. Nothing. I worked for free for at least three months,” Samrath told me. “I felt so ashamed and sad. I cried so much.” He could hardly bring himself to tell his family at home what had happened.

I met Samrath and several other workers on a Sunday on the marshes. For the Indian Sikh workers from Punjab, this is usually the only day off for the week. They all gather at the temple, where they pray together and share a meal of pakoras, vegetable curry and rice. The women sit on one side, the men on the other. It’s been a long working week — for the men, out in the fields or tending the buffaloes, while the women mostly work in the enormous packing centers, boxing up fruits and vegetables to be sent out all over Europe.

Another worker, Ramneet, told me how he waited for his monthly check — usually around 1,300 euros (about $1,280) per month, for six days’ work a week at 12-14 hours per day. But when the check came, the number on it was just 125 euros (about $250). 

“We were just in shock,” Ramneet said. “We panicked — our monthly rent here is 600 euros.” His boss claimed, again, that the money had gone to taxes. It meant he had worked almost for free the entire month. Other workers explained to me that even when they did have papers, they could risk being pushed out of the system and becoming undocumented if their bosses refused to issue them payslips.

Ramneet described how Italian workers on the farms are treated differently from Indian workers. Italian workers, he said, get to take an hour for lunch. Indian workers are called back after just 20 minutes — despite having their pay cut for their lunch hour.

“When Meloni gives her speeches, she talks about getting more for the Italians,” Ramneet’s wife Ishleen said, referring to Italy’s new prime minister and her motto, “Italy and Italians first.” “She doesn’t care about us, even though we’re paying taxes. When we’re working, we can’t even take a five-minute pause, while the Italian workers can take an hour.”

Today, Italy is entering a new era — or, some people argue, returning to an old one. In September, Italians voted in a new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. As well as being the country’s first-ever female prime minister, she is also Italy’s most far-right leader since Mussolini. Her supporters — and even some leaders of her party, Brothers of Italy — show a distinct reverence for Mussolini’s National Fascist Party.

In the first weeks of Meloni’s premiership, thousands of Mussolini admirers made a pilgrimage to Il Duce’s birthplace of Predappio to pay homage to the fascist leader, making the Roman salute and hailing Meloni as a leader who might resurrect the days of fascism. In Latina, the largest city in the marshes, locals interviewed by national newspapers talked of being excited about Meloni’s victory — filled with hopes that she might be true to her word and bring the area back to its glory days in the time of Benito Mussolini. One of Meloni’s undersecretaries has run a campaign calling for a park in Latina to return to its original name: Mussolini Park.

During her campaign, a video emerged of Meloni discussing Mussolini as a 19-year-old activist. “I think Mussolini was a good politician. Everything he did, he did for Italy,” she told journalists. Meloni has since worked to distance herself from such associations with fascism. In December, she visited Rome’s Jewish ghetto as a way of acknowledging Mussolini’s crimes against humanity. “The racial laws were a disgrace,” she told the crowd.

A century on from Italy’s fascist takeover, Meloni’s victory has led to a moment of widespread collective reckoning, as a national conversation takes place about how Mussolini should be remembered and whether Meloni’s premiership means Italy is reconnecting with its fascist past.

Unlike in Germany, which tore down — and outlawed — symbols of Nazi terror, reminders of Mussolini’s rule remain all over Italy. There was no moment of national reckoning after the war ended and Mussolini was executed. Hundreds of fascist monuments and statues dot the country. Slogans left over from the dictatorship can be seen on post offices, municipal buildings and street signs. Collectively, when Italians discuss Mussolini, they do remember his legacy of terror — his alliance with Adolf Hitler, anti-Semitic race laws and the thousands of Italian Jews he sent to the death camps. But across the generations, Italians also talk about other legacies of his regime — they talk of the infrastructure and architecture built during the period and of how he drained the Pontine Marshes and rid them of malaria, making the land into an agricultural haven.

Today in the Pontine Marshes, which some see as a place brought into existence by Il Duce — and where the slogans on one town tower praise “the land that Mussolini redeemed from deadly sterility” — the past is bristling with the present.

“The legend that has come back to haunt this town, again and again, is that it’s a fascist city. Of course, it was created in the fascist era, but here we’re not fascists — we’re dismissed as fascists and politically sidelined as a result,” Emilio Andreoli, an author who was born in Latina and has written books about the city’s history, said. Politicians used to target the area as a key campaigning territory, he said, but it has since fallen off most leaders’ agendas. And indeed, in some ways, Latina is a place that feels forgotten. Although it remains a top agricultural producer, other kinds of industry and infrastructure have faltered. Factories that once bustled here lie empty. New, faster roads and railways that were promised to the city by previous governments never materialized.

Meloni did visit Latina on her campaign trail and gave speeches about reinvigorating the area with its old strength. “This is a land where you can breathe patriotism. Where you breathe the fundamental and traditional values that we continue to defend — despite being considered politically incorrect,” she told the crowd.  

But the people working this land are entirely absent from Meloni’s rhetorical vision. Marco Omizzolo, a professor of sociology at the University of Sapienza in Rome, has for years studied and engaged with the largely Sikh community of laborers from India who work on the marshes.

Omizzolo explained to me how agricultural production in Italy has systematically relied on the exploitation of migrant workers for decades.

“Many people are in this,” he told me, when we met for coffee in Rome. “The owners of companies who employ the workers. The people who run the laborers’ daily work. Local and national politicians. Several mafia clans.”

“Exploitation in the agricultural sector has been going on for centuries in Italy,” Giulia Tranchina, a researcher at Human Rights Watch focusing on migration, said. She described that the Italian peasantry was always exploited but that the system was further entrenched with the arrival of migrant workers. “The system has always treated migrants as manpower — as laborers to exploit, and never as persons carrying equal rights as Italian workers.” From where she’s sitting, Italy’s immigration laws appear to have been designed to leave migrants “dependent on the whims and the wills of their abusive employers,” Tranchina said.

The system of bringing the workers to Italy — and keeping them there — begins in Punjab, India. Omizzolo described how a group of traffickers recruits prospective workers with promises of lucrative work abroad and often helps to arrange high-interest loans like the one that Gurinder took out. Omizzolo estimates that about a fifth of the Indian workers in the Pontine Marshes come via irregular routes, with some arriving from Libya, while many others are smuggled into Italy from Serbia across land and sea, aided by traffickers. Their situation is more perilous than those who arrived with visas and work permits, as they’re forced to work under the table without contracts, benefits or employment rights.

Omizzolo knows it all firsthand. A Latina native, he grew up playing football by the vegetable and fruit fields and watching as migrant workers, first from North Africa, then from India, came to the area to work the land. He began studying the forces at play as a sociologist during his doctorate and even traveled undercover to Punjab to understand how workers are picked up and trafficked to Italy. 

As a scholar and advocate for stronger labor protections, he has drawn considerable attention to the exploitative systems that dominate the area. In 2016, he worked alongside Sikh laborers to organize a mass strike in Latina, in which 4,000 people participated. All this has made Omizzolo a target of local mafia forces, Indian traffickers and corrupt farm bosses. He has been surveilled and chased in the street and has had his car tires slashed. Death threats are nothing unusual. These days, he does not travel to Latina without police protection.

The entire system could become even further entrenched — and more dangerous for anyone speaking out about it — under Meloni’s administration. The prime minister has an aggressively anti-migrant agenda, promising to stop people arriving on Italy’s shores in small boats. Her government has sent out a new fleet of patrol boats to the Libyan Coast Guard to try to block the crossings, while making it harder for NGOs to carry out rescue operations. 

At the end of February, at least 86 migrants drowned off the coast of Calabria in a shipwreck. When Meloni visited Calabria a few weeks later, she did not go to the beach where the migrants’ bodies were found or to the funeral home that took care of their remains. Instead, she announced a new policy: scrapping special protection residency permits for migrants. 

Tranchina, from Human Rights Watch, explained that getting rid of the “special protection” permits will leave many migrant workers in Italy, including those in the Pontine Marshes, effectively undocumented. 

“The situation is worsening significantly under the current government,” she said. “An army of people, who are currently working, paying taxes, renting houses, will now be forced to accept very exploitative working conditions — at times akin to slavery — out of desperation.” 

Omizzolo agreed. Meloni’s hostile environment campaign against arriving migrants is making people in the marshes feel “more fragile and blackmailable,” he told me. 

“Meloni is entrenching the current system in place in the Pontine Marshes,” Omizzolo said. “Her policies are interested in keeping things in their current state. Because the people who exploit the workers here are among her voter base.”

And then there’s the matter of money and how people are paid. A few months into her administration, Meloni introduced a proposal to raise the ceiling for cash transactions from 2,000 euros (about $2,110) to 5,000 euros ($5,280), a move that critics saw as an attempt to better insulate black market and organized crime networks from state scrutiny.

Workers describe that they were often paid in cash and that their bosses were always looking for ways to take them off the books. “We have to push them to pay us the official way and keep our contracts,” Rajvinder, 24, said. “They prefer to give us cash.” Being taken off a contract and paid under the table is a constant source of anxiety. “If I don’t have a work contract, my papers will expire after three months,” Samrath explained, describing how he would then become undocumented in Italy.

Omizzolo says Meloni’s cash laws will continue to preserve the corruption and sustain a shadow economy that grips the workers coming to the Pontine Marshes. Even for people who once worked above the table, the new government’s laissez-faire attitude towards the shadow economy is pushing them back into obscurity. “That law is directly contributing to the black market — people who used to be on the books, and have proper contracts, are now re-entering the shadow economy,” he said.

In December, Latina celebrated its 90th anniversary — some people here call it the youngest city in Italy. Some believe that this land, with its marble towns built in the fascist rationalist style, has fascism and Mussolini to thank for its very existence. The town was founded as a kind of utopia: a vision for a fascist future.

“This place was born in 1932. You can see it everywhere, in the architecture, in the buildings. We can’t skip over fascism. We can’t tell this story from the beginning while cutting things away to suit our convenience,” Cesare Bruni, who organizes a monthly “market of memory” where people sell antiques and relics from the past, said. 

Bruni holds up an old photo from the New York Sunday News, showing a sun-dappled Mussolini visiting the newly drained marsh to help with the first harvest since the land was reclaimed, wearing a wide-brimmed hat. “Il Duce-Farmhand,” the headline reads, describing how the leader “put in three hours of hard work” out in the fields.

The idealistic image of the harvest was powerful propaganda at the time. Not shown were the workers, brought in from all over the country, who died of malaria while digging the trenches and canals to drain the marsh. It also stands in contrast to today’s reality. Workers are brought here from the other side of the world, on false pretenses, and find themselves trapped in a system with no escape from the brutal work schedule and the resulting physical and mental health risks. In October, a 24-year-old Punjabi farm worker in the town of Sabaudia killed himself. It’s not the first time a worker has died by suicide — depression and opioid addiction are common among the workforce. 

“We are all guilty, without exception. We have decided to lose this battle for democracy. Dear Jaspreet, forgive us. Or perhaps, better, haunt our consciences forever,” Omizzolo wrote on his Facebook page.

Talwinder, 28, arrived on the marsh last year. “I had no hopes in India. I had no dreams, I had nothing. It is difficult here — in India, it was difficult in a different way. But at least [in India] I was working for myself.” His busiest months of the year are coming up — he’ll work without a day off. And although the mosquitoes no longer carry malaria, they still plague the workers. “They’re fatter than the ones in India,” he laughs. “I heard it’s because this place used to be a jungle.”

Mussolini’s vision for the marsh was to turn it into an agricultural center for the whole of Italy, giving work to thousands of Italians and building up a strong working peasantry. Today, vegetables, olives and cheeses from the area are shipped to the United States and sold in upmarket stores to shoppers seeking authentic, artisan foods from the heart of the old world. But it comes at an enormous price to those who produce it. And under Meloni’s premiership, they only expect that cost to rise.

“These days, if my family ask me if they should come here, like my nephew or relatives, I tell them no,” said Samrath. “Don’t come here. Stay where you are.”

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The post The Indian migrants lured into forced labor on Mussolini’s farmland appeared first on Coda Story.

Although nearly a quarter of Colombians identify as either Black or mixed race, the African diaspora and Colombia’s deep roots in the slave trade are conspicuously absent from official narratives about the country’s history. When Muntú Bantú opened in 2009, the museum was wholly unique in a country with one of Latin America’s largest Black populations yet no institutional centers or museums dedicated to their history, culture and heritage. The name is a tribute to the region’s African roots, referencing Bantu, a family of languages spoken across the African continent. According to the museum, Africa’s Bantu diaspora has a strong linguistic and cultural presence in the Chocó region, where it is located.

“Sometimes people enter as one person and exit as someone else,” Sergio Antonio Mosquera, an Afro-Colombian historian and the museum’s founder, told me in Spanish over a shaky WhatsApp connection. 

Visitors would pass through the building’s yellow facade and descend into the bowels of a ship, meant to evoke the transatlantic slave trade, and then be immersed in exhibits about African history and biodiversity, Black achievements in cinema and Afro-Colombian feminism. Some left transformed. 

“They found themselves with their history, their ancestors,” Mosquera added. “It’s a huge experience, understanding the world in Afro-diasporic thinking, not Eurocentric, Christian and white as we were taught.”

But no one is walking through the museum now. A few months back, a local armed group set its sights on Muntú Bantú and sought to extort Mosquera and his colleagues, threatening violence if they didn’t pay up. The harassment led them to shutter Muntú Bantú in January, forcing the museum’s vast archive of Afro-Colombian history underground. 

In Chocó, the impoverished region in Western Colombia where it’s located, Muntú Bantú was a revelation — a gateway to an archive of repressed national memory. It had become a hallowed space in the community — so much so that for years, it was able to stay open despite the violence and instability plaguing Chocó.

Rich in natural resources like coca and gold, the Pacific Coast province is in the crosshairs of a violent battle for control between criminal groups lured by illegal mining and drug trafficking. These groups prey upon local businesses and organizations through extortion and harassment, and Muntú Bantú was no exception. When death threats and so-called extortion “war taxes” landed in front of Mosquera and his colleagues, they saw no option but to close up shop indefinitely over concerns for their safety.

The closure highlights the increasingly precarious position of activists working in the country’s conflict zones, particularly in the years since Colombia’s 2016 internal peace treaty, which is now faltering. It also comes less than a year after the inauguration of Vice President Francia Márquez, the first Afro-Colombian to hold such a high office.

Violence against activists and community leaders has reached record levels in Colombia as criminal organizations and armed groups fight to control territories and drug trafficking routes. Gangs threaten, harass and murder local leaders, activists and anyone they see as a threat to their power. Last year, according to government officials, at least 215 Colombian activists were murdered, the highest number ever recorded.

The violence has been especially pronounced along Colombia’s Pacific Coast, where Chocó is located. According to Gimena Sánchez, an expert on Afro-Colombian issues at the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and advocacy group, a disproportionate number of the 1,200 human rights workers assassinated in the country since 2016 were of Afro-Colombian and Indigenous backgrounds. “Up until now, they’ve respected the space, which is seen as a source of pride,” she told me. But the winds seem to be shifting. In the city of Quibdo, the home of Muntú Bantú, the situation has “turned into a nightmare,” Sánchez said. “There are shootings every day. [Paramilitaries] extort absolutely everybody. It's out of control.”

And then there’s Márquez, whose ascent has brought increased visibility of Afro-Colombian history, memory and culture in public life. Márquez herself — who before entering politics was an outspoken activist fighting against illegal gold mining — has been a top target of racist trolling, death threats and harassment. In January, Márquez denounced the threats against Muntú Bantú on Instagram, calling the museum a “sacred temple” for the Afro-Colombian community. Mosquera explained to me that this racist backlash has trickled down to the Afro-Colombian community as a whole, reaching public figures and everyday people. The threats aimed both at Márquez and Muntú Bantú seem to be a byproduct of this volatile and historic political moment: an era of increased exposure, and danger, for Afro-Colombian leaders as parts of the country remain locked in conflict. 

All the while, Colombia’s 50-year civil war looms in the background. The conflict between the Colombian government and the country’s largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (also known as FARC) left 260,000 Colombians dead and 8 million displaced. It officially ended in 2016, after the two parties brokered a historic peace agreement that was supposed to finally put an end to the bloodshed. The complex and wide-ranging treaty established a ceasefire and created a pathway for FARC militants to reintegrate into Colombian society in exchange for laying down their arms and demobilizing. The deal was also supposed to address the structural issues fueling the conflict — poverty and inequality — by investing in the economic development and security of long-neglected parts of the country that bore the brunt of the violence. But in places like Chocó, this redevelopment never happened.

After the accord went into effect, thousands of guerrillas turned in their weapons and the FARC withdrew from Chocó, bringing several months of relative peace and stability to the region. But in less than a year, it all came crashing down. New armed groups rushed to fill the void left by the FARC’s exit and the ongoing absence of the state, thrusting Chocóans into yet another cycle of violence and terror. 

There are versions of this scenario across the country, where peace remains elusive seven years after the agreement was signed. Critics say the treaty failed to live up to its lofty promises. Various armed factions, from paramilitary organizations to drug cartels and rival guerrilla groups, have muscled their way into territories formerly held by the FARC, holding a vice-like grip on local communities. Experts say these gangs recruit impoverished youth and threaten, harass and kill anyone they believe poses a danger to their economic and political interests, including activists and teachers.

“They’re seen as a threat by illegal groups because they’re educating people, so they [the armed groups] think that they’re educating people against them,” explained Sánchez.

María Fernanda Parra, the museum’s director, believes that Muntú Bantú may have been targeted because of the alternative vision it shares with the youth sought for recruitment by criminal groups. The center, she explained, provided activities to prevent young people from joining gangs. “We are teaching them another path and that there are other choices [one] can make,” Parra said, “So we are a target. But we didn’t think the aggressors would fight against culture. We thought culture was untouchable because it nourishes education and it shouldn’t be censored.”

Muntú Bantú’s closure threatens the fragile preservation of a history that’s long been ignored by the state. “We are paying a huge cost,” Mosquera said, “because our knowledge is not circulating.”

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In the English-speaking world, Dresden has become a symbol of moral ambivalence and the cost of war in general, most famously captured in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Arguments still continue, mainly among historians, about whether it was a necessary military action or a war crime motivated mainly by vengeance. 

For Germans today, talking about Dresden has far more immediate political stakes. One of Germany’s proudest cultural achievements has been its very public process of “coming to terms with the past,” establishing a mainstream political and cultural consensus around collective responsibility for the legacy of Nazi crimes. Where does the bombing of Dresden — a moment of suffering that totally reshaped the city, both culturally and architecturally, and that lives on in many local families’ memories — fit into all that? 

The far right has eagerly adopted the portrayal of Dresden as a senseless war crime, holding an annual “march of mourning.” They use the bombings to draw false equivalencies about the damage of World War II and to suggest that Germany’s apologetic and largely anti-nationalist memory culture has gone too far. More mainstream elements have tended to advocate either for the avoidance of the topic altogether or — as a compromise position — for a policy of dignified “silent commemoration,” hoping to reject any kind of politicization of the date. Left-wing and community organizations, meanwhile, have made a priority of interrupting far-right actions while arguing that any commemoration on February 13 should foreground Dresden’s own Nazi past and the dangers of fascist politics in general. Under public pressure, the city’s major religious institutions and municipal government have begun to move away from silent commemoration, opening up the city to a range of other memorial activities around the date.

Over the past 25 years, the anniversary of the bombings has become a passionately contested date, one that sees clashes in the media and in the streets as the whole city is turned into a chaotic public laboratory for memory culture. The question of how to talk about Dresden becomes a conversation about victimhood and complicity, apology and pride, pacifism and justice — and ultimately, too, about the identity of the city.

Dresden is a gorgeous, captivating, contradictory place. The capital of Saxony, Germany’s easternmost state, it was built up in elegant style from the 15th century onwards. Its reputation as a city of culture and beauty — praised by Goethe, painted by Canaletto, epitomized by the name “Elbflorenz” (Florence on the River Elbe) — was secured during the Baroque-era rule of Augustus the Strong. And, despite the many developments that have shaped the city since — the industrial revolution, Nazi rule, the Allied bombing and its aftermath, 40 odd years of the Communist German Democratic Republic — it is this period of Saxon prestige that Dresden turned to in the 1990s as it sought to rebuild its urban center. Now, thanks to phenomenally expensive renovations, visitors to Dresden can experience the architectural beauty of the original Elbflorenz, provided they do not venture too far from the city center.

For a long while, the bombings hardly featured in any national conversation. The GDR accused the Western Allies, their Cold War enemies at the time, of terror bombing innocents, cynically redeploying a narrative coined by the Nazis, although this remained a relatively minor element of East German national public history. West Germans, meanwhile, were more focused on either reviving their economy or, especially from the 1960s onwards, on acknowledging their own national guilt. How, if you are committed to accepting the collective responsibility of “coming to terms with the past,” can you account for your own suffering? 

The answer has tended to be to not talk about it, a tactic that W.G. Sebald criticized as an “inability to mourn,” citing the lack of literature on Germany’s bombed-out cities like Dresden, Hamburg and Cologne. Yet this national silence, as Gunter Grass and others have warned, risks ceding the terrain of remembering German wartime suffering — not just the bombings but the atrocities committed by Allied and Red Army soldiers, among other things — to extremist right-wing elements.

“For the far right, Dresden is a symbol that can be used to support a different approach to memory about the Nazi past,” said Stephan Petzold, a lecturer in German history at Leeds University. “It’s part of an attempt to create an idea of Germans being not perpetrators but victims.” According to Petzold, far-right activists and politicians have been drawn to Dresden since the 1990s on account of its symbolic status as a German “victim city.” In doing so, they have capitalized on older mythologies of German victimhood, which flourished in postwar West Germany, in the GDR generally and among German families in private.

The annual far-right “march of mourning” has drawn openly militaristic groups like the neo-Nazi Kameradschaften networks as well as politicians from the extremist NPD party, which peaked in the 2000s before falling away. More recently, the Alternative for Germany, the far more professional far-right party that currently receives 28% of the vote in the Saxon parliament, also participated in the march. The anti-Islam Pegida movement and the Covid-skeptic Querdenker (“lateral thinker”) networks have also been present. These commemorations are openly provocative in a nation whose constitution forbids the relativization of Nazi crimes (one sign seen at the march last year read: “Bombenholocaust,” or bombing Holocaust). But they have never been banned by city or federal governments.

Commemorations grew in size over the 1990s and early 2000s but it was not until 2005, when the bombings’ 60th anniversary was marked by what was then the largest far-right rally in postwar Europe, that Dresdeners began to publicly rally in opposition.

At that time, the municipal government policy had been the avowedly “apolitical” silent mourning, and anything else in the inner city was banned. Dresden’s conservative administration, Petzold said, attempted to position themselves between the far right and antifascists, suggesting that each side was politicizing the date for extremist purposes. Gradually, however, the city’s wreath-laying ceremony began attracting more far-right elements, so much so that the Jewish Community of Dresden decided to boycott the event. Leftist groups began trying to blockade far-right marches. Community organization campaigns pressured the city government to unambiguously resist far-right appropriation of the date and encourage an approach to memory culture that included perspectives from the victims of Nazi persecution and other marginalized groups.

What has resulted since is a wide array of often competing activities around February 13. One of the numerous city-sponsored events is a “human chain” of remembrance, which symbolically encircles the historic downtown as a statement against xenophobia and a gesture of protection against far-right incursion. Many left-wing and civil society groups have gone further, organizing further blockades and counter-protests against the far right in addition to commemorative events around local Jewish sites and attempts to publicly draw attention to the city’s Nazi past.

Petzold explained that Dresden’s historic downtown has become an important element of local memory politics. “The competition over space, over who gets to be visible in public space, is really key,” he said. Far-right groups “were being allowed to use iconic sites like the opera house to create good images of themselves, which also makes them appealing to the media. There’s an appropriation, perhaps, not only of that space but also of those iconic buildings, which have become enshrined in local Dresden identity.”

I walk among these iconic buildings when I arrive in Dresden on February 11, the first day of commemorations. There are helicopters in the air and hullabaloo on the streets. Slipping around a group of police, I join what appeared to be an antifascist block party. A brass band is playing, while rainbow flags and antifa banners billow in the wind. People young and old stay warm by drinking coffee, tea and punch from the nearby kiosk. Right at the front, beside the cordoned-off street, stands a group of old women with a sign reading, “Omas Gegen Rechts,” — Grannies versus the (far) Right. I observe a few gruff middle-aged people, all alone, many small groups of fashionable 20-somethings and five or six clusters of rather hard-looking antifa, all dressed in black and with face masks, including one bloke with a hoodie that boasts of “German Punk Terror Since 1990.” A few people arrive dressed as sparkly unicorns. It is, to put things mildly, a difficult crowd to get a read on. Sensing my confusion, somebody turns to me and says: “We’re waiting for the Nazis.”

After an hour they arrive, on the other side of a police cordon. Most are dressed in black. They carry banners that read “Dresden 1945: Unforgotten” and “350,000 Europeans murdered.” A float goes past playing Vivaldi, with a sign in a Gothic-style font that reads: “That they do not lie in their graves in vain // is solely up to our will // our actions.” There seems to be about a thousand of them. Some wave black flags. I think I can make out a snatch of the “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” the anthem of the Nazi party. A rumor spreads that the police have been confiscating sap gloves.

Here, on the counter-protest side, somebody is handing out whistles. Doja Cat’s “Boss Bitch” comes on over a loudspeaker, effectively drowning out Vivaldi. A number of chants go up: “There is no right to Nazi propaganda,” “Nazis piss off, nobody will miss you,” “German policemen are protecting the fascists.” Suddenly a 20-something with short pink hair and overalls surges to the front and shouts, in a strong Saxon accent: “Your kids are gonna be like us! Your kids are gonna be like us!” The rest of the crowd nearby joins in.

Afterwards, I meet up with Claudia Jerzak. A 43-year-old sociologist born and raised in Dresden, Jerzak has been documenting the far-right protests and counter-protests for over a decade — first for her Master’s degree on the topic and now for a doctorate she is completing part-time alongside her work as a researcher for an initiative on social work with refugees. She also co-wrote a 2012 film, “Come Together,” about Dresden’s contested memory culture. In her writing, Jerzak is critical of the city’s “silent commemoration” policy, which she believes has too easily tolerated the presence of far-right groups and obstructed any discussion of Dresden’s own perpetrator past. 

Jerzak wants to explain everything — she has the enthusiasm and eye for detail of a city tour guide — but on this day she has to rush off to see where the far-right demonstration ends up. We agree to meet again later. Before I let her go, I want to ask her a personal question. How does it feel, as a Dresdener, to see your hometown transformed at least once every year into a political battleground of international interest, a place where various factions squabble over the legacy of a long-past local wound? She gives an ironic laugh. “It’s exhausting,” she says, and then she’s gone.

“We’re worried about what’s going to happen,” said Michael Hurshell, the vice president of the Jewish Community of Dresden. February 13 is a difficult day for the community every year, he explained. “We tell our community members that maybe this isn’t the best day to be out and about in the inner city.’”

Hurshell, an American conductor and orchestra leader born in Vienna but educated in the U.S, moved to Dresden in 2002. Since 2020, he has led this Jewish community of some 700, a majority of whom are Russian speakers from Ukraine. When we met, he invited me to the ostentatious Cafe im Coselpalais, which is housed in a complex that Augustus the Strong built for his mistress. When I arrived, he asked if I had come to report on neo-Nazi protests. That, I said, but also the whole range of rituals and memorials around February 13, the diversity and enthusiasm of which surprised me. “Well,” he said, with a wry smile. “That’s Dresden.”

The city’s Jewish community is based in the New Synagogue, a blocky Modernist building erected on the site of the old synagogue, which was destroyed on Kristallnacht in 1938. It is currently locked behind a fence, undergoing safety upgrades, recommended by the German authorities after a synagogue shooting elsewhere, that may last for up to two years.

Hurshell described the bombings as a “terrible, terrible act of suffering,” but took issue with the myth of victimhood some Dresdeners have adopted on the topic — which the far right has instrumentalized. Only recently did Hurshell learn that Dresden enthusiastically supported the Nazi regime, being among the first cities to engage in public book burnings. “And when it comes to the question of whether bombing Dresden was merely an act of reprisal, with no military significance,” he added, “the Jewish community likes to remind people that a number of our members are only alive because of the bombings.” Hurshell’s late friend Hans-Joachim Aris was one of these people: He and his sister were scheduled to be on a transport headed east days later when the Allied attack saved both of their lives.

A far-right party in 2004 won almost 10% of the vote in a Saxon state parliament election. Hurshell and his Jewish friends got together to discuss what to do: “Does this mean it’s time to get out of here?” Hurshell remembers how, in one of those early years, the far-right demonstrations around February 13 brought people from all across Germany for a march that was scheduled to go over the Carola Bridge and right past the synagogue on its way into town. Dresden's city government insisted that it could not prevent a legally registered demonstration. Jewish community members had decided to stand in front of the synagogue arm in arm, following the progress of the oncoming far-right march by observing the police helicopters overhead. But the march never made it to the synagogue because a huge crowd of Dresdeners had come to the bridge and simply sat down, even though it was illegal to block a registered demonstration. "And that impressed me. It was an act of solidarity with us, which I hadn't expected, and it was one of the reasons those demonstrations eventually petered out” Hurshell said. He, of course, decided to stay.

On February 13, 2023, I find myself losing my bearings. What I had expected, in Dresden, was a memory war with two sides: the far right against civil society and the leftists. Instead, as I enter town in the early afternoon, a vast spectrum of arguments and performances are taking place across the city.

At one square, there is a huge “peace” demonstration where several Russian flags are flown. One sign at this protest compares the vice-chancellor Robert Habeck’s call for an “economic war” against Russia to the “total war” of Josef Goebbels. Down by the Kreuzkirche, one of Dresden’s two main churches, there is a memorial plaque for the victims of the Holocaust. By the time I arrive there, seven women are holding a vigil. They are part of the Dresden chapter of the Omas Gegen Rechts (Grannies against the Right), which has been holding vigil at the site since 10 a.m.

This year, the Omas Gegen Rechts demonstrators are carrying a banner that reads: “For peace, against violence and war everywhere.” “We are against war,” explains Helga, a long-time Dresdener. I ask if they are saying they oppose Germany delivering tanks to Ukraine. “Well,” Helga hesitates, “we don’t all agree about that.” At the mention of Ukraine, one or two other Omas look over. Helga explains that they often argue about the situation — but always in a respectful manner. A fellow Oma, Christine Weimann, admits that, while her pacifist beliefs are unwavering, she has found herself uncertain in this instance. “I think it’s good that we’re always in conversation,” she adds. “And I wish our group did even more of it, because people need to stay in conversation and not divide people up into pigeon holes. It’s our only chance.”

I meet again with Claudia Jerzak, who has agreed to show me some memorial activities around the city. She describes Dresden on February 13 as a turbulent public stage for memory culture — a big meet-and-greet, almost, for the city and its histories. Dresden, in Jerzak’s view, generally lacks an earnest and thorough engagement with its past. The anniversary offers an opportunity to change that, and the “friction,” she says, is part of the process.

Up at the Neumarkt, the human chain is about to form. Dresden’s mayor and the rector of its main university give speeches about the importance of friendship, peace and solidarity, rejecting outright any switching of the victim and perpetrator roles. When the bells ring out at 6 p.m., people get into position and begin linking arms.

I ask Jerzak if she ever joins in. She says no. “If the idea is to protect the city, then why are we just protecting the historical buildings downtown — wouldn’t it be more valuable to protect the values of the city everywhere, to protect its vulnerable citizens and people of color, on this day and throughout the year?”

Jerzak leads me to a different square, a few blocks south and east, to show me some more explicitly political public memory activities. Here, a far-right rally is expected to arrive in the next hour or so. Since this year’s anniversary falls on a Monday, the “mourning march” has combined with the regular weekly Querdenker protests that lean more Covid-skeptic, libertarian and respectably suburban than the hardcore-looking cadres from Saturday. What is happening now is a counter-demonstration, a Gegendemo, designed to block far-right actors from marching into downtown Dresden. Once again, we are listening to a brass band.

Jerzak gets cold and heads home, while I follow the action to the decidedly un-baroque Pirnaischer Platz. Here a number of anti-right Gegendemos have combined to blockade the rally. The police presence is heavy, with some officers moving through the Gegendemo trying to find someone with whom they can negotiate a withdrawal. 

The withdrawal doesn’t happen, and suddenly the far-right demonstration arrives, separated by a long line of police vans. Unlike Saturday’s solemn procession, this group seems upfront about its desire to provoke. Because the police are now rerouting them, they each have a turn to face the Gegendemo crowd before turning down Saint Petersburg Street. Many of them point and laugh, while others mock-conduct antifa chants. Almost everyone takes a selfie. Some hold up peace flags and commemorative candles — a surreal act of coded provocation.

Later I learned that the blockade went down as a success. The far-right march was rerouted, and its estimated 500 to 1,000 attendees were outnumbered more than two to one by the counter-protesters. The arithmetic stays with me for a long time. If you include the reported 10,000 people in the human chain — plus all the other various community events — then February 13 has, per capita, been a day overwhelmingly defined by resistance to the pull of German victimhood and xenophobia. What the far right has triggered is a very public process of self-clarification for the city: Every year, every February, where do we stand? It must be utterly exhausting, and not just for Claudia Jerzak, but at least it gets everything out into the open.

Back at the Neumarkt, the human chain has ended and people are milling about. The last official event for the day is Nacht der Stille, “the Night of Silence,” to be held in the basement of the Frauenkirche from 10 p.m. onwards. I join the crowds filing in.

“Wars,” says the Frauenkirche’s pastor, Angelika Behnke, “do not begin or end with bombs.” Instead, she intones, they find their roots in envy, resentment and arrogance. Behnke somberly describes how the Frauenkirche collapsed in 1945 from the damage it sustained during the bombing. Yet with the memory of destruction comes hope, she continues: “We cannot do anything about what happened back then, but we can look around at what is happening today.”

For the rest of the evening, interspersed with music, a series of Dresdeners give short speeches about what they are lighting a candle for. We hear from the Jewish Community of Dresden’s Michael Hurshell and then from a Ukrainian-born Dresdener, a young woman from Iran and a Russian university student who opposes the war. The shift in context is surprising, but I begin to see its logic. If Dresden is now an open, multicultural city — if Dresdeners, now, bring with them a whole diverse array of remembered wartime suffering — then surely it’s not just the Dresden of 1945 that belongs to the city’s memorial duties but also 1938’s Kristallnacht, and 2022’s Ukraine.

The same goes for Syria in 2015, when its civil war changed the population of Germany, much to the ire of the far right. In 2017, Damascus-born Dresden artist Manaf Halbouni installed three upturned buses in front of the Frauenkirche, a visual homage to Aleppo civilians’ use of city buses as protective barricades during the Syrian civil war. Right-wing activists responded with outrage, but Halbouni, when we spoke on the phone, said that he was simply building a bridge between two destroyed cities, only one of which had yet had the chance to build back up. As to whether he might be accused of taking the date out of context, of instrumentalizing it to his ends, he replied sharply: “You could accuse anyone of that. Everyone is always instrumentalizing this day.”

When I depart Dresden the following day, I find myself thinking about what purpose memory culture serves. Even the best public monuments run the risk of growing stale, assuming as they do that everyone is on the same page. This anniversary, by contrast, sets the whole thing in motion. It demands a constant trying-out of new contexts and connotations. When the far right wanted to turn the city into a one-dimensional symbol of suffering, Dresdeners have responded with an ongoing public renegotiation of their history — a rowdy play of the past and the present against their ornate, Baroque stage.

At the very least, they’re having arguments. As my train pulls away, one particular image from the anniversaries stands out. It is 9:45 p.m. on a Monday night, the town square is filled with people and two old men are simply standing there and arguing — arguing about Russia, arguing about the bombings, arguing about their city and about what should be done.

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