Chris Hedges's Blog, page 273

North Korea Leader Kim to Meet With Putin in Russia

SEOUL, South Korea—North Korea on Tuesday confirmed that leader Kim Jong Un will soon visit Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin. The summit would come at a crucial moment for tenuous diplomacy meant to rid the North of its nuclear arsenal, following a recent North Korean weapons test that likely signals Kim’s growing frustration with deadlocked negotiations with Washington.

The North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency released a terse, two-sentence statement that announced Kim “will soon pay a visit to the Russian Federation,” and that he and Putin “will have talks.” A date for the meeting was not immediately released, and it wasn’t clear if Kim would fly or take his armored train. There are some indications that the meeting will be held in the far-eastern port of Vladivostok, not too far from Russia’s border with the North.

The Kremlin said in a brief statement last week that Kim will visit Russia “in the second half of April,” but gave no further details.

Russia is interested in gaining broader access to North Korea’s mineral resources, including rare metals. Pyongyang covets Russia’s electricity supplies and wants to attract Russian investment to modernize its dilapidated industrial plants, railways and other infrastructure.

Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump have had two summits, but the latest, in Vietnam in February, collapsed because North Korea wanted more sanctions relief than Washington was willing to give for the amount of disarmament offered by Pyongyang.

As the standoff continued, the North last week announced that it had tested what it called a new type of “tactical guided weapon.” While unlikely to be a prohibited test of a medium- or long-range ballistic missile that could scuttle the negotiations, the announcement signaled the North’s growing disappointment with the diplomatic breakdown — and its apparent willingness to turn back to the kinds of missile tests that in 2017 had many in Asia fearing war.

The North also demanded that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo be removed from the talks, and on Saturday criticized White House national security adviser John Bolton for calling on North Korea to show more evidence of its disarmament commitment before a possible third leaders’ summit.

GOP Donors Who Scorned Trump in 2016 Are Giving Him Big Bucks in 2020

The Never Trumpers, those Republicans who pledged never to align themselves with the President, are jumping ship. An early April edition of a Gallup tracking poll found 89% of Republican respondents support Donald Trump. The trend continued this week, as Politico reported that a number of wealthy Republicans who declined to support Trump in the 2016 election “are going all in for him in 2020, throwing their weight behind a newly created fundraising drive that’s expected to dump tens of millions into his reelection coffers.”

This fundraising effort, Politico writer Alex Isenstadt continued, involves former donors to George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney. It is also modeled after the Pioneers network that helped lead Bush to victory in 2000, and will be formally announced on May 7, when, Isenstadt writes, “well-connected Republican fundraisers from around the country descend on Washington for a closed-door event with Trump 2020 aides.”

The fundraising push, Isenstadt observes, “illustrates how Trump, who once took a sledgehammer to rivals for their supposed fealty to big donors, has come to rely on a GOP establishment he once repudiated.” In addition, it also shows how much the top levels of the Republican fundraising world “has come to accept and accommodate a president it once scorned.”

One prominent Republican fundraiser, Roy Bailey, told Politico that over 150 people have signed to the Trump Victory program, including funders who had previously, even vehemently, rejected Trump in 2016: “I’ve had a couple of people that in 2016, they just weren’t on board with candidate Trump at all and they said, ‘Look, Roy, he has won me over. I’m all in,’” Bailey added.

Jack Oliver, who helped lead fundraising for both George W. Bush in 2000 and his brother Jeb Bush in 2016, is another longtime Republican who came around to the Trump effort after not participating in the 2016 general election. He told Politico, “I think you’ll have a significant number of Bush and Romney veterans that were on the sidelines or didn’t get overly involved in 2016 but will be involved in the 2020 campaign.”

As Isenstadt points out, some of this apparent change of heart is a result of the “fear of a Democratic 2020 field that includes liberal figures like Bernie Sanders.”

Geoff Verhoff, a lobbyist for Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, echoed Oliver, saying that supporting Trump “is a pretty easy decision for a lot of people. …From a policy standpoint, there’s virtually nothing they disagree with, then layer on top of that the choice that the other side is presenting to the country and it’s a no-brainer.”

The reversal was at least a few months in the making and is reflected in Republican punditry. In an October 2018 interview, pollster Lee Miringoff told The Hill that Never Trumpers “have vanished in the Republican Party. They’re extinct.” In February, conservative writer and Fox News contributor Erick Erickson, who previously wrote a piece with the headline “Why I Will Not Vote for Donald Trump. Ever,” in 2016, came back exactly three years to announce, on his site The Resurgent, that “I will vote for Donald Trump and Mike Pence. …They’ve earned my vote.”

Growing Up Transgender in Romania

Truthdig is proud to present this article as part of its Global Voices: Truthdig Women Reporting, a series from a network of female correspondents around the world who are dedicated to pursuing truth within their countries and elsewhere. Click here to read Maria Ruxandra Burcescu’s related coverage of LGBTQ rights in Romania.

“You don’t wake up one day and realize something isn’t right. For as long as you can remember, ‘something’ was never right. Then one day you wake up and everything makes sense.”

—David Kai Partenie

I don’t remember the exact day I met David Kai Partenie, but I recall the quiet guy with a red hoodie, glasses, short dark-blond hair and a baby face. He didn’t say much, but something about him made me want to meet him. Finally, one of our mutual high school friends introduced us. At that moment, I had no idea he was transgender.

PHOTO ESSAY | 5 photosClick here to see more photos of David in Romania and South Korea.

We were in an arts high school in Bucharest and the easiest way to find a subject of discussion was to take a look at his work—a series of anime sketches made with a few of his classmates. That was how we started hanging out.

When we began talking more, David told me he initially lacked the knowledge to explain why he didn’t fit into his assigned gender role. For a long while he thought there was something wrong, simply because he felt alone in this matter. He tried his best to fit in with the boys around him, even if they teased him for “being a girl.” They didn’t know how to place him socially.

David’s first transitional steps were cutting his hair short and wearing clothes for boys. When he was 13 years old, he spent about a year presenting in an androgynous way, and because most of his friends were cosplayers, they were open-minded and seemed to accept it. (Cosplay is a performance art in which players wear costumes to represent characters. Gender switching is common in this role-playing.)

Slowly, female pronouns started to make less sense to David. He kept searching for a more in-depth description, a way to elucidate how he felt.

One day, he stumbled upon a video made by a cosplayer he was following on social media. The person was “coming out,” and that was the first time David heard the word “transgender” and discovered its meaning: those whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex. “I was instantly captivated,” he says. “That day I realized there wasn’t anything wrong with me.”

David then began his journey as a transgender person in Romania, a country known for its history of persecution against the LGBTQ community.

He started coming out to his friends and classmates in 2012, the second half of his freshman year of high school. Reactions were mixed, and he says, “I ended up having to cut a big chunk of people out of my life.” Because he already felt as if he were going against the whole world, he refused to keep people close to him if they were critical of him.

He came out to his homeroom teacher in his junior year, and she was supportive. However, our school lacked information about transgender people, and teachers didn’t really know what they could do to help. Some would address him by his surname to avoid using a masculine or feminine first name. (David preferred not to mention his birth name in this article.)

David met with Sasha Ichim, one of the main transgender rights activists in Romania, and asked for advice about coming out to his family. He later decided to tell his sister, who is a psychologist, and his sister told their brother. David wrote a three-page letter of explanation to his mother. His father had died when David was 10 years old.

His sister had difficulty accepting David’s news, but he says, “I told her she could either try harder to accept me as her brother or piss off and disregard me entirely.” Today he is on excellent terms with his sister and his brother. David’s mother responded to his letter with a letter of her own, writing that even though she can’t consider David a son, he will always be her child and she loves him unconditionally.

Medical procedures were to be the next step, and David’s mother wanted more information about them. Sasha answered all their questions and patiently explained what they would need to do. Romanian NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) including Accept, TRANSform and MozaiQ also are available to help people who want to transition. These groups put transgender people in contact with medical specialists and introduce members of the transgender community.

In the following years, David’s mother became his greatest ally. He had his first shot of testosterone when he was 17 years old, in January 2015, followed by chest reconstruction surgery in August of that year. He chose not to get phalloplasty because he doesn’t find it worth the cost, risks and recovery time. (Sex reassignment surgery is available in Romania, but few surgeons in the underfunded medical system have the skill to perform it. The most common procedures available for transgenders are chest surgery, face feminization, hysterectomies and removal of the Adam’s apple.)

“Medically transitioning—and how far you want to go—is entirely up to you,” David says. “You may not (know it initially), but the hardest part of your journey is learning to love yourself for who you are. No amount of hormones and surgeries will do that for you, but they may alleviate your dysphoria. Do what you feel is right for you.”

Until the age of 18, David got his testosterone shots at the hospital. He says he didn’t feel welcome in the medical system—for example, a female hospital nurse asked him why he hates his parents and said he would never be a “real man.”

David’s official identification papers still identified him as a woman. Romania has no clear guidelines for changing one’s name and gender, and few lawyers have expertise in this matter. Some people have changed their documents through the courts, but it is an expensive process that can take up to three years so David didn’t undertake it.

Although he ran into prejudice, he feels it was mitigated because he is a white, college-educated, straight, cis-passing transgender man. He says racial minorities in Romania face more serious problems, and so do many other transgender people who don’t enjoy the privileges he has.

“When one of the trans female activists in Romania came out, she lost her job, her wife and almost ended up homeless,” he says. “Furthermore, Romania has one of the highest sex trafficking rates in Europe, and a lot of those victims (forced into prostitution) are transgender women (because they can’t find other employment). As a transgender man, who am I to complain?”

In 2016, David decided to emigrate. He had always found Korean culture interesting: In Romania, he had joined a team of traditional Korean drummers and volunteered at events organized by the Korean Embassy and by an Asian Studies center. So it was natural for him to choose South Korea for a fresh start.

That move has brought about many changes in his life. He’s no longer the quiet guy with glasses and a red hoodie, and he doesn’t love anime anymore. He’s now studying English literature, bartending and advocating for transgender rights.

One of his initial steps in Korea was to change his gender on official paperwork.

“When I first registered (at the) university in Seoul, I asked the international students’ office if they could change my name and gender mark in the system, for my comfort and safety,” he says. “They agreed without hesitation and suddenly, I was in control. For the first time in 13 years of education, I got to choose whether or not I (formally) came out to my classmates. I chose to come out, so that I could bring up LGBTQ+ issues in my in-class presentations. It was the right choice for me.”

David says South Korea is a fairly conservative country, and the LGBTQ+ community there faces many of the issues that exist in Romania. He thinks people in Korea tend to “keep the peace,” while those in Romania are willing to be more open. However, he now finds much more tolerance when he deals with the public sector. In Romania, he says, he often was treated with disgust, while people in Korea are better at keeping a professional attitude.

This fresh start meant something else for David, too. To avoid negative interactions, it’s a lot easier for him to walk away from antagonistic people he has just met, as opposed to those he’s known his whole life. And in Romania, many people told him he was just going “through a phase”—something often said to teenagers. He feels he’ll never hear that in Korea because when he emigrated, he was past 20 and five years into a medical transition.

At this stage in his journey David is much more secure emotionally than he was when he left Romania. “I feel like I’ve reached the sweet spot,” he says. “Yes, I’m trans. No, it’s not a big deal. … I’m also the happiest and the most comfortable I’ve ever been with my body. Ever.”

Terrors of the Past Are Gone, but Chains Still Bind Gay Romanians

Truthdig is proud to present this article as part of its Global Voices: Truthdig Women Reporting, a series from a network of female correspondents around the world who are dedicated to pursuing truth within their countries and elsewhere. Click here to read Alexandra Crisbășan’s coverage of a transgender life in Romania, produced in conjunction with this story.

In Romania, the winters are cold and snowy, and the sun sets early. Though it was barely past 6 that February night in 2018, the streetlights were on. The snow squeaked under my feet, and steam was coming out of my mouth as I headed for the Romanian Peasant Museum in the center of Bucharest. I was going to watch “Soldiers: A Story from Ferentari,” a Romanian movie about a love story between two men from different backgrounds. While I waited at the traffic light to cross the crowded boulevard, I saw a crowd gathered around the museum. Some of the group wore national folk costumes, and many were shouting and screaming. Reporters and camera crews surrounded them. I knew why they had gathered there.

Those in the crowd, dressed in traditional Romanian clothing and wearing crosses and placards, were members of far-right organizations. They had come because they knew that a “gay movie” would be shown at the museum. They considered this to be an insult, because, in their words, “the Romanian peasant is not gay.” Their purpose was to stop the event, but, as they were surrounded by cameras, they did not make any move toward me or other people who had come to see the movie. Instead, some of the group bought tickets.

Shortly after the movie began, people in the first rows lit the flashlights on their mobile phones and projected them on the screen to prevent others from watching the film. They put on loud music and started laughing. At one point, they started to shout. I stood and went up to one of the most aggressive of them. I remember my hand was trembling as I held the phone I had taken out to record the conversation. When I approached him, he flipped the phone out of my hand with a hard slap. That was the moment the police intervened to prevent an outbreak of violence. They removed the group that had interrupted the film, the projection resumed, and the rest of the motion picture went by without incident.

This was only one event in a year-long wave of hatred and violence against the LGBTQ community in Romania. The episodes started in late 2017 when the government announced that a referendum affecting gay people would take place in October 2018. The referendum, under which voters essentially were called on to decide the future of gay marriage in the country, didn’t pass, but the animosity it generated shone a spotlight on Romania’s deeply troubling history of prejudice against the gay community.

A Regressive Referendum

The 2018 referendum was designed to modify the Romanian constitution regarding the definition of the family. This effort had the support of the government, the Romanian Orthodox Church and many far-right organizations under the umbrella of Coalition for the Family.

The constitution uses the term “spouses” when referring to family laws, and the referendum would have replaced the word “spouses” with “man and woman.” Currently in Romania, gay marriage is not recognized by law, but gay-rights proponents hope that will change.

If the referendum had passed, any debate or discussion about recognizing gay marriage would have been quashed. Change would have become impossible if marriage was defined as the union only between a man and a woman.

As soon as this referendum was announced in 2017, an awareness campaign started. The streets were filled with posters announcing that the traditional family was in danger. Priests warned about Sodom and Gomorrah and threatened parishioners with church expulsion if they did not vote for the traditional family.

TV commentators foretold the end of the accepted idea of family, and politicians spoke of Romania becoming “homosexualized.” Extreme right-wing groups became increasingly vocal and violent, and public incidents were common. According to Vice, two students assaulted their transgender classmate at a bus station, and when witnesses tried to intervene, the students told the witnesses they shouldn’t get involved because the victim was a “girl-boy.” Vice also reported store customers shouting at a young woman who was waiting in line with her girlfriend. One customer slapped the young woman across the face. According to another Vice article, five men beat a young man in a Bucharest subway station because he was wearing rainbow-colored suspenders.

Throughout 2018, members of the LGBTQ community not only feared physical harm but were also constantly bombarded with the message that homosexuality is the same as pedophilia and zoophilia.

In the end, only 20% of Romania’s eligible citizens came out to vote on the October referendum. LGBTQ advocates say the low turnout was due to public backlash against overkill on the part of the church and other referendum supporters. “People would go to church and get very annoyed that every single week there was talk about politics,” says Vlad Viski, a journalist and activist for LGBTQ rights. “The failure of the referendum was a blow to both the church and the politicians who supported the initiative.” But the toxic haze has yet to go away, and what has been said cannot be unsaid. The referendum reflected the homophobia that has haunted this country for the past 81 years.

The Price of Being Gay Under Communism

In 1938, with the rise of Nazism in Europe and extreme right-wing movements in Romania, the Romanian Penal Code was amended to criminalize homosexuality. Article 431 stated it was illegal for two people of the same gender to have sex if it caused a public scandal.

In 1947, the Communists came to power in Romania. The “public scandal” wording disappeared in 1957; in 1968, Article 200, which made homosexuality a crime punishable by one to five years in prison, was introduced in the Penal Code. Under article 200, someone could be convicted of being gay merely on the basis of statements from two acquaintances. During the regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu, Article 200 became a means of terror and, at the same time, of political pressure to support Ceauşescu and the Communist Party.

I met Adrian Newell Păun at an event organized by the LGBTQ rights organization MozaiQ in partnership with Funky Citizens, a group that promotes civic involvement. The event space was designed to re-create the feel of a 1980s apartment in Communist Bucharest, complete with electricity outages and a shortage of warm water and heat. We discussed what it was like when being gay carried the risk of being tortured by the police and imprisoned.

Adrian Newell in 2019. (Alexandra Crisbășan) 

Ironic, easygoing and forthcoming with many stories, Newell is 60 years old now.

When he was a teenager, he realized he was gay and living in a country that severely punished homosexuality. At age 17, he had spent several days in police custody for that offense.

Because they didn’t have anywhere private to meet partners under the Communist regime, homosexuals frequented some public places in the center of the Bucharest, such as an American-style public restroom with long urinals on the walls. A vice squad, designed to arrest homosexuals and prostitutes, knew about these places, and officers often showed up dressed in civilian clothes, trying to entrap gay people.

“I went [into the restroom] fishing. You know what that means, right?” Newell says. “Well, the one I liked turned out to be a police major who caught me and said, ‘You’re done, faggot. I’m throwing you in jail for this.’ ”

Because he was still underage, Newell was not taken to jail, but to a police station where he was kept for three days. Officers beat him, which was standard practice at the time. “They had to beat you [so you would)]write a statement,” he says. “And it was very important to write exactly what they dictated to make it easy for the prosecutor to accuse you under Article 200.”

Newell smiles and says that generally he is not afraid of the consequences of his actions, but he knows his arrest was devastating to others. When his father came to take him home, the older man was as pale as if he had been drained of blood. The first words Newell’s father told him were, “I hope your mother doesn’t hear about this.”

Many LGBTQ people lived a dual life in the Communist era. Often, they would marry so the police wouldn’t suspect them of being homosexual. Newell remembers that marriage between a gay man and a lesbian was common at the time. It was the only way they could protect their intimate lives and be assured of spousal discretion.

Denunciations by family members were encouraged, and it was common for straight women to denounce their husbands for homosexuality. But such betrayals also took place among the members of the gay community. Having to choose between their own freedom and that of the other—and being subjected to torture and beatings in police custody—many gay people bowed to police demands under pressure. The police wanted arrestees to give as many names as possible; if they denounced well-known people who could be blackmailed, that was even better in the eyes of the authorities. Gay people whom police threatened might be let go without arrest if they cooperated or, if a person cooperated after being arrested, he or she might receive only a mild punishment.

“We did not have a gay community like the other countries in the socialist camp,” Newell says. “What Communism did in Romania was the atomization of the gay community. You could not trust anyone.”

In 1980, Newell supported the formation of a free labor union as an alternative to the Communist Party’s labor union. Government authorities stripped him of his Romanian citizenship, and he was left with two options: leave the country or go to prison. He fled to the United States, where he started a correspondence club between Romanian and American LGBT people.

During the three years the club existed, Newell received 680 letters from Romania. “Well, some thought it was some kind of dating club,” he says. “They were sending me pictures of them, their height, weight, age. I even received love poems.”

Newell responded personally to the first letter from every correspondent. The need for communication was so great that Romanian gay people accepted the risk of ending up in jail if their correspondence was intercepted by authorities. Newell says those who wrote the letters were not timid or ashamed. They felt good about themselves, even if the country they were living in was constantly telling them they were wrong. Many in the correspondence club asked for gay porn magazines. They were curious to see them and, for a while, he complied. Later, he realized he could not continue because shipping costs were so high.

Newell decided to return to his home country at another tense moment for Romanian homosexuals. In 2000, discussion was taking place about the abolishing of Article 200 and decriminalizing homosexuality. This initiative didn’t come from the Romanian government, but from external sources.

“I felt it was the time for me to do something for my community,” Newell says. “I had seen in the U.S. how the LGBTQ community was fighting, and I thought to myself, ‘If they can, we must be able to as well.’ So I came back.” The Communist regime had been overthrown, and Newell was allowed to return to the country and regain his Romanian citizenship.

Article 200 and Its Victims

The Communist authorities in Romania had an overriding purpose: to consolidate the totalitarian regime. To achieve this goal, they needed Romanian citizens to reject the West and the democratic parts of Europe. LGBTQ people became emblematic of the “decadent West,” and hunting them became a national duty.

A child’s room in an event space designed to show what Romanian life what like under Communist rule. An LGBTQ rights organization co-organized the event. (Alexandra Crisbășan)

The Romanian Communists wanted a large population, which they tried to achieve by controlling the bodies of their citizens. Abortion was banned, regardless of circumstances. The LGBTQ community, too, was considered a threat to population growth. By sowing terror and systematically encouraging the denunciation of LGBTQ people, the Communist regime sought to ensure its continuity.

After the fall of the Communist regime in 1989, Romania made the transition from a totalitarian state to a democratic one. However, Romanian politicians retained Article 200 that prohibited same-sex relationships, and many in the LGBTQ community continued to face harsh treatment.

Mariana Cetiner is the only woman in Europe known to be condemned and imprisoned for lesbianism in modern times. This happened in 1995, and, in an interview in the Romanian newspaper Adevărul, she remembers how she remained on her knees for hours while tied to pipes in a police station. She went without food and water, and guards beat and humiliated her. Cetiner was sentenced to three years in prison but was released in 1997 following pressure from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) outside the country.

A Human Rights Watch report details cases of other gay people who were imprisoned between the fall of Communism and the abolition of Article 200. Ciprian Cucu and Marian Mutaşcu were sent to prison and tortured following a denunciation by Cucu’s sister. The police and the prosecutor wanted to know which of the two men was the “woman” in the relationship. This translated into “experiments” in which the two men were raped in prison while guards watched, according to Cucu’s testimony. Later, Mutaşcu committed suicide.

Ovidiu Bozdog, director of a local newspaper in Sibiu, was imprisoned under Article 200 after police applied pressure on some of his acquaintances. At the time he was denounced, Bozdog was preparing to launch a newspaper opposing the government.

When a gay person was imprisoned, guards made it a point to let the other inmates know a gay person was going to arrive. According to victims’ statements, the guards encouraged rape and sometimes took part in it.

Heavy external pressure led to the revocation of Article 200 in 2001. While the country still had a law against homosexuality, it couldn’t become a full member of the European Union, and that law also interfered with Romania’s entrance into the Council of Europe.

Newell believes that the abolition of Article 200 partly resulted from the arrival of Michael Guest, the new U.S. ambassador to Romania. Guest was going to be accompanied by his male partner (now his husband) and thus put Romania in an impossible situation—the U.S. ambassador would be illegal in the country if that penal code article were still in place when he arrived.

Although Article 200 was revoked, many Romanians still believed homosexuality was criminal—or at least aberrant.

Doctors said on TV that homosexuality was a disease, and politicians announced there were no homosexuals in Romania. Church and government representatives claimed LGBTQ people were a threat to national security. The Accept Organization—the first Romanian LGBTQ rights group—formed in 1996 with the declared purpose of protecting human rights because the protection of LGBTQ rights was still illegal. Accept members recall appearing on TV shows at that time and enduring the hostility of camera operators.

“I was the devil to them,” says Florin Buhuceanu, current president of Accept. “I felt like an insect nailed down in an insectarium.”

Article 200 made Romania famous in Europe for the institutionalized violence with which LGBTQ people were treated—and for the fact that its abrogation came very late. Romania was one of the last countries in Europe to decriminalize homosexuality.

The Price of Being Gay Today

Eighteen years after homosexuality became legal, gay people in Romania still do not enjoy the same level of legal protection as straight people. The country does not recognize same-sex marriages, and there is no civil partnership law. And although the terrors that Adrian Newell faced in the 1970s are gone, the unsettling months leading up to the 2018 referendum revealed the social problems that continue to confront gay people in Romania.

“This referendum was like poking a beehive with a stick and waiting to see what happens,” says Andreea, a 27-year-old woman working in an advertising agency in Bucharest. “It brought out the worst in people—it was like a slap in the face when you are not looking.” (Andreea asked that her last name not be used.)

When I met Andreea, the first thing I noticed were her tattoos. She was very nervous when we met because she had never talked to a journalist about what it was like to be gay in Romania. She said her first tattoo depicted four swallows and that she had chosen that bird because it always returns home no matter where it flies. For Andreea, the idea of feeling at home is very important. But when she left her hometown and moved to a bigger city, she had her tattoo redone with the image of part of a painting by M.C. Escher. She thought the work of one of her favorite artists would represent her better.

Andreea once had a tattoo depicting birds who always return home, but when she left her small town for Bucharest, she had her tattoo redone. (Alexandra Crisbășan)

“You know, for me ‘home’ is more about people than the place,” Andreea says. “I had [a] ‘home’ in my town, but I did not necessarily feel at home. It wasn’t bad or anything. It simply wasn’t it.”

Andreea was born and lived for 18 years in a small town on the Danube River. At that time, the gay community was beginning to form in Bucharest, but LGBTQ people were invisible in small towns.

She came from a religious family and was taught to go to church every Sunday. When she was in high school, she realized she was sexually attracted to women.

Andreea had no information about homosexuality, felt she could not ask her parents and did not understand what was going on, but she had the internet. She entered a forum on a dating site and started asking questions. Later, she read more about what it means to be gay. The first person she came out to was her best friend, but the response was not positive.

“She said something like, ‘Of course you are, cause you’re bored with men, aren’t you?’ ” Andreea says. “I was still a virgin. I did not know anything, but I felt the need to tell someone. And that was her reaction.”

At one point, she had what she calls “a summer fling” with a boy in her town. But at that time, she fell in love with a girl, and she told her boyfriend the truth. He did not understand how Andreea could prefer women and accused her of trying to humiliate him.

She had “the conversation” with her mother much later. Her father doesn’t know to this day.

“My mom told me she thinks it’s a psychological issue,” Andreea says. “She thought it was something related to depression, and that it would pass. But it was OK—at least she tried to understand as much as she could. I accept even the slightest effort from anyone, even if they put me in a totally different box. At least they are trying to do something with the information.”

After graduating from high school, Andreea moved to Iaşi to study at the Faculty of Arts. One evening she befriended a random woman on Facebook. The woman lived in Bucharest, and they began to exchange messages over the internet. They met face to face for the first time during a spring holiday in Andreea’s hometown.

“I was head over heels from the moment I saw her,” Andreea says. “I decided to move to Bucharest.” There, the two began a relationship that lasted five years. They lived together and ran into their share of prejudice. For example, when they refused to pay money they didn’t feel they owed a former landlady, the woman threatened to write to each of their parents and reveal the truth about their relationship. Her girlfriend was terrified by this prospect, but Andreea did not want to give in to blackmail.

“[I told the landlady], ‘you know what, I’ll send you a picture of the two of us so you can show it to them if you want,’ ” Andreea says. The woman backed off and never contacted their parents.

Andreea says the 2018 referendum “brought out the worst in people—it was like a slap in the face when you are not looking.” (Alexandra Crisbășan)

Andreea is determined to leave Romania if civil partnership is not approved by the time she is ready to marry. “If things do not change, I do not want to raise my children here,” she says. “I will go where it is easier for me, my partner and the children I want to have.”

The Winds of Change

Any legislative change regarding LGBTQ rights in Romania must be accompanied by a change in mentality. LGBTQ activist Viski says studies show that personal contact with a person different than yourself decreases your level of intolerance. The problem is that many people in Romania think they have never met a gay person. According to Viski, this stems from the years when the LGBTQ community was forced to become invisible under Article 200.

Newell says Romanian homophobia is not a psychological but a cultural phenomenon.

“The Romanian does not really care what you are doing, but he knows it’s wrong and he repeats it because that’s what the priest told him,” Newell says. “In a way, this is good because things can change through education.”

Social attitudes may change only slowly, but they are changing, according to Adrian Coman, former executive director of the LGBTQ rights group Accept.

“In the 2001 polls, [in response to] the question ‘Whom would you hate having as a neighbor,’ 85% of Romanians said they would not want a gay neighbor,” Coman says. “Now we have reached 30%, so the social perception has evolved.”

This cautious optimism is spreading six months after the referendum failed and more than a year after alt-right groups tried to stop the projection of a gay movie at the Romanian Peasant Museum. Snow is no longer squeaking under our feet, and apple blossoms fly in the spring breeze. It may be a new dawn.

Appeals Court Rejects Chelsea Manning’s Effort to Leave Jail

FALLS CHURCH, Va. — A federal appeals court on Monday rejected a bid by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to be released from jail for refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating Wikileaks.

The three-paragraph, unanimous decision from a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond rejects both Manning’s argument that she was erroneously found in civil contempt of court and her request for bail while the contempt decision is litigated.

Manning has been jailed at the Alexandria Detention Center since March 8 after refusing to testify to the Wikileaks grand jury.

Since her incarceration, criminal charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange have been unsealed and U.S. officials have requested his extradition . Manning’s lawyers argued that her testimony is unnecessary in part because Assange has already been charged.

Manning served seven years in a military prison for leaking a trove of military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks before then-President Barack Obama commuted the remainder of her 35-year sentence.

Manning’s lawyers also argued that she told authorities everything she knew during her court-martial investigation and that her incarceration was unnecessarily cruel because the jail is unable to provide adequate medical care in connection with gender-reassignment surgery Manning underwent.

Prosecutors responded that they believe Manning, who was granted immunity for her grand jury testimony, may have more to say about her interactions with Wikileaks than has been previously disclosed, and that Manning is out of line for disrupting the grand-jury process simply on her speculation that she is being singled out for harassment. They also say that the jail has gone out of its way to accommodate her medical needs.

Prosecutors have called Manning’s leak to Wikileaks one of the largest compromises of classified information in U.S. history.

Monday’s opinion was issued by judges Allyson Duncan, a George W. Bush appointee; Paul Niemayer, a George H.W. Bush appointee; and Robert King, a Bill Clinton appointee.

Manning’s lawyer said she expected to issue a statement later Monday.

Under the terms of the judge’s contempt finding, Manning will remain jailed until she agrees to testify or until the grand jury’s term is concluded. That date is unknown.

The Most Horrifying Look at Monsanto Yet

“Fear is the best weapon to awaken the reader,” says Samanta Schweblin, the acclaimed Argentine author of “Fever Dream.” “Fear is what makes you drop a book and run to your computer to Google what is happening, and think, ‘Can this happen to me? Is this really happening?’”

“Fever Dream” certainly terrified readers across the globe after it was translated from Spanish into more than a dozen languages over the past few years. It was first published in English in 2017 and received ample critical acclaim, in part due to her considerable talent as a writer, but also due to the timeliness of the subject at hand: the horrors companies such as agrochemical giant Monsanto have inflicted on the planet and us all.

In her novella, however, Schweblin never names Monsanto, but rather tells the spine-chilling tale of Amanda, a city-dweller, mysteriously dying during a vacation to the countryside. Where does this horror story take place? you may ask. The answer is anywhere, given the multinational company’s harrowing reach. On her deathbed, Amanda is visited by a child who attempts to lead her and, perhaps more importantly, Schweblin’s readers, toward the realization that is likely on the tip of many readers’ tongues as the seemingly fictional ailments and occurrences start to form a familiar pattern. Wake up, the ghostly David seems to tell us as we all lie on our laurels during the planet’s death throes. “That’s the story we need to understand […] Don’t get distracted,” the child repeats over and over.

It is precisely as the global public begins to wake up, in large part thanks to young activists such as the courageous Greta Thunberg, to the barbarous damage done to the planet in the name of boundless greed that stories such as Schweblin’s can become an important tool in the fight against climate inaction. But this fever dream that feels inescapable currently is not just about climate change. According to writer Patricia Stuelke, “the recent resurgence of horror in feminist literary fiction in Argentina [and] the United States,” of which she considers Schweblin’s “Fever Dream” a prime example, is also undeniably a product of capitalism. Schweblin’s work,

… continues the long tradition Mark Stevens traces in which […] “a critique of [capitalist] horror,” he suggests, “produces horrific forms.” In this sense, the energy and aesthetics of the Argentine and international feminist remaking of the strike against capitalism’s “gore realities” are infusing, and perhaps being infused by, the feminist horror boom. These works repurpose horror conventions in order to confront the entangled forces of environmental destruction, financialization and extraction, and the exploitation of women’s labor.  …

Graciously, Schweblin’s tales also make for great literature. Once looped into the eerily familiar stories the Argentine author crafts masterfully, it can be hard to put her books down, despite the creeping terror that inevitably takes hold. Both “Fever Dream” and her most recently translated collection of stories “Mouthful of Birds” have been nominated for the Man Booker International literary prize. “Fever Dream” is also currently being adapted by Netflix and is due to hit screens worldwide in 2019.

In a discussion about everything from agrochemicals to women’s rights, I caught up with Schweblin at her current home in Berlin, Germany, during a recent phone interview. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation translated from Spanish.

Natasha Hakimi Zapata: Before talking about your recently translated collection of short stories, “Mouthful of Birds,” I’d like to talk a little about your novella “Fever Dream,” a book I have seen described as an eco-horror.

The delirium depicted in your book is especially frightening to me because it sounds so familiar in this era of climate change. Can you tell me a little about why you decided to write about this topic?

Samanta Schweblin: Honestly, when I start writing a new story, I never start by choosing a topic, rather what I’m after is a kind of feeling, emotion, emotion in the reader.

The issue is not something that is self-imposed, but something that arises in the middle of the search for how to convey this feeling to the reader.

Of course, it’s charged with personal experiences, and information that I’m mulling over at that moment. When I started writing “Fever Dream,” which was in 2013—the end of 2012, the beginning of 2013—there was a very big controversy in Argentina. People were beginning to talk about something that had been going on for some time, but had not reached the media, which is the horror of the crops of an industry that is based on crops that abuse the agrotoxins.

The horror that this generated in communities, which were literally dying intoxicated, was huge. This is more or less where the topic came from—in a way I approached it as a concerned citizen.

In Argentina, “Fever Dream” was read as a very political novel. The reception caught me off guard because I think, it’s a novel that does not provide enough information to be called political, but of course it was the first novel, the first work of fiction, that addressed the subject of glyphosate and Monsanto.

I had not realized that what I was writing could have such a significant impact on society, but ultimately, I was writing about a topic that at that time nobody spoke of and that would be new to many people.

[As I was writing “Fever Dream”], I thought, “Can I afford to write about a topic like this and not denounce or name governors who had agreed to incredible laws that left citizens defenseless, or not mention nefarious statistics about the consequences of these fumigations or name brands, even?”

I was dealing with this struggle between journalism and fiction.

In the end what I realized is that the readers—myself included—always tend to forget the names, the statistics, the numbers; but we never forget terror when we really feel it. Fear is the best weapon to awaken the reader.

Fear is what makes you drop a book and run to your computer to Google what is happening, and think, “Can this happen to me? Is this really happening?”

That seemed to me to be a stronger weapon than any information I could offer in the book, information that ultimately the book could not hold well because the book is simply the story of a woman who is dying in a field.

Later I realized that it was a good decision and that many people responded by informing themselves once they [had read “Fever Dream”].

Another interesting political thing is that when this book began to circulate and to be translated—it has a lot of translations, I think it has 20 translations already, to different languages—I noticed something very interesting. In societies that are very clear about the danger of agrochemicals, the novel was read as political immediately. Without hesitation, they arrived at that reading.

Then there were the societies that did not have this information. There are a lot of issues that are discussed in the book about the consequences of fumigations in fields: thousands of spontaneous abortions, children with malformations, people with cancer, respiratory problems, animals that suddenly transform and die. [In these societies, people] read all this as fantasy, as if they were reading about ghosts and strange children and phantasmagoric animals that suddenly died. [Witnessing this reading of my book], I became aware of how fanciful societies become when they have no information.

NHZ: How fascinating. When I read “Fever Dream”, I immediately began to recognize precisely what I read in the news and it is not one single story, but many stories around the world, as you are saying. It is something that has not only happened in Argentina.

I think it was also a good decision precisely because it translates into this horror story and a story too, because we as readers connect a lot with the main characters—the dying woman and the ghostly child. It leaves us with a very strong impact.

SS: Sure. Do you know that a movie is being filmed right now?

NHZ: No, I did not know.

SS: Yes, they are filming at this moment in Chile and in Argentina. It will be called “Distancia de Rescate” [in Spanish]. It is being filmed by Claudia Llosa, who is an excellent Peruvian film director. I received a lot of offers, but when [Llosa’s offer] appeared I did not hesitate to say yes because I’d been following her work for a long time.

We wrote the script together and Netflix is ​​financing it, so in a very short time, it’ll be available to watch.

NHZ: That’s great! […] Well, I’d like to talk a little bit now about “Mouthful of Birds.” Many of the stories in the book deal with the subject that affect us daily, but are told through a surrealist narrative. What does surrealism permit you to convey that realism doesn’t? Do you consider it surreal? I do not know if I’m imposing my point of view.

SS: I think that some stories can be surreal at times, but I do not consider them surreal, although I do not deny your perspective at all. I love that you have that reading. Rather, it seems to me that they are stories that take place in the realm of the strange, of the abnormal.

Surrealism leaves room for more questions about the real world. It seems to me that [any type of surrealist work] questions the real and the normal from start to finish … On the other hand, it seems to me that these stories take place in the real and, at some point, break with it. Not all, but most. I like that moment of breaking the real, that moment where the normal disintegrates.

These stories were published for the first time 10 years ago. There are even some of these stories, such as “The Test,” “Headlights,” “The Heavy Suitcase of Benavides” and there is one more, now I do not remember which, [ … ] which were taken from my first very first book [which was published when I was] 22.

I think the book is the equivalent of what a painter would create when trying out a palette of colors for the first time.

I moved from genre to genre, but in general it is a moment in which I was thinking a lot, as I was entering the adult world, about the rules, about the codes, about what is established socially as acceptable or unacceptable.

I realize now looking back how uncomfortable I felt, how arbitrary I found that concept of normality. The idea that between you and me there is an intermediate point and that point is what we call normal. But in reality, neither you nor I are standing at the point, so the normal is an invention. […] if something does not fall within the norm, it does not mean that it does not exist or that it cannot happen. I think [“Mouthful of Birds” is composed of] stories that are always approaching that breaking point [I discussed earlier].

In fact, except for one or two stories that absolutely take place in the realm of the fantastic or the surreal, as you said, I believe that in all the rest, the element of the fantastic happens in the reader’s head. It would be strictly impossible to underline where the fantastic appears, that’s to say, what is an impossible occurrence in this world cannot be identified in the text. It is rather something that the reader utters in a low voice to themself, but in reality the text never makes it explicit.

NHZ: Going back to “Mouthful of Birds,” the first story in the collection “Headlights,” where we met a crowd of newly married and abandoned brides in a field, waiting, screaming and lamenting. In the end we see that their boyfriends were not very far away and they return to the scene of abandonment, not for their wives but for a single man that was left behind. Is this a comment on modern marriage and on the limited relationships that can take place between men and women under patriarchy?

SS: [laughs] I would never give away those clues. It seems to me that my intention is to question the entire scene. There is something very theatrical for me about marriage. Not marriage as in the civil act of getting married, but rather especially a Catholic idea of marriage, which is still very popular in Argentina, even among non-Catholics who wouldn’t dream of getting married without the white dress, church and a priest’s blessing.

There is a theatricality surrounding the clothes and formalities which to me represents a lot of ideas of marriage that are outdated. Our mothers and grandmothers have suffered them and now they sound a bit funny to us, and some don’t even seem outrageous anymore because of how far we’ve come.

That’s why [the story is] written in prose that seems to be very realistic, but deep down it’s so theatrical that it even has a choir of voices. I even think it’s theatrical also in terms of lighting. It’s a story that happens in the dark and every so often cars pass by or something happens that sheds light on the faces, and they are revealed and recognized.

NHZ: Speaking of women, I wanted to ask you a bit about how you see the situation of women in Argentina. I’m thinking of course about movements like “Ni Una Menos” that have developed as a protest against femicide and other forms of violence against women.

SS: Obviously, in order for movements like these to form, we need to have reached a very high level of incipient violence, which is terrible, but the reality is that these movements have made great changes in Argentine society, changes that they are even spreading to the rest of Latin America.

Really in these last two years, there has been a leap in the Argentine paradigm about women, and we owe it to these movements and also to all the women who fought in favor of the legalization of abortion.

Although abortion was not legalized [in Argentina], the fight was very strong; it was a cross-generational, political struggle. All the problems that Argentina was dealing with at that moment always seemed to divide us into A and B. But the problem of abortion seemed to touch everyone at the same time and that was very important because then, it seems incredible, but the abortion debate ultimately served as a bridge towards other discussions.

Though abortion wasn’t legalized, the topic made so much noise and it became so clear that the vast majority of Argentine citizens wanted to legalize abortion, that in some way it left the political system in crisis.

Imagine how strong the impact was. I think it was very good and, of course, this also brought a new energy to literature written by women in Argentina. Suddenly a lot of fiction writers … began to find places to publish, to be heard. So it is very gratifying to see that many doors have been opened for women in recent years in Argentina.

This does not mean that the extreme level of violence against women has decreased. And abortion remains illegal in Argentina. I am deeply ashamed that a democracy like Argentina’s does not have legalized abortion.

NHZ: It’s not just in Latin America where women are fighting for similar issues, but also in the United States and Europe with the #MeToo movement. I’m not sure it’s also reached Germany, where you live, but for example, it’s reached France. I think what we’re experiencing is a global change in women’s rights, or at least, in how we fight for them.

SS: Yes. I was thinking how on a global level, doors have been opened for literature written by women.

It’s funny because more than once I’ve been asked if I think this is a passing fad, and I’m stunned by that question because to me it’s not a fad. To me it’s about what half of humanity writes. It seems silly to think that this is just a passing trend.

It seems to me that what’s happening is that when a minority voice suddenly comes under the spotlight, it brings with it a very different world view: a very new voice, new themes, a freshness and a power that any voice that has been displaced until now contains. And that’s part of why writing by women around the world is so strong right now.

 

Elizabeth Warren Introduces Sweeping Plan to Wipe Out Student Debt

Elizabeth Warren wants to cancel part or all student loan debt for 95 percent of Americans and make public college free for everyone—the latest, and perhaps most ambitious, policy proposal for the 2020 Democratic contender.

Warren announced the policy in a Medium post Monday morning.

The Massachusetts Democrat told readers that her own past as a waitress who was able to attend public college due to the school’s low cost is now unattainable for most Americans.

But Warren aims to change that.

“The first step in addressing this crisis is to deal head-on with the outstanding debt that is weighing down millions of families and should never have been required in the first place,” wrote Warren. “That’s why I’m calling for something truly transformational — the cancellation of up to $50,000 in student loan debt for 42 million Americans.”

run my student debt over, liz warren

— elim garak appreciator (@onesarahjones) April 22, 2019

Warren, in a fundraising email to supporters, said that the policy’s goals writ large aimed at righting past wrongs.

“My plan for universal free college would give every American the opportunity to attend a two-year or four-year public college without paying a dime in tuition or fees,” said Warren. “And we’ll make free college truly universal—not just in theory, but in practice—by making higher education of all kinds more inclusive and available to every single American, especially lower-income, Black, and Latinx students, without the need to take on debt to cover costs. Free tuition, and zero debt at graduation.”

one of the most interesting things about warren’s student loan/free college plan is its specific focus on racial inequality pic.twitter.com/mfILTW2eGU

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) April 22, 2019

That will also take public investment, said The New York Times‘s Astead W. Herndon.

Ms. Warren’s sweeping plan has several planks…. In addition to eliminating undergraduate tuition at public colleges and universities, she would expand federal grants to help students with nontuition expenses and create a $50 billion fund to support historically black colleges and universities.

Estimates put the cost of the program at around $1.25 trillion.

The education overhaul would be paid for, Warren told Herndon, by less than half of a decade’s worth of her Ultra-Millionaire Tax — a 2 percent annual tax on the 75,000 families with $50 million or more in wealth.

Warren’s wealth tax would generate $2.75 trillion over a decade, leaving $1.5 trillion available for her other proposed transformative social policies, like protecting public lands from exploitation and universal childcare and pre-k.

In an interview aired Monday, Warren told CNN‘s M.J. Lee that her program goes further than the free college plan put forward by her 2020 primary rival Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

“It covers more and it addresses both the access question of going to college and the problem of the debt burden for our students,” said Warren.

Elizabeth Warren told me in our sitdown that her new proposal is “bigger” and “goes further” than Bernie Sanders’ free college legislation — “It covers more and it addresses both the access question of going to college and the problem of the debt burden for our students.” pic.twitter.com/ZrMRzC1jAV

— MJ Lee (@mj_lee) April 22, 2019

Sanders and Warren are competing for left-wing Democratic votes and both have put forward ambitious proposals on the environment, taxes, healthcare, and, now, education.

The Nation community editor Annie Shields said she was excited not only by the proposal but by how Warren made the case to CNN‘s Lee.

“This is a really exciting proposal and I’m really impressed with how Warren sells it in this segment,” said Shields.

This is a really exciting proposal and I’m really impressed with how Warren sells it in this segment. https://t.co/L5vC8Hh4lQ

— Annie Shields (@anastasiakeeley) April 22, 2019

Initial reaction from progressives to Warren’s plan was positive, though the Massachusetts Democrat’s low polling numbers in the crowded primary continue to baffle many on the left.

“If we’re talking primary candidates whose policies would affect the material conditions of the working class, Warren is the way ahead of the game here,” said journalist Andray Domise.

If we’re talking primary candidates whose policies would affect the material conditions of the working class, Warren is the way ahead of the game here. https://t.co/LHmoiCj2k1

— Andray (@andraydomise) April 22, 2019

“Warren is consistently offering substantive policies (let’s see if folks will actually evaluate them),” tweeted activist Mariame Kaba.

This is test for all of the people who are always bleating about wanting *substance* re: domestic policies during campaigns. I never believe them so let’s see… Warren is consistently offering substantive policies (let’s see if folks will actually evaluate them). https://t.co/X71HuZHhTJ

— Prison Culture Returns (@prisonculture) April 22, 2019

“How Warren is polling below *Joe freaking Biden* baffles me,” said Right Wing Watch‘s Jared Holt.

How Warren is polling below *Joe freaking Biden* baffles me https://t.co/Kb07Fg8tha

— Jared Holt (@jaredlholt) April 22, 2019

“Elizabeth Warren is pushing out some great policy proposals,” said Arnesa Buljušmić-Kustura. “I feel like she’s been really minimized so far and I hope people start paying attention.”

Elizabeth Warren is pushing out some great policy proposals. I feel like she’s been really minimised so far and I hope people start paying attention.

— Arnesa Buljušmić-Kustura (@Rrrrnessa) April 22, 2019

The Mainstream Media’s Disgraceful Cheering of Assange’s Demise

Julian Assange was arrested inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London on April 11. The Australian-born co-founder of Wikileaks had been trapped in the building since 2012 after taking refuge there. He was immediately found guilty of failing to surrender to a British court, and was taken to Belmarsh prison. An extradition to the United States is widely seen as imminent by corporate media, who have, by and large, strongly approved of these events.

A Washington Post editorial (4/11/19) claimed Assange was “no free-press hero” and insisted the arrest was “long overdue.” Likewise, the Wall Street Journal (4/11/19) demanded “accountability” for Assange, saying, “His targets always seem to be democratic institutions or governments.”

Other coverage was more condemnatory still. The View’s Meghan McCain (4/11/19) declared she hoped Assange “rots in hell.” Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost (4/13/19) said it was “so satisfying to see an Internet troll get dragged out into the sunlight.” But it was perhaps the National Review (4/12/19) that expressed the most enthusiastic approval of Assange’s arrest, condemning him for his “anti-Americanism, his antisemitism and his raw personal corruption” and for harming the US with his “vile spite.”

Both the United Nations and the ACLU have denounced Assange’s arrest, with the formercondemning Sweden and the UK for depriving him of liberty and freedom, ordering them to pay compensation for the many years he was confined to the embassy. Despite this, establishment media have overwhelmingly described this situation with a euphemism: Mr. Assange’s “self-imposed isolation” (CNN, 4/11/19; USA Today, 4/11/19; New York Times, 4/11/19), a phrase that conjures a very different image of the situation and the responsibilities of the various parties involved. TheDaily Beast (4/11/19) made this implication explicit, describing Assange’s predicament as “voluntary confinement.”

Assange is a controversial character who originally took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy after England’s High Court ruled to extradite him to Sweden to face charges of rape. Yet most of the media coverage downplayed or even did not mention this (e.g., Bloomberg, 4/11/19; National Review, 4/12/19; Daily Beast, 4/11/19), suggesting they did not consider it relevant.

The universal charge of narcissism

Celebrating his arrest, The Week (4/11/19) attacked Assange as a “delusional, childish narcissist” who undermined the security of every nation. A host of other media outlets across the spectrum (Washington Post, 4/12/19; New York Times, 4/12/19; London Times, 4/7/19) similarly framed him as a “narcissist,” one with an “outsized view of his own importance,” despite his poor “personal hygiene,” according to the New York Times (4/11/19).

The narcissist accusation is a common trope thrown at enemies of the US establishment, including Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez (National Review, 6/27/07; Economist, 3/9/13; Miami Herald, 7/25/15), Vladimir Putin (Atlantic, 4/15/14; Guardian, 3/10/18) and even Bernie Sanders (Huffington Post, 2/9/16; New York, 11/25/18). It was also exactly the same line of attack the media used against Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who leaked NSA documents (e.g., New Yorker, 6/10/13; Bloomberg, 11/1/13; Chicago Tribune, 12/23/14), and how the prosecution portrayedChelsea Manning at her trial, suggesting it is a convenient putdown rather than a good-faith description of anti-establishment figures.

Manning had offered the files that came to be known as the Iraq War Logs to both the Washington Post and New York Times. However, only Wikileaks decided to publish them. The files showed evidence of US war crimes in the Middle East, and shot both Manning and Assange onto the world stage.

The UK press reaction

 

The infamously acerbic British press responded to Assange’s arrest with undisguised glee. The Daily Mail’s front-page headline (4/12/19) read, “That’ll Wipe the Smile Off His Face,” and devoted four pages to the “downfall of a narcissist” who was removed from “inside his fetid lair” to finally “face justice.” The Daily Mirror (4/11/19) described him as “an unwanted guest who abused his hospitality,” while the Times of London (4/12/19) claimed “no one should feel sorry” for the “overdue eviction.”

The Mirror (4/13/19) also published an opinion piece from Labour member of Parliament Jess Phillips that began by stating, “Finally Julian Assange, everyone’s least favorite squatter, has been kicked out of the Ecuadorian embassy.” She described the 47-year-old Australian as a “grumpy, stroppy teenager.”

At the far-left of the corporate media spectrum, the New Statesman(4/12/19) described Assange as a “demented-looking gnome.” The Glasgow Herald editorial board (4/13/19) summed up the press reaction: “Julian Assange is not a journalist, and he’s not a hero, and his day in court is long overdue.”

Is Assange a journalist?

The central question of whether Assange a journalist has been discussed at great length this week in corporate media. The resounding response has been “no.”

The National Review (4/12/19) declared him a “petty, biased, hostile foreign actor”; CNN (4/11/19) described him as an activist, not a journalist, demanding he “face justice.” Fox News (4/12/19) also labeled him an activist, one who is using journalism as a “fig leaf for his reckless conduct.” Other outlets (Bloomberg, 4/11/19; Washington Post, 4/11/19) have also been eager to insist Assange is not a journalist.

The New York Times editorial board (4/11/19) writes that while Assange’s arrest will likely raise questions about press freedom, for now, the Trump administration has “done well” by charging the “scraggly-bearded refugee” with an “indisputable crime.” They argue that there is currently technically no First Amendment issue because he is no journalist but a “foreign agent seeking to undermine the security of the United States through theft,” who highlights the “sharp line between legitimate journalism and dangerous cybercrime.”

Veteran journalist and supporter of Assange John Pilger disagrees, contending that his arrest is a historically important warning to “real journalists,” who are few and far between at establishment media, who resent him for highlighting their subservience to the elite.

Whatever your view of Assange might be, it seems clear he shares virtually nothing in common with those in positions of influence in big media outlets, who have been only too happy to watch his demise.

Noam Chomsky: Democrats May Have Handed Trump the 2020 Election

As Attorney General William Barr releases Robert Mueller’s long-anticipated report into Russian interference in the 2016 election, we speak with world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky about what he sees as the political perils of “Russiagate.”

AMY GOODMAN: Can you share your analysis of President Trump? You have lived through so many presidents. Explain President Trump to us and assess the massive response to him.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, Trump is—you know, I think there are a number of illusions about Trump. If you take a look at the Trump phenomenon, it’s not very surprising. Think back for the last 10 or 15 years over Republican Party primaries, and remember what happened during the primaries. Each primary, when some candidate rose from the base, they were so outlandish that the Republican establishment tried to crush them and succeeded in doing it—Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum. Anyone who was coming out of the base was totally unacceptable to the establishment. The change in 2016 is they couldn’t crush him.

But the interesting question is: Why was this happening? Why, in election after election, was the voting base producing a candidate utterly intolerable to the establishment? And the answer to that is—if you think about that, the answer is not very hard to discover. During the—since the 1970s, during this neoliberal period, both of the political parties have shifted to the right. The Democrats, by the 1970s, had pretty much abandoned the working class. I mean, the last gasp of more or less progressive Democratic Party legislative proposals was the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978, which Carter watered down so that it had no teeth, just became voluntary. But the Democrats had pretty much abandoned the working class. They became pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans. Meanwhile, the Republicans shifted so far to the right that they went completely off the spectrum. Two of the leading political analysts of the American Enterprise Institute, Thomas Mann, Norman Ornstein, about five or 10 years ago, described the Republican Party as what they called a “radical insurgency” that has abandoned parliamentary politics.

Well, why did that happen? It happened because the Republicans face a difficult problem. They have a primary constituency, a real constituency: extreme wealth and corporate power. That’s who they have to serve. That’s their constituency. You can’t get votes that way, so you have to do something else to get votes. What do you do to get votes? This was begun by Richard Nixon with the Southern strategy: try to pick up racists in the South. The mid-1970s, Paul Weyrich, one of the Republican strategists, hit on a brilliant idea. Northern Catholics voted Democratic, tended to vote Democratic, a lot of them working-class. The Republicans could pick up that vote by pretending—crucially, “pretending”—to be opposed to abortion. By the same pretense, they could pick up the evangelical vote. Those are big votes—evangelicals, northern Catholics. Notice the word “pretense.” It’s crucial. You go back to the 1960s, every leading Republican figure was strongly, what we call now, pro-choice. The Republican Party position was—that’s Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, all the leadership—their position was: Abortion is not the government’s business; it’s private business—government has nothing to say about it. They turned almost on a dime in order to try to pick up a voting base on what are called cultural issues. Same with gun rights. Gun rights become a matter of holy writ because you can pick up part of the population that way. In fact, what they’ve done is put together a coalition of voters based on issues that are basically, you know, tolerable to the establishment, but they don’t like it. OK? And they’ve got to hold that, those two constituencies, together. The real constituency of wealth and corporate power, they’re taken care of by the actual legislation.

So, if you look at the legislation under Trump, it’s just lavish gifts to the wealth and the corporate sector—the tax bill, the deregulation, you know, every case in point. That’s kind of the job of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, those guys. They serve the real constituency. Meanwhile, Trump has to maintain the voting constituency, with one outrageous position after another that appeals to some sector of the voting base. And he’s doing it very skillfully. As just as a political manipulation, it’s skillful. Work for the rich and the powerful, shaft everybody else, but get their votes—that’s not an easy trick. And he’s carrying it off.

And, I should say, the Democrats are helping him. They are. Take the focus on Russiagate. What’s that all about? I mean, it was pretty obvious at the beginning that you’re not going to find anything very serious about Russian interference in elections. I mean, for one thing, it’s undetectable. I mean, in the 2016 election, the Senate and the House went the same way as the executive, but nobody claims there was Russian interference there. In fact, you know, Russian interference in the election, if it existed, was very slight, much less, say, than interference by, say, Israel. Israel, the prime minister, Netanyahu, goes to Congress and talks to a joint session of Congress, without even informing the White House, to attack Obama’s policies. I mean, that’s dramatic interference with elections. Whatever the Russians tried, it’s not going to be anything like that. And, in fact, there’s no interference in elections that begins to compare with campaign funding. Remember that campaign funding alone gives you a very high prediction of electoral outcome. It’s, again, Tom Ferguson’s major work which has shown this very persuasively. That’s massive interference in elections. Anything the Russians might have done is going to be, you know, peanuts in comparison. As far as Trump collusion with the Russians, that was never going to amount to anything more than minor corruption, maybe building a Trump hotel in Red Square or something like that, but nothing of any significance.

The Democrats invested everything in this issue. Well, turned out there was nothing much there. They gave Trump a huge gift. In fact, they may have handed him the next election. That’s just a—that’s a matter of being so unwilling to deal with fundamental issues, that they’re looking for something on the side that will somehow give political success. The real issues are different things. They’re things like climate change, like global warming, like the Nuclear Posture Review, deregulation. These are real issues. But the Democrats aren’t going after those. They’re looking for something else—the Democratic establishment. I’m not talking about the young cohort that’s coming in, which is quite different. Just all of that has to be shifted significantly, if there’s going to be a legitimate political opposition to the right-wing drift that’s taking place. And it can happen, can definitely happen, but it’s going to take work.

AMY GOODMAN: The world-renowned linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky, speaking at the Old South Church in Boston last Thursday night. Go to democracynow.org to see more of the interview and to see his speech. You can go to democracynow.org for our video and audio podcasts, as well as transcripts of all of our shows.

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Ukraine’s Powerful Rebuke to American Hegemony

This piece originally appeared on Popular Resistance.

With the landslide victory of Volodymyr Zelensky, who won 73 percent of the vote, the comedian will become the president of Ukraine. Understanding how this occurred becomes easy when people review US government documents published by Wikileaks about the outgoing president.

Who is “OU”? Our Ukraine. In a classified diplomatic cable from 2006 released by Wikileaks.org, U.S. officials refer to Poroshenko as “Our Ukraine (OU) insider Petro Poroshenko.” “Our Ukraine” has been in the pocket of the US government for 13 years.

The US government knew he was corrupt. A separate cable also released by Wikileaks makes that clear. The May 2006 cable states “Poroshenko was tainted by credible corruption allegations, but wielded significant influence within OU; Poroshenko’s price had to be paid.” The US government knew he was corrupt, but allowing his corruption was a price the US was willing to pay to have Our Ukraine serving as president.

The document also describes the “bad blood” between Poroshenko and  Yuliya Tymoshenko. This bad blood continues to this day as Tymoshenko came in third in the first round of the elections, and it seemed to continue through the General Election, as those who voted for her, voted for Zelensky — or against Poroshenko. The memo describes the Tymoshenko-Poroshenko relationship writing, “there is a thin line between love and hate,” and describing how  “Tymoshenko and Poroshenko might appear in public, shake hands, agree to ‘do business’ together” but a coalition between them was unlikely to last.

Joe Biden, who is expected to announce a run for president, is emblematic of the corruption of the US in Ukraine. Wikileaks reports, Biden pledged US financial and technical assistance to Ukraine for “unconventional” gas resources (i.e. fracking). And, not only was his son Hunter put on the board of the largest private gas company in Ukraine (along with a long-time Kerry family friend and financier) but when that gas company was threatened with investigation, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 saying that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion. Biden claimed he gave the country six hours to fire the prosecutor before he left Ukraine or he would bankrupt the country. OU fired him.

Why did Biden want him fired? The prosecutor was leading a wide-ranging corruption investigation into the natural gas firm – while Biden’s son, Hunter, sat on the board of directors. Corruption is a major problem in Ukraine, and Biden contributed to it, bringing US corruption to Ukraine. After Poroshenko replaced the prosecutor with one to Biden’s liking a Wikileaks document shows he was prepared to move forward with the signing of the third $1 billion loan guaranteeagreement

Now the two pro-US politicians, Tymoshenko and Poroshenko, have been replaced by a political unknown in Zelensky, or “Ze,” as he’s more popularly known. The incoming president has been vague on what policies he will pursue but says he wants to negotiate peace with Russia over eastern Ukraine, saying he was prepared to negotiate directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Ukraine is sick of corruption. Adding to Poroshenko’s corruption, the US brought more corruption. Not surprisingly, corruption under Poroshenko worsened. The country is tired of the conflict between Kiev and East Ukraine and Zelensky said he would try to end the war. And, the country has become the poorest in Europe as the promise of close ties with the US have not resulted in the benefits promised.

While the country has gotten poorer, Poroshenko remains one of the wealthiest men in Ukraine. He has been surrounded by corruption scandals as various businessmen close to him have been caught up in scandals involving corruption. The common view is Ukraine has gotten poorer as Poroshenko has gotten richer.

All this was predictable with what the US knew about OU, and thanks to Wikileaks should not be a surprise to anyone.