The New-Old Authoritarianism

Jun 7, 2024

LONG READ 

INTERVIEW 

RUTH BEN-GHIAT


With US think tanks having already drawn up plans for instituting an authoritarian government under a second Donald Trump administration, the stakes in the year's presidential election are difficult to overstate. Around the world, "strongmen" are turning democratic institutions on themselves and learning from each other.

Over the past decade, Ruth Ben-Ghiat has emerged as one of the English-speaking world’s leading experts on, and chroniclers of, authoritarian leaders in the twenty-first century. A professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, she warns against complacency in the face of growing threats to democracy around the world.

Project Syndicate: What is your working definition of a twenty-first-century “strongman”? Or more specifically, which contemporary political leaders do you include in this category, and what features do they share?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I use the term strongman for authoritarian leaders who damage or destroy democracy using a combination of corruption, violence, propaganda, and machismo (masculinity as a tool of political legitimacy). A strongman’s personality cult elevates him as both a “man of the people” and “a man above all other men.” Authoritarianism is about reorganizing government to remove constraints on the leader – which in turn allows him to commit crimes with impunity – and machismo is essential to personality cults that present the head of state as omnipotent and infallible.

Strongmen, as I define them, also exercise a form of governance known as “personalist rule.” Government institutions are organized around the self-preservation of a leader whose private interests prevail over national interests in both domestic and foreign policy; public office thus becomes a vehicle for private enrichment (of the leader and his family and cronies).

Personalist rule is associated with autocracies. A good example is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where a kleptocratic economy allows for the systematic plundering of private and public entities for the financial benefit of the leader and his circle. Yet personalist rule can also emerge in degraded democracies when a politician manages to exert total control over his party, develop a personality cult, and exert outsize influence over mass media. That happened in Italy under Silvio Berlusconi (who owned the country’s private television networks and much more) and in America during Donald Trump (through his command of Twitter and his alliance with Fox News).

Because personalist leaders are always corrupt, they and those closest to them usually will be investigated when they come to power in a democracy. In such cases, governance increasingly revolves around their defense. More party and civil-service resources will be devoted to exonerating the leader and punishing those who can harm him, such as judges, prosecutors, opposition politicians, and journalists. In the United States, the Republican Party has lent itself fully to this personalist endeavor. The House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, chaired by Trump loyalist Jim Jordan, is just one example of a government mechanism created for the sole purpose of targeting anyone who threatens the leader.

Even where investigating the leader is no longer possible, as in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, a formidable army of lawyers, trolls, bureaucrats, and others will sustain the leadership cult and watch for any cracks in the armor. Hence, the Turkish government spends considerable time and public funds pursuing tens of thousands of “insult suits” against Erdoğan’s critics.

Finally, while democratic leaders can be deeply flawed as individuals, the strongman’s corruption and paranoia ineluctably leads him to develop highly dysfunctional governance structures such as “inner sanctums” composed of sycophants, family members, and advisers chosen for their loyalty rather than their expertise. As a result, strongmen will gradually come to lack the proper objective input to make reasoned decisions. Their impulsive and mercurial personalities will make their cabinets a circus of hirings and firings, with the chaos further drowning out sound advice. Trump, who made his daughter and son-in-law top advisers, is in this lineage. “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things,” he said in 2016, when asked who advises him on foreign policy. When the strongman is ripe to be overthrown, he may be the last to know.

PS: Would you also include those CEOs and business leaders who, like Elon Musk, wield absolute power within their organizations?

RBG: There are many “little tyrants” in business who create decision-making structures that are beholden to their whims, and who dwell in a semi-fantasy environment rooted in their demands for loyalty. Adam Neumann, the former CEO of WeWork, is a good example. Of course, corporate leaders generally must answer to boards of directors and other fiduciary structures that exist to preserve the integrity and profits of the business entity; that is why Neumann eventually was removed. But this does not always happen, as the case of Musk (at Tesla) shows.

NORMALIZING EXTREMISM

PS: How should we understand Trump’s evolution since he first announced his presidential candidacy in June 2015? In what ways has he become more dangerous, and in what ways has he become simply a “known quantity”?

RBG: Trumpism started in 2015 as a movement fueled by conservative alarm and white rural rage at a multiracial and progressive America. It continued as an authoritarian presidency – what Trump’s advisers envisioned as a “shock to the system” – that unleashed waves of hate crimes against non-whites and non-Christians. It then reached a new stage with the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, which deployed violence not just to keep Trump in office, but also to keep Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and other representatives of social and racial progress from taking power.

Normalizing extremism has been critical to this success. Trump has worked very hard to condition Americans to accept authoritarianism as a superior form of government, and this emotional re-training has proceeded along several vectors. For example, he has sought to change perceptions of political violence, using his rallies since 2015 to market it as necessary and justified – the preferred way to deal with differences. He has also repeatedly praised dictators around the world in an effort to change Americans’ perceptions of tyrants. And he has led a massive, concerted campaign to delegitimize democratic leaders and institutions, from elections and the courts to the free press. All are depicted as inefficient, corrupt, and dangerous.

Trump surveyed the political marketplace and made himself into an exponent of the causes and emotions that he felt American politics was neglecting. He identified and named a new constituency: the “forgotten” – white rural and exurban working-class voters whom Democrats had ignored. He told them he loved them, proclaimed himself their savior, and made himself a victim on their behalf. None of this is new for authoritarian politics, but it was new for America, given the scale it has reached.

PS: There is a long-running debate over whether Trump is more of a symptom or a cause, with the “symptom” camp arguing that a similar politician would fill the void were Trump to exit the stage. Do you agree with that, or is there something uniquely compelling about a figure like Trump (or historical antecedents like Mussolini)?

RBG: Strongmen use their personality cults to proclaim their uniqueness. As individuals, they are indeed innovators in repression and communication, capable of presenting themselves as the symbols of all that is most wanted at the moment (safety from racial enemies, protection from leftist anarchy and globalists abroad, and so forth). They can connect on an emotional level with their followers. Nazis felt that Hitler was speaking directly to them and expressing things they had not known how to articulate, and you can find many quotes from people at Trump rallies who feel the same way about their leader.

But the strongman also breeds imitators (in Nazi Germany they were known as “mini-Hitlers”). Though these figures are often hated by the people, even as the original remains loved, they perform an important function by institutionalizing the tyrant’s values and style. Sometimes, however, a strongman can become too much of a liability for a country’s conservative elites, so support builds for someone who is equally extreme but appears and sounds more acceptable.

This happened in the Philippines, where former President Rodrigo Duterte’s loose-cannon pronouncements about killing people earned him an International Criminal Court investigation and bad press for the country. That created an opening for the current president, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., the son of the former dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. Bongbong is a known quantity to the country’s elites, and he is much more respectable on the surface. When Duterte resigned to help his own daughter be elected as vice president, the Marcos family returned to power. That is how the legacy of dictatorship is institutionalized and normalized.

In the US, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was supposed to be the more polished extremist that Republicans could use to ditch Trump (along with all of his legal and other baggage). But DeSantis proved unsuitable. Although his autocratic leadership style and repressive policies were just fine for the GOP, he was too unlikeable, and his personality too wooden. Some also hoped that Nikki Haley could assume this role (and she has continued to get votes in primaries even after dropping out of the race). The maxim once applied to Berlusconi is applied to Trump: there is no alternative.


PS: What will it mean for America if Trump wins in November? Do you agree with The Washington Post’s Robert Kagan that America would become a “dictatorship”?

RBG: To understand the stakes of this year’s election, one need only read The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a neutrally named plan for converting America into an autocracy, and listen to what Trump says he will do to America and Americans. I was one of the very first to see Trump as an authoritarian, and I have seen nothing to give me comfort since then. In a January 2017 CNN commentary, I predicted how he would behave in office. Unfortunately, my warnings proved accurate in every detail, from his attacks on judges and the press, to his efforts to delegitimize institutions and cultivate a personality cult.

I have no doubt that Trump would try to exert dictatorial power so that he could end his legal troubles and repress his critics and investigators without consequences. He will continue to turn party structures into vehicles for personal enrichment. The Republican National Committee had already been paying his personal legal expenses long after he left office, and now his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, is its co-chair.

Meanwhile, Trump’s enablers at Project 2025 have been working for years to facilitate his destruction of democracy. It is telling that they see an “existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch.” Dictators always justify their crackdowns as necessary responses to some kind of national emergency. Now add Trump’s quest to achieve personal immunity for any crimes he will commit, his efforts to attract more unscrupulous cronies by promising pardons, and his vow to grant police officers immunity from prosecution. It becomes easy to see how the rule of law would be transformed into rule by the lawless, with Trump as chief thug.

THE ILLIBERAL INTERNATIONAL

PS: Why did the MAGA movement identify so eagerly with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, rather than with other figures like Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland (before his party’s recent ouster from power)?

RBG: Orbán has an unusual history. I call him the strongman “made in America and Hungary.” Having lost re-election as prime minister in 2002 to a Socialist coalition, he embarked on a journey of reinvention as a far-right politician. In 2008, Binyamin Netanyahu, then the leader of the opposition in Israel, introduced Orbán to Arthur Finkelstein, a Republican political consultant who specialized in crafting campaigns designed to spark anger and fear in voters and polarize the electorate.

It was Finkelstein, along with his protégé George Birnbaum, who created the villainous “George Soros” of the right’s imagination, turning the billionaire defender of democracy into an all-powerful exploiter and predator. Orbán was back in power two years later, and “George Soros,” the anti-Semitic creation of two American Jews, has helped him to stay there ever since.

Orbán has portrayed himself as a defender of white Christian civilization against “globalists,” a talking point that is now central to GOP platforms, too. The GOP is also enamored with “illiberal democracy,” Orbán’s slogan for a model of governance in which elections are free but unfair, because they are weighted to produce the desired results. He and his party have done this through domination of the media, so that opposition candidates’ messages don’t really reach voters outside of big cities; and through purges of non-loyalists from the judiciary and the electoral apparatus, so that any challenges to results can be turned back swiftly.

While we hear about people falling out of windows or being poisoned in Russia, Orbán relies on more surreptitious forms of threat and pressure. That makes him palatable to suit-wearing extremists such as The Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, who wants autocracy without seeming to dirty his hands. Owing to Hungary’s captured press, we don’t know the full back story of how Orbán persuaded owners of 500 media properties to “donate” their assets “voluntarily” to a government-allied foundation in 2018. But it is pretty easy to see why he became the poster boy for MAGA, and for far-right elites who work behind the scenes more broadly.

“It’s like we’re twins,” Trump exclaimed when he hosted Orbán at the White House in 2019. After a few years of Trump, America could indeed resemble Hungary.


PS: According to many commentators, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has transformed herself into more of a moderate, mainstream politician, despite leading a party with fascist roots. What do you say to that?

RBG: I am not among those who see Meloni as a moderate. She is a far-right militant who presents herself as a conservative abroad while staying silent when Mussolini sympathizers salute Il Duce publicly in Italy. Meloni plays a double game. On foreign-policy issues, she takes pro-democratic positions (notably on helping Ukraine) that keep Italy in good standing with its funders at the European Union. That quiets the conservative elites and technocrats at home, giving her a freer hand to pursue an authoritarian agenda domestically.

That agenda includes restricting reproductive and LGBTQ rights (she is for the “natural” family of one man and one woman, and does not support same-sex marriage or adoptions by same-sex couples); revising the constitution to strengthen the executive; and using her position to attempt to shut down critics with lawsuits. For example, she is suing the eminent (81-year-old) classicist Luciano Canfora for calling her a “neo-Nazi at heart” six months before she took office, and her lawyer in this venture is the sitting minister of justice.

PS: Which is more dangerous, a deeply unpopular strongman or a popular one? On the one hand, Netanyahu is so desperate to avoid prosecution that he seems willing to do just about anything to stay in power. On the other hand, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has trampled on civil and human rights, but boasts a sky-high approval rating.

RBG: As I write in Strongmen, the most dangerous authoritarian is the one who can no longer risk removal from power. That is the factor that matters most. Since leaving office usually means meeting a bad end – in the form of prosecution, exile, jail, or worse – a leader in this desperate position will do anything to stay in power.

Netanyahu is indeed a case study. First, he allied with extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir (who was previously convicted on charges of supporting terrorism) to return to power and avoid prosecution. Then, he tried to push through a self-serving “judicial reform” that sparked mass protests in Israel. Now, he wants to expand his war with Hamas. Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet (the internal security service), recently stated outright that Netanyahu would gladly prolong the war to avoid leaving office, since thousands of Israelis continue to protest against him and demand his resignation.

The recent round of purges to the Israeli defense leadership may have been a move to clean house as punishment for intelligence failures before the October 7 attacks. But it bears mentioning that dismissing insiders is also something autocrats do when they feel their power is threatened.


RUTH BEN-GHIAT
Writing for PS since 2019
6 Commentaries
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University, is the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (W.W. Norton & Company, 2020).

A migrant family is undeterred by Biden’s push to restrict asylum

Arelis R. Hernández | The Washington Post


CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico - Ingrid Orasma had spent weeks trekking through Mexico by foot, train and bus with her two young sons. She reached the border Tuesday only to find out the man she calls “Papa Biden” had imposed new restrictions on how many asylum seekers like her are allowed to stay in the United States.

The thought of remaining a day longer in Mexico was unbearable. Along the journey, she said, Mexican authorities had robbed the group of friends her family was traveling with, pulled them off trains and abandoned them in the desert. She feared what getting stuck south of the U.S. border might bring next.

“To Mexican immigration officials, we are animals,” Orasma, 47, said. “It’s been abuse and mistreatment at every step.”

So on Wednesday, as President Biden’s new asylum policy went into effect, the Venezuelan woman and her family headed to the border, hoping immigration officials might still let them in. They waited to board a bus toward the border wall. And they prayed.

Deemed ineligible

The stakes were high: Migrants deemed ineligible for protection will be returned to their home countries or Mexico unless they express a convincing fear of harm that qualifies them for an exemption under tougher screening procedures.

Orasma had a long list of complaints about life in Venezuela. But it was unclear if any of them would be enough to convince an immigration officer that they should get to stay.

“What options do I have?” she asked, caressing her 10-year-old son as they took shelter from the blistering heat under the shade of a tree. Sweat glistened on her forehead. The only thing left to do, she decided, was to try to cross and “leave it to God.”

In Venezuela, their life felt like a steady spiral downward.

There was the government that permitted little dissent. The blackouts that made running any kind of business a losing prospect. The fear that came with expressing a contrarian viewpoint. Her salary as a schoolteacher was hardly sufficient to raise two children on her own.

Friends had made it to the United States. And cousins in New Jersey had offered them a place to stay. Why shouldn’t they leave, too?

Two months ago, they packed their bags and set off on a quest to reach the United States. They traveled first toward Central America and reached Mexico without any major complications. But as soon as they reached the last country on their journey, their troubles began.


There were long nights where the only place they could find or afford to sleep was the floor of a plaza or outside a gas station. During one 20-day stretch, no one offered them a ride and they had no money for a bus, so they walked. Her two children - the eldest of which is 15 - developed painful blisters on their feet.

As the trek to Mexico’s northern border stretched on, her sons had grown steadily skinnier.

They were defenseless

But nothing, she said, shocked her quite as much as the treatment they experienced at the hands of Mexican authorities. The group of friends they made along the way tried to protect one another, but often, they were defenseless. When they managed to get on a train recently, officials found them and forced them off, she said, leaving them in a desert.

The only way they’d managed to find their way out was by following the faint glow of lights from a town on the horizon.

All along, she’d predicted, U.S. immigration officials would let them in. The Biden administration had repeatedly shown generosity toward Venezuelan migrants. A new parole program permitted several thousand to enter the country each month, though they’d need to apply from Venezuela. Still, thousands of others had had success making long trips through Central America and Mexico and surrendering to officials at the border.

She figured her family would be treated the same. But when they finally reached Ciudad Juárez on Tuesday, news began trickling in about Biden’s new policy. U.S. immigration officials would start sending migrants back.

The next day, Orasma and her friends gathered under a tree in the city’s downtown, trying to find news stories and social media posts that might offer them some hint of what to do next. The new policy blocking migrants’ access to the U.S. asylum system when illegal border crossings are at emergency levels had gone into effect, and officials were already starting to enforce it.

Orasma said she tried to make an appointment with an immigration officer through the Biden administration’s CBP One app. But there aren’t enough slots to meet demand.

From her perspective, there was just one option.

‘Open the door’

“We want Papa Biden to open the door,” she said.

Over the last two months, the group of Venezuelans, Mexicans and Hondurans Orasma and her sons were traveling with had built an indestructible bond. They affectionately referred to one another by nicknames. Orasma was known as “Mama.”

Their plan: Take a bus somewhere close to a stretch of the Rio Grande that other migrants had told them was near a border gate where they could easily surrender to officials on U.S. soil.

At this point in their journey, they were running out of money. Bus drivers across northern Mexico were barring immigrants from boarding to avoid trouble with authorities.

They stood at a bus stop and waited.

A driver stopped and opened his door. But when they explained where they were going, he shook his head and drove away. Twenty minutes passed. No one would take them.

“Just the thought of coming back to Mexico,” Marco Morales, 46, a teacher from Venezuela traveling with the group, said. He paused for a moment. “It makes me want to cry.”

Then came a refurbished school bus painted green. The driver stopped and agreed to allow them on for 40 pesos each - a little more than two dollars. They would try to get to “La X,” a giant sculpture in the form of an X near the border wall that migrants use as a landmark to indicate they are close to Gate 36.

Got off at the wrong stop

The bus driver was surprisingly kind, calling the group to board again after they initially got off at the wrong stop.

“If you get off here you’ll have to walk too far,” he said.

“And there’s no police there, right?” Morales asked.

The driver said there was no one there last time he’d checked.

They boarded again, spreading themselves across the bus between Mexicans heading home from work and others dozing off in the 100-degree heat. The children couldn’t help but fall asleep as the bus rolled eastward. Songs from the band Queen blared over the radio.

“Los del 36!” the driver suddenly yelled, snapping them awake. They stood up and grabbed their bags of water bottles and small backpacks, their only remaining belongings. No one knew which direction led to the border but they figured heading north would take them there.

The group navigated their way through traffic-filled highways, dodging angry drivers who honked their horns. They passed giant fenced-in factories for foreign manufacturers. When they reached a carwash, a worker yelled out to them to stop.

Orasma felt her heart stop. The group froze, confused.

The man ran inside a nearby fast-food restaurant, grabbed a bag and handed it to them. There were burritos inside, spicy ones. They hadn’t eaten much at all that day. Orasma’s boys thanked the man with a smile.

When they finally reached the river, a levee blocked their view. A man known as Flaco because of his tall and skinny frame approached. He craned his neck and peered over the top.

“It’s clear!” he yelled, barely audible over the traffic. “Vamanos!”


No troops in sight

They walked, ran and skipped toward the edge of the Rio Grande, no Mexican federal troops in sight. The river had been reduced to a mere creek by the hot weather and drought.

A Texas National Guard Humvee purred across the water alongside a state trooper’s black and white SUV. Rows of razor wire lined the river on the other side. The dry river silt they were leaning against as they hid in the nearby brush was so hot it burned their backs if they stayed still for too long.

Orasma wasn’t sure what to do next. She was a mother with children. Would border agents really turn them back?

Her 15-year-old son took out his phone and shot a video zooming through the tree leaves toward the rust-colored panels of border wall. He uploaded it on WhatsApp to share with friends and family.

At the bottom of the image he captioned it: “Todo con el favor de Dios.”

“May we have God’s blessing.”

Then he took a photograph of himself. He was straight-faced and tired. But he gave a thumbs-up. He typed in two prayer emojis and an image of the United States flag. The border was in sight. They would try.

WWIII
Chinese armed vessels patrol waters around disputed islands, angering Japan

It was the first time that four Chinese vessels carrying what appeared to be cannon entered its territorial waters in the East China Sea.
PHOTO: Reuters

PUBLISHED ONJUNE 07, 2024 


TOKYO — Japan lodged a protest against Beijing on June 7 after four armed Chinese Coast Guard vessels entered waters that Tokyo considers its territory.

The Japanese government said it was the first time that four Chinese vessels carrying what appeared to be cannon entered its territorial waters in the East China Sea surrounding the disputed islands, which Tokyo calls the Senkaku and Beijing calls the Diaoyu.

"I am not in a position to state what the Chinese side's intentions are, but the intrusion of vessels belonging to China's Coast Guard into (our) territory is a breach of international law," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told a press conference.


China's Coast Guard said separately that it had patrolled the waters with vessels carrying weapons.

Tokyo lodged a "strong protest" through diplomatic channels calling for a swift exit from the area, Hayashi said. The four vessels stayed in the area for more than an hour and left shortly after midday, he said.

"The intrusion into our territorial waters is extremely regrettable and cannot be tolerated. We will continue to do our utmost to be vigilant and monitor the areas surrounding the Senkaku Islands with a sense of urgency, while dealing calmly and resolutely with China," Hayashi said.


The two countries have repeatedly faced off around the uninhabited Japanese-administered islands.

China's run-ins with the Philippine navy have also been escalating in disputed areas of the South China Sea.

 

Vietnam decries China’s ‘illegal’ activities in Tonkin Gulf

A spokesperson said a Chinese naval survey ship has been operating without permission in Vietnam’s waters.

By RFA Staff
2024.06.07

The Chinese navy survey vessel Hai Yang 26 in Vietnam’s waters on an unspecified date.

 Vietnam's Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Vietnam has expressed concern and demanded that China end “illegal” survey activities in Vietnam’s waters in the Gulf of Tonkin, a Vietnamese foreign ministry spokeswoman said.

A Chinese navy Type 636A hydrographic survey vessel, the Hai Yang 26, has been operating in Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone and continental shelf, said the spokeswoman, Pham Thu Hang, on Thursday without giving details.

Hang told reporters in Hanoi that the Vietnamese government “has engaged in multiple diplomatic exchanges” with the Chinese to demand the ending of the Hai Yang 26’s “illegal activities.”

Radio Free Asia is not able to verify whether the vessel is still inside Vietnam’s waters as it has not turned on its AIS (automatic identification system) for tracking.

In 2000, Vietnam and China signed an agreement on the demarcation of the Gulf of Tonkin, which is shared by both countries.

An exclusive economic zone gives a coastal country exclusive access to natural resources in the waters and seabed so the Chinese vessel’s activities are deemed unlawful, according to Vietnam’s foreign ministry.

“Vietnam also demands that China not repeat such illegal activities, fully respect Vietnam’s sovereign rights and jurisdiction, respect international law,” the spokeswoman said.

In March, China released a new “excessive” baseline for its claims of sovereignty in the Gulf of Tonkin, known in China as Beibu Gulf. Vietnam responded with a request that China “respect international law and bilateral agreements.”

Edited by Mike Firn.

Sweden’s foremost opera and ballet theater fined $300,000 for 2023 fatal fall of stage technician





This photo shows an exterior view of the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm, Sweden, on April 22, 2024. Sweden’s national theater for opera and ballet, the Stockholm-based Royal Swedish Opera, has been fined 3 million kronor ($300,000) after a stage technician died in 2023, when he fell around 13 meters (more than 40 feet) from a balcony as he was carrying out work inside the building. (Henrik Montgomery/TT News Agency via AP)Read More

This photo shows a view of the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm, Sweden, on April 22, 2024. Sweden’s national theater for opera and ballet, the Stockholm-based Royal Swedish Opera, has been fined 3 million kronor ($300,000) after a stage technician died in 2023, when he fell around 13 meters (more than 40 feet) from a balcony as he was carrying out work inside the building. (Henrik Montgomery/TT News Agency via AP)

 June 7, 2024


COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Sweden’s national theater for opera and ballet, the Stockholm-based Royal Swedish Opera, has been fined 3 million kronor ($300,000) after a stage technician died last year when he fell around 13 meters (more than 40 feet) from a balcony as he was carrying out work inside the building.

The fatal fall had been investigated as “a work environment violation” and Prosecutor Jennie Nordin said the death could have been avoided, Swedish broadcaster SVT reported Friday.

According to SVT, Nordin said that the Royal Swedish Opera “had failed to investigate and assess the risk of the work in question,” and “that the stage worker was allowed to perform the work in question despite the risk of falling over the railing.”

The Royal Opera employee, Petter Sundelin, 57, died after falling on Sept. 21. He was flown in a helicopter to a hospital where he later died from his injuries.

Following the death, which was investigated by police, the Royal Opera decided to cancel all performances and tours of Sweden’s national theater for opera and ballet, founded in 1773. The downtown Stockholm stage offers a mix of performances and classical masterpieces with opera, ballet and activities for children and adolescents.

 

Jewish extremists clash with Palestinians, burn fields in West Bank town

Palestinians throw rocks at troops who arrive on scene to disperse rioters, with 2 injured as soldiers return fire; Hadash-Ta’al MK calls incident ‘another pogrom’

By MICHAEL HOROVITZ 7 June 2024, 

Fires allegedly lit by Jewish extremists burn an agricultural field in the West Bank town of Qusra, June 6, 2024. (Social media/X; used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)

Jewish extremists rioted Thursday night in the West Bank town of Qusra, throwing stones at Palestinian residents and burning property, Hebrew media reported.

The apparent settler “hilltop youth” tried to burn down a house, and successfully burned several agricultural fields in the town, near the city of Nablus, a security source told Army Radio, which referred to the incident as Jewish terrorism. Footage circulating on social media appeared to show the blazes.

Palestinians threw stones at the perpetrators and at Israeli troops who arrived at the scene to disperse the crowd, Army Radio reported.

Soldiers returned fire, injuring two Palestinians, according to the report.

The Israel Defense Forces have not commented on the incident.

Hadash-Ta’al MK Ofer Cassif called the incident “another pogrom in a long chain of crimes by scumbags from the hills and their allies,” and blasted the army and police for not assisting the town’s residents.

Settler violence in the West Bank was already at a more than 15-year high in 2023 and surged further after the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7. Several countries, including the United States, have recently issued sanctions against those accused of violent attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.

At least 520 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers across the West Bank, Palestinian authorities say, since Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel, most in violent clashes with Israeli troops, but a few were shot dead by settlers during altercations.

Since October 7, troops have arrested some 4,150 wanted Palestinians across the West Bank, including more than 1,750 affiliated with Hamas.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.

Ultra-cheap meals from China’s delivery giant are hugely popular. Drivers are bearing the costs

Meituan’s group order program boomed amid China’s post-Covid-19 thrift economy, but delivery drivers say they’re working longer for less pay.

Ruwangi Amarasinghe for Rest of World

By VIOLA ZHOU
7 JUNE 2024

China’s food delivery giant, Meituan, is attracting lower-income consumers by offering discounted meals if multiple people order from the same restaurant.
The program is part of the country’s post-Covid-19 thrift economy, as consumers seek discounted goods amid economic uncertainties.
Gig riders say they are working more for less pay while delivering batched orders.

On a rainy day in November, food delivery worker KX Wu loaded 16 packages of rice bowls, noodles, and bubble tea onto his scooter, balancing some items on the handles, and began going door-to-door in a dense neighborhood in the southern Chinese city of Nanning. Some customers lived in high-rises with elevators, and others in walk-ups. As time went on, Wu grew worried that the customers would complain because the noodles were already cold.

He spent more than an hour delivering to nine different locations. For those deliveries, Wu earned just about 30 yuan ($4.15).

To many customers, however, the risk of cold noodles is worth the money saved on “group” orders from China’s leading on-demand delivery company, Meituan. Under the Pinhaofan program (which means “grouping for good meals”), Meituan users place group orders by sharing links with people who live nearby, and enjoy a big discount if two to four people end up ordering the same things together. The goal is to make delivery so cheap that even frugal or low-income buyers could afford frequent orders. “Eat well for 9.9 yuan ($1.4) and no delivery fee,” the program’s tagline reads.

Meituan is offering ultra-cheap meals under its group delivery program, including noodle bowls, dumplings and peking duck, priced at as low as 52 cents each. Meituan

But the program is a headache for delivery workers. They usually need to travel to multiple locations to deliver one group order, and the pay is often not worth it, five current and former workers told Rest of World. By adding to delivery riders’ workload, Meituan is able to offer steep discounts and attract new users in the low-income population, experts said. Workers’ grievances have led to an increase in customer complaints and arguments erupting between drivers and customers.

First introduced in one city in 2020, Meituan has gradually rolled out Pinhaofan across China, hitting almost 5 million orders per day in 2024, according to Chinese business news outlet LatePost.

Its success is another sign of China’s post-Covid-19 thrift economy, as consumers seek discounted goods to counteract the impact of economic uncertainties. On Pinhaofan, users often get meals for under $3 if they join group orders. “They are pretty tasty and very cheap,” Fandara Cao, a 21-year-old engineering major in Ganzhou, Jiangxi province, told Rest of World. Cao has been ordering dinner on Meituan almost every day since she discovered the app’s group-order feature. Her go-to options include a 10.4-yuan ($1.44) wrap-and-congee set and a 7-yuan (97 cents) bubble tea.

Meituan customers spent an average of 48.2 yuan ($6.7) per order in 2021, the last time the company disclosed the data. As the dominant delivery platform, Meituan needs to offer something cheaper if it wants to grow its user base, especially in the lower-income populations, Li Chengdong, head of Chinese tech think tank Haitun, told Rest of World. Having users from the same area order as a group allows each person to save on delivery costs, he said. The rider Wu, for example, was paid 1.8 to 2.5 yuan (25 to 35 cents) for delivering each Pinhaofan meal in late 2023, compared with 5 yuan (69 cents) for a regular order.

Alibaba’s Ele.me, China’s second-biggest delivery platform, has launched a similar group-ordering feature. But Li said it would be hard for Ele.me to compete, given its smaller user base.

Meituan did not respond to a Rest of World request for comment.

Millions of people work for Meituan. Chinese food delivery apps’ evolving algorithms that squeeze workers’ income while making deliveries faster have come under public criticism over the past few years. To earn the highest possible income, workers have to take as many orders as possible, meet all individual deadlines plus earn positive customer reviews.

Riders said they occasionally make good money from Pinhaofan: If people from the same school or office join a group order, workers deliver only to one location. But in many cases, they are picking up from one restaurant and delivering to customers living in different buildings. On social media and in Chinese media reports, riders have spoken of long elevator wait times and sprawling apartment complexes as reasons why they struggle to deliver orders on time.

“The rate was too low,” a 27-year-old former delivery rider from Sichuan province, who requested anonymity for privacy reasons, told Rest of World. “I could accept it if I didn’t have to climb up buildings. The walk-ups were brutal.” The single mother spent three months delivering Pinhaofan orders before quitting.


“It’s a way that the platform as a technological system takes the autonomy away from the workers.”

In 2021, Chinese regulators ordered delivery and ride-hailing platforms to compensate workers fairly. But a subsequent slowdown in economic growth and high youth unemployment have sent a steady supply of young workers to the gig economy, giving platforms little incentive to raise wages, according to Julie Yujie Chen, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto who has studied China’s food delivery industry.

Disputes have erupted between disgruntled delivery workers and price-sensitive consumers. On social network Xiaohongshu and consumer complaint platform Black Cat, Pinhaofan users have complained about delivery workers displaying sour attitudes, arriving too slowly, or refusing to deliver food to their doors. Unlike regular orders, Pinhaofan does not set deadlines for riders and this often leads to longer waiting times.

A Xiaohongshu user posted a chat record showing a delivery rider calling them a “Pin dog” after the user requested the food be brought up to their apartment rather than handed over by the elevator, as the rider intended. A food stall owner in the southern city of Guangzhou told Rest of World that Pinhaofan had brought more business to her small noodle shop, but the “poor attitude” of riders had led to an increase in negative reviews for the shop as well as refund requests.

Chen said that in the past, Chinese delivery workers could choose to take on multiple orders if they found the payment, route, and deadlines acceptable — similar to how batched orders work on Uber Eats and DoorDash. But with the group-order feature, customers and the platform decide which orders should be delivered together. “It’s a way that the platform as a technological system takes the autonomy away from the workers,” Chen said. “[Customers] wouldn’t really think about the decrease in [pay] that would affect workers and, in turn, affect their customer experiences.”

While many delivery workers resent Pinhaofan, Wu said, they order the cheap meals themselves. Wu, who quit his Meituan gig in April, said he understands if the food takes a long time to arrive.

“We have worked as riders,” Wu said. “So we know how hard it is to deliver Pinhaofan.”

Viola Zhou is a Rest of World reporter based in New York City.

 

The Postwar Revival of British Fascism

Attacks by Zionist paramilitaries in Mandatory Palestine in 1946-7 provided an opening for a campaign of antisemitism

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James A.S. SunderlandJames A.S. Sunderland is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford, where his work focuses on the final years of the British Mandate in Palestine

May 31, 2024

The former leader of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley, addresses a crowd in London in 1948. (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

In a cramped and poor suburb of east London, a crowd of over 1,000 people gathered to hear a fascist orator declaim his views, including the usual antisemitic invective. On the fringes, a group of Jews and communists were waiting for the perfect moment to leap into action and disrupt the open-air meeting, hiding crude weapons such as coshes and even tightly rolled-up newspapers to deliver a drubbing to the fascists in the crowd. Here and there, members of the Metropolitan Police kept an eye on proceedings. Some of them, though by no means a majority, were even sympathetic to the message the fascists were spreading. The scene was reminiscent of many meetings of the 1930s, when fascist clashes with Jewish, socialist, trade unionist, communist and other opponents were common in London.

But this was not the 1930s. It was August 1947. Adolf Hitler had been dead for two years, the horrors of the Holocaust were slowly being recognized, and years of wartime propaganda, hardship and loss meant that to nearly every British person, fascism was a hated ideology that had darkened their lives, bombed their homes and killed friends and loved ones.

After years of war against a fascist enemy in Europe which had affected every man, woman and child in the country, why were crowds willing to gather en masse in east London to listen to what fascists had to say? The answer is tied to events over 2,000 miles away in the British Mandate for Palestine. As violence rages today in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, we are once again seeing war in the Middle East polarizing communities and contributing to dangerous discourse. The events of 1946-1947 in Britain provide an earlier example of how public concerns about distant conflicts can fuel social divisions at home, and be weaponized by groups seeking to push their own divisive and hateful agendas.

Under British rule since 1917, by the 1940s Palestine had become a liability, with frequent clashes between Zionist Jews, now arriving in large numbers, Palestinian Arabs and British forces. By 1944, the main sources of violence were two small but very active Jewish militant groups, the Irgun and Lehi, who sought to evict the British from Palestine by force and declare a Jewish state. These organizations wrought havoc across Palestine, targeting British personnel in the country and blowing up railway lines, communications infrastructure and buildings. Most famously, the Irgun blew up the southern wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946, killing 91 people. The Lehi, meanwhile, even threatened to bring carnage to Britain by sending (ultimately defective) letter bombs to important political figures living in London.

After the trials and tribulations of years of war, amid the efforts to rebuild a devastated country, the grim news coming out of Palestine was hardly welcome. Britain, a victorious power, had suffered enough: The fact that British Tommies were dying in a country thousands of miles away, where Britain seemed to have no real interests, was too much for many people to stomach. Yet it was impossible to avoid. Nearly every day, news stories would appear in all the major newspapers about the latest shooting, bombing or atrocity. Radio bulletins and newsreels shown before films also graphically depicted the chaos unfolding in Palestine.

It certainly didn’t help that few people understood what these Jewish paramilitary groups wanted and why they were willing to use violence to achieve their aims. Many people hadn’t even heard of Zionism. Mass Observation, a social research project that probed the opinions of the U.K. populace on a wide array of issues, found in 1947 that 1 in 3 people had either never heard of the term “Zionism” or had the wrong idea as to what it meant. Incorrect guesses show a not insignificant number of people thought it was related to Christian Science, the British Israelites or even the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Among those who had heard of the term, there was still only a vague understanding of what the movement was, with answers varying from the crass (“Yes — lot of Jew boys”) to the muddled (“A sort of Mecca for Jews. On a par with Pakistan, something of a pipe dream”). Even more disturbingly, many people did not differentiate between Jewish militants in Palestine and British Jewry, often tying them together. According to Mass Observation, 1 in 5 people believed that British Jews supported the actions of the Irgun and Lehi.

Without a clear understanding of the two groups’ aims, and greeted with near-daily reports of casualties and violence in Palestine, many people became increasingly angry — and hateful. Mass Observation estimated, from polling in 1946 and 1947, that nearly half of the population held views that were to some extent antisemitic. Respondents gave numerous different reasons for their dislike of Jews, including ancient tropes, from their appearance to their supposed behind-the-scenes control of power. The latter conspiracy was so ubiquitous that the document’s author noted that “from different reports, one would gather that London, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Brighton, and indeed all large towns, are mainly run by Jews.” Yet a new factor affecting people’s feelings was also cropping up in reports — the violence in Palestine.

This violence was the subject of a considerable amount of public discussion, casual conversation and private thought in the immediate postwar period, as contemporary diaries show. A young typist in Cheshire noted that after a bombing at a Jerusalem railway station the previous day, conversation in her office turned to Palestine, recording several particularly angry remarks. One of her colleagues went so far as to suggest that for every British subject murdered in Palestine, 10 Jews should be shot, concluding her argument with the phrase, “Hitler knew what he was doing.” Another young woman, Maggie Joy Blunt, recorded how the conversation during her lunch break became lively when someone mentioned the problem of Palestine, degenerating into antisemitic comments. Meanwhile, Mr. B. Charles, an antiques dealer in Edinburgh, offered his solution to the Palestine issue in his diary: “We should drop six atomic bombs on six cities in Palestine and wipe out as many Jews as possible.” Ironically, in the next paragraph he noted that he was reading Emery Reves’ “The Anatomy of Peace.”

British fascists looked on with glee. Their main vehicle for spreading fascist ideas in this period was the British League of Ex-Servicemen and Women. The group was led by Jeffrey Hamm, who had himself sat out much of the war after being detained under Defense Regulation 18b, which aimed to keep potential traitors and fifth columnists behind bars. Hamm had been a disciple of the aristocrat, former Labour member of Parliament and fascist demagogue Oswald Mosley before the war. As leader of the British Union of Fascists from 1932, Mosley spent the entirety of the war imprisoned and then under house arrest. Since Mosley’s activities and involvement in politics after 1945 were closely monitored, he gave his blessing to Hamm to prepare the ground for his eventual comeback by spreading the fascist message using the league as his vehicle.

Palestine thus offered Hamm an excellent opportunity. Here was a chance to relaunch the movement. Events in Palestine gave fascists’ antisemitic tirades direction, and these words now resonated with increasing numbers of the British public. Many of those in the crowd who gathered to hear Hamm speak in this period would not have identified themselves as fascists, but they were nevertheless supportive of what he had to say, much of it explicitly antisemitic in nature. If he had not been able to capitalize so successfully on the issue of Palestine, it is likely that Hamm would have emigrated from Britain, returning to the Falklands where, before the war, he had been teaching. Militant attacks in Palestine kept him active, gave his antisemitism an “acceptable” gloss and allowed him to whip up hatred. Indeed, the League often claimed that their outdoor meetings were not strictly fascist gatherings, but “were designed as protests against terrorism in Palestine.”

Given the rising antisemitism and widespread ignorance about Zionism, fascists were easily able to conflate Zionist paramilitary attacks with Judaism in their speeches, meaning British Jews came to be seen as complicit in violence in Palestine. Bertrand Duke Pile, a key member of Hamm’s League, informed a cheering crowd that “the Jews have no right to Palestine and the Jews have no right to the power which they hold in this country of ours.” Denouncing Zionism as a way to introduce a wider domestic antisemitic stance was common to many speakers at fascist events and rallies. Fascists hid their ideology and ideological antisemitism behind the rhetorical facade of preaching against paramilitary violence in Palestine. One of the league’s speakers called for retribution against “the Jews” for the death of British soldiers in Palestine. This was, he told his audience, hardly an antisemitic expression. “Is it antisemitism to denounce the murderers of your own flesh and blood in Palestine?” he asked his audience. Many audience members, fascist or not, may well have felt the speaker had a point.

On July 30, 1947, the bodies of two British soldiers, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, were found hanging in a eucalyptus grove in Netanya, Palestine. They had been kidnapped over two weeks earlier by the Irgun and despite frantic efforts being made to find them by British forces and the Haganah — the mainstream Jewish paramilitary group and the proto-army of the nascent Jewish state — they had remained hidden away. Their killing was a retaliation by the Irgun for the British execution of several of their own members who had been involved in attacks. More gruesomely, the ground under Martin and Paice was booby-trapped with a mine so that when the bodies were cut down further chaos unfolded.

On Aug. 1, The Daily Express published a picture of the two bodies hanging limply from a eucalyptus tree on their front page under the headline, “HANGED BRITONS: Picture that will shock the world.” The image was captured by Jim Pringle, an Irish-born photographer from The Associated Press. He had been part of a group of photographers who had been accompanying a search party looking for the bodies of the two sergeants when they came across the grisly spectacle. The police, clearly panicked, commandeered the group’s cameras to avoid any horrific images reaching the press, but after angry protests from the photographers, the administration agreed to return the cameras and to develop the film they had shot, removing any particularly gruesome pictures before returning the developed photos to their rightful owners. Pringle’s photographs turned out to be completely unexposed. He had switched his film at the last minute before his camera had been confiscated and the exposed film was already on its way to London. Pringle received an official reprimand from the mandate authorities. His employers, on the other hand, gave him a bonus.

Pringle’s photo promptly made numerous appearances at fascist meetings, often attached to the speaker’s platform. In at least one meeting, several British soldiers on leave from serving in Palestine attended Hamm’s speech, giving further legitimacy to his remarks. And with soldiers and policemen in Palestine showing increasing signs of overt antisemitism as a result of their experiences, the director of public prosecutions warned that the fascists might receive a steady stream of new recruits. MI5, the U.K. domestic security service, noted with some alarm that “as a general rule, the crowd is now sympathetic and even spontaneously enthusiastic.” Opposition, it was noted in the same Home Office Bulletin of 1947, “is only met when there is an organized group of Jews or Communists in the audience.”

The major opposition came from the 43 Group, formed by the British-Jewish ex-paratrooper Gerry Flamberg and his friends in September 1946 to fight the fascists using the only language they felt fascists understood — violence. The group disrupted fascist meetings for two purposes: to get them shut down by the police for disorder, and to discourage attendance in the future by doling out beatings with fists and blunt instruments. By the summer of 1947, the group had around 500 active members who took part in such activities. Among these was a young hairdresser by the name of Vidal Sassoon, who would often turn up armed with his hairdressing scissors.

The 43 Group had considerable success with these actions, but public anger was spreading faster than they could counter the hate that accompanied it. The deaths of Martin and Paice had touched a nerve with the populace. On Aug. 1, 1947, the beginning of the bank holiday weekend and two days after the deaths of the sergeants, anti-Jewish rioting began in Liverpool. The violence lasted for five days. Across the country, the scene was repeated: London, Manchester, Hull, Brighton and Glasgow all saw widespread violence. Isolated instances were also recorded in Plymouth, Birmingham, Cardiff, Swansea, Newcastle and Davenport. Elsewhere, antisemitic graffiti and threatening phone calls to Jewish places of worship stood in for physical violence. Jewish-owned shops had their windows smashed, Jewish homes were targeted, an attempt was made to burn down Liverpool Crown Street Synagogue while a wooden synagogue in Glasgow was set alight. In a handful of cases, individuals were personally intimidated or assaulted. A Jewish man was threatened with a pistol in Northampton and an empty mine was placed in a Jewish-owned tailor shop in Davenport.

As violence spilled into the streets, British fascists looked on with glee, occasionally taking an active part in the riots, but overall their involvement was negligible — most of the rioters were not in any way active in fascist movements. Indeed, at a league speech shortly after the riots, the fascist activist Harold Robinson stated that the unrest was “very comforting to me because it means we have far more supporters than we thought.”

However, British fascists soon learned that antisemitic violence in an area did not mean they had support in that locale. When Hamm and Pile — the league’s self-proclaimed “expert on Palestine” — traveled up to Liverpool to help the local fascist leader Joseph Morrissey, they had high hopes. Liverpool had seen some of the worst rioting and the leadership of the league naturally assumed that the city would be sympathetic to their message. Yet when Hamm arranged a meeting and began to speak, he was attacked, and the rostrum he had been talking from was smashed by his audience. In the brawl, Pile found himself knocked down while an old lady stood over him, beating him with part of the splintered rostrum. Hamm decided the trip was not likely to be successful and immediately scarpered back to London. Yet fascist rhetoric certainly helped foment the conditions that allowed for the riots, even if their ideology was rejected by much of the population.

In November 1947, Mosley launched the Union Movement party in an attempt to turn the anti-Jewish sentiment Hamm had been able to mine into political success. By the end of 1947, the British government had made the decision to abandon the Mandate for Palestine and hand the matter to the newly formed United Nations. By May 1948, the last British soldiers and personnel were leaving the country for good. British fascists had lost one of their favorite talking points, and soon the crowds began to dwindle. The 1949 municipal elections led to an electoral drubbing for Mosley’s new party. Its eight candidates polled only 1,993 out of a total of 4,097,841 votes.

By March 1949, British fascists were considered to be so little risk to national security that MI5 ceased its monitoring of them. They quickly descended into infighting, and schisms soon developed. In 1951, Mosley left Britain for Ireland, where he focused (unsuccessfully) on spreading his new pan-European fascist ideology. Hamm followed him, eventually becoming Mosley’s secretary — a role in which he served for 25 years. The end of British rule in Palestine had spelled the end of the British fascist revival — never again would Mosley or his adherents be able to exert such influence on British society or receive such support for their speeches. While they had held the public’s attention, they had nurtured and fed British anger at events in Palestine and fueled a rise in antisemitism. Yet while Hamm and the League had instrumentalized hate, they had been unable to win the public over to their ideology. In an age of division, partisanship and the reemergence of chauvinistic populist politics, this ultimate failure to mobilize hatred offers a ray of light.

How Exiles in Argentina Shaped France’s Resistance to Nazi Occupation

During WWII, a Latin American network fought to liberate their homeland from afar, with Buenos Aires — the Paris of South America — at the heart of a transnational movement

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Diane de VignemontDiane de Vignemont is a historian-turned-journalist based in Paris

Phineas RueckertPhineas Rueckert is an investigative journalist based in Paris

June 7, 2024

Illustration by Joanna Andreasson for New Lines Magazine

Summer 1940. A young boy reads in his parents’ living room as a portrait of the French Gen. Charles de Gaulle watches over him from the mantelpiece. The house is not in Paris or Nice, but Alta Gracia, Argentina. And the young boy’s name is Ernesto Guevara.

Sixteen years later, Guevara would lead Cuba’s armed communist revolution. But at the time, “El Che” was a schoolboy in a small town in Argentina.

Guevara’s political consciousness came from his mother, Celia de la Serna. In the late 1930s — already married and with four children — de la Serna joined various anti-fascist groups and began to engage in left-wing activism. When war broke out in Europe, she helped resettle Spanish Republican refugees in Argentina. Then, when Hitler marched west in summer 1940, she turned her sights to France.

De la Serna must have listened to, or at least been aware of, de Gaulle’s June 18, 1940, speech on the BBC, in which he condemned the French armistice signed with the Nazis and called on the army to keep fighting. Around the world, French expatriates and Francophiles tuned in to this broadcast. The most active of them began to form external resistance committees. The constellation of these networks made up Free France, a state in exile that claimed to be the true incarnation of the fallen Republic, with de Gaulle at its helm.

In Cordoba, near Alta Gracia, de la Serna co-founded the local Free French chapter. Roughly 300 committee members met weekly to recap the latest news from the front and gather funds for the liberation of Paris by selling hand-bound French recipe books. They were not alone. Of the 400 Free French committees founded around the world, 300 of them were in Latin America, and more than 40 in Argentina. Committees sprouted up in Mendoza, Posadas and as far away as Tucuman, near the Bolivian border.

From June 1940, Buenos Aires became the beating heart of the French resistance-in-exile. In this cosmopolitan port city, French expats and Argentinians alike drummed up resistance to — and raised money to counter — France’s collaborationist regime headquartered in the spa town of Vichy. Around 400 recruits left the port of Buenos Aires on boats headed for England, where they would put their lives on the line to free a country most of them had never seen. At home, volunteer civilians published newspapers, hosted radio shows, sold pins and badges and held high-society galas to support Free France. These Argentinians — who had strong historical and cultural ties to France — may have also seen in the French civil resistance echoes of their own situation: emerging fascist sentiment that would eventually boil over into a military coup.

The story, then, of how de Gaulle’s portrait ended up on the mantle of Guevara’s family home is also the story of how French expatriates and exiles and their Argentinian allies resisted fascism at home and abroad — and it begins with one mustachioed Frenchman.

Little in Albert Guerin’s past made him a likely candidate for resistance leader. Wounded in World War I, the Avignon-born Guerin was a disabled business owner who dealt in perfume rather than politics. He had moved from France to Buenos Aires after the war and, by 1940, had lived half his life outside his home country.

Still, when de Gaulle made his June 18 speech, the 47-year-old Guerin, head of the WWI veterans association in Buenos Aires, was one of the first people to answer his call.

A week after de Gaulle’s BBC radio address, a telegram arrived at the Foreign Office in London, where de Gaulle was attempting to establish his Free French government-in-exile. It came from Argentina and read: “Former French combatants united [in] Buenos Aires have set up [a] French National Committee approving your initiative [to] continue resisting until victory and await your orders.”

Several weeks later, de Gaulle wrote back to Guerin: “I congratulate you, confirm your appointment as Buenos Aires French group representative, and invite you to form a French action group and keep me informed of the situation.”

Guerin called his group of resistors-in-exile the “de Gaulle Committee.” And with the approval of the general himself, he got straight to work.

From a Hausmannian building on the aptly named Libertad Street in central Buenos Aires, Guerin founded and bankrolled a free, monthly bulletin called Pour la France Libre that would serve as the Free French mouthpiece in Latin America.

Readers of the bulletin admired Guerin’s daring and sharp tongue. “One finds his reward in reading your articles that are of an admirable verve and flame,” the New York-based art historian and Free French commentator Henri Focillon wrote to Guerin in August 1941. De Gaulle, too, wrote to Guerin to encourage him: “The Argentinian de Gaulle Committee, by its efficient action, is at the forefront of all of the committees formed around the world.”

The first issue of Pour la France Libre featured a red, white and blue cover and an image of Francois Rude’s sculpture “La Marseillaise.” The following bulletins were littered with crosses of Lorraine, the symbol of Free France, designed to counter the Nazi swastika. He paired it with the Latin words “In hoc signo vinces,” meaning, “In this sign thou shalt conquer.” Guerin, as it turned out, was not only a sharp writer but also a visionary propagandist.

Guerin was very much a “precursor” to the broader movement of resistance-in-exile, Vladimir Trouplin, a historian and head curator at Paris’ Museum of the Order of the Liberation, told New Lines. Flipping through archives, he explained that Guerin was both “the first to join and one of the most active members of the resistance-in-exile” and that his grassroots efforts in Argentina were key in making Free France a government in its own right.

Trouplin’s office is decorated with a large poster of the two-barred Cross of Lorraine, alongside the motto “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite” and the tricolor flag of Republican France. Guerin, he explained, could use these three symbols at a time when de Gaulle himself wasn’t able to. London, where de Gaulle had set up the Free French headquarters, had broken diplomatic relations with Vichy in July 1940, though the two countries were never officially at war. As a result, criticism of the Vichy regime and its 84-year-old leader, Marshal Philippe Petain, was expressly forbidden, including in broadcasts by the government-funded BBC.

The BBC’s censorship did not apply to Argentina, though, and Guerin could afford to be as virulently anti-Vichy as he wished. “Could we accept this forfeiture, this degeneration inflicted upon France by this handful of traitors?” he wrote in fall 1940. “No, a thousand times no!” he responded. In early 1941, on Argentinian public radio, he declared: “To obey Petain is to obey Hitler. It’s as simple as that.”

Bruno Leroux, a historian and author of several books on the French Resistance, told New Lines that Guerin, unlike most of his contemporaries, was “not just against Vichy, but against Petain himself.” By August 1940, Guerin was already calling Petain a “dictator.”

It’s obvious from Guerin’s editorials that he had read not only “Mein Kampf” but also de Gaulle’s and Petain’s respective books and was fluent in their ideology and rhetoric. This, according to Leroux, made his own writing all the more convincing: “When Guerin — a war veteran himself — wrote that Petain had been a horrible general in WWI and should not be trusted to save France from the Nazis, people paid attention.”

Guerin’s propaganda led to his being condemned to 15 years in prison and stripped of his French nationality in absentia. In October 1941, a few months after Vichy effectively rendered him stateless, de Gaulle granted Guerin wartime France’s highest honor: the Cross of the Liberation, a medal bestowed upon only about 100 civilians. De Gaulle had rewarded him not as a soldier but as “Free France’s first propagandist,” Trouplin explained.

That Guerin built his propaganda machine 7,000 miles away from France, in an office in central Buenos Aires, was not as surprising as it may seem: Argentina has a long history of Francophilia.

Miranda Lida, a historian and professor at the University of San Andres in Buenos Aires, explained that from 1857 to 1940, Argentina received some 200,000 French immigrants — of whom more than half permanently settled in the country. A popular saying at the time went: “Argentina was built by Italian brawn, English capital and French thought.”

“In the prewar years, French culture was very important,” Lida told New Lines. “People read in French. They were up to date on all of the debates on the French left.” When the French socialist leader Jean Jaures was assassinated in 1914, she explained, “Argentinian newspapers commented on it, and some reacted with outrage.” Argentinians had first heard about the Russian Revolution through the effect it had in Paris, she added.

Buenos Aires in the early 20th century was like a modern Babel. The French community regularly came into contact not only with Spanish and Italian immigrants but also Germans, who published their own Spanish-language newspaper, El Pampero.

Despite the German presence, in May and June 1940, as the Nazis marched across France, Argentinian students backed France. They took to the streets singing “La Marseillaise.”

“South American elites are so traditionally attached to our culture,” wrote the French cultural attache Henri Seyrig in 1941, that the fall of France had felt “as though their entire spiritual universe was collapsing.” For the people of Latin America, Vichy signified “the annihilation of the social gains of the French Revolution” — in the name of which their own countries had been constituted as independent states.

This made supporting the war effort second nature to many in the “Paris of South America.” Argentines felt that if France fell, so too could their relatively new republic.

The fact that de Gaulle took a special interest in Latin America may have also spurred them on. On April 19, 1943, he gave one of only two wartime speeches directed to non-French listeners (the other being Canadians). “No other part of the world has shown suffering and fighting France a more ardent sympathy than Latin America,” he said. “Your souls and ours drink from the same sources of inspiration.”

By early 1943, Guerin had gathered some 4,000 dues-paying members across the country. His Buenos Aires committee was more than just a political entity: It was a hub of cultural preservation, hosting art shows, lectures and concerts that showcased prewar France to fund the fight for a postwar order.

The committee linked up with Accion Argentina — one of the anti-fascist groups Guevara’s mother, Celia de la Serna, had joined — and began to cross-syndicate content aimed at drumming up support for de Gaulle’s liberation army. At a time when fascist ideas were also beginning to take hold in Argentina, “the de Gaulle committees are an act of faith in France,” they wrote in a joint editorial, “which is in itself an act of faith in democracy.”

Latin American and Free French anti-fascist intellectuals frequented the same salons and republished one another’s work in their newspapers and magazines. In Lida’s book-filled Buenos Aires apartment, she kept dozens of copies of the magazine Sur, edited by the Argentinian editor Victoria Ocampo — a Francophile and close confidant of Guerin’s.

During the war, Ocampo was particularly active in supporting the Free French. In 1940, her publishing house translated and released de Gaulle’s 1934 missive, “The Army of the Future,” which had called on the French army to modernize in the face of the fascist threat. As the war went on, she joined forces with Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and French intellectual Roger Caillois in publishing a number of manifestos calling on Latin American governments to cut ties with Vichy and recognize the Free French.

From Argentina, Guerin also began to coordinate the broader Latin American resistance effort, reaching out to various Free French committees by letter and telegram.

Across the region, contemporaries had responded to de Gaulle’s call to arms. By June 22, 1940, committees had popped up in Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and Cuba — the latter would become the first country to recognize Free France as a government in its own right, in 1942. These committees gathered hundreds and sometimes thousands of members in many capital cities and smaller towns.

Guerin’s strongly worded and increasingly international bulletin (boasting roughly 150,000 readers across Latin America by late 1941), his financial heft and his close connection to de Gaulle made him a natural leader of this regional movement.

World-famous French writers often sent Guerin articles and editorials from their forced exile. Eve Curie, daughter of the scientists Pierre and Marie, mailed in an excerpt of “Journey Among Warriors,” her Pulitzer-nominated reportage on the war fronts of Africa, East Asia and the Soviet Union. Out of Brazil, author Georges Bernanos published several pieces urging his compatriots not to give up the fight. Jacques Maritain, Philippe Barres, Genevieve Tabouis and countless others also contributed from New York.

Guerin’s bulletins were translated into Spanish under the name Por la Francia Libre and widely distributed across the region. According to Leroux, roughly three-quarters of its readers were Spanish-speaking.

In January, Guerin transitioned the monthly bulletin into a bilingual weekly newspaper called La France Nouvelle. Subtitled “The Great Weekly of Latin America,” the operation was truly a transnational affair. Tono Salazar, a Salvadoran diplomat and artist, joined the newspaper as a caricaturist. Pedro Olmos Munoz penned monthly illustrations from Valparaiso, Chile. New York’s own Free French weekly, France-Amerique, sent in regular editorials from its director, Henri Torres.

The movement created by Guerin’s call was so compelling that some decided to embark on the long boat ride to Europe to join the fight, including 15-year-old Benjamin Josset. On June 15, 1940, Josset was on his way home from school when he saw the front page of the newspaper, La Gaceta. “The German Army has occupied Paris,” it read.

Josset must have felt devastated. “My professors had always told me that Paris had given culture and liberty to the rest of the world,” he said in an interview years later.

Josset, whose parents had emigrated from the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Syria) to Tucuman, a city in the Argentinian high plains, read about the newly formed de Gaulle committee. In October, he made the 745-mile journey to the committee’s office on Libertad Street in Buenos Aires to enlist — and in typical teenage fashion, he took off without telling his parents. “I’m leaving to liberate France,” he later wrote to them in a letter.

Other volunteers came from even farther away.

In April 1941, a 20-year-old Chilean of French Basque ancestry, Margot Duhalde, joined a group of a dozen Chileans traveling from Santiago to Buenos Aires to enlist. Duhalde sailed to London, where she went on to become the first and only woman to join the Free French air force and was later honored with France’s Legion of Honor. She was nicknamed “Chile.”

Across the muddy Rio de la Plata, the river separating Buenos Aires from neighboring Uruguay, Domingo Lopez Delgado also chose combatant exile. Delgado, 21, enlisted at the Montevideo Free French chapter in 1941. He boarded the Northumberland, a frigate designed for anti-submarine warfare, to London, where he was trained by the Royal Air Force. His combat missions took him to Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, as well as northern Italy and France.

“I went to war dragged by my love for France, mother of civilization,” Delgado, who had never been to France before the war, declared. “And I went to war to be able to shout loudly that I have defended with my arms the ideals of democracy and that I have the right to be a free man!”

Today, a monument to the Free French still stands in Rocha, the town in Uruguay where Delgado was born. The giant Cross of Lorraine is dedicated to “Charles de Gaulle, citizen of the world.”

Others fought for France without leaving Latin America.

Latin Americans, themselves recent victims of settler colonialism, had taken the occupation of France particularly hard. In defense of France, Peruvian writer (and future prime minister) Luis Alberto Sanchez compared the subjugation of Paris to that of the Aztec Empire under Hernan Cortes or the Inca Empire after Pizarro’s conquest.

The Guatemalan poet Miguel Angel Asturias, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in literature, was deeply devoted to France and to de Gaulle, who, like him, categorically refused to see the country fall. “On the coasts of Central America,” he wrote, “facing the furious waves of the Pacific, while we were fishing for sharks, a portable radio had transmitted to us the words of the one who, because of something that touched us deeply, we already called ‘our General.’”

In a warehouse in downtown Buenos Aires, the Free French Feminine Union, founded in April 1941, collected fabric donations from around the continent, which they sewed into clothing and uniforms. This “hive of women animated by patriotic faith,” as Guerin’s paper called them, donated no fewer than 26,000 items to Free French soldiers in Africa and the Middle East.

Women at the Feminine Union opened a shop, La Petite Boutique. The shop’s earnings were sent to London to help run the Free French orphanage in Beaconsfield, northwest of London. Young female volunteers dressed in typical Alsatian garb sold rings, pins, bracelets and handkerchiefs on Libertad Street.

According to the committee’s archives, their most popular items were the ones emblazoned with the tricolor flag of France, forbidden by Vichy and dear to so many Argentinians.

On the home front, Argentinians were also fighting their own battles — not unlike the ones at play on the other side of the Atlantic.

Already virulent in its attacks against the Vichy regime in France, La France Nouvelle began to lambast the Argentinian state for its complicity in the Nazi takeover of Europe. Despite pressure from the United States, Argentina refused to break relations with the Axis powers until January 1944.

Throughout the war, Argentinian society was split into two factions, pro-Allies (“aliadofilos”) and pro-neutral (“neutralistas”). When it became clear that a soon-to-be new president would declare war on the Axis, the armed forces, who favored the neutralistas, staged a military takeover. The June 1943 coup greatly destabilized the French resistance-in-exile and the burgeoning anti-fascist movements in Argentina.

From June onward, the junta under Gen. Pedro Pablo Ramirez began cracking down on press freedom and banning groups like Accion Argentina. The next year, La France Nouvelle was banned from distribution in Argentina. Guerin was unfazed. He moved publishing operations to neighboring Uruguay and sneaked in the paper across the Rio de la Plata on commuter boats. “Only victory will stop us,” he wrote.

Guerin had reason to be hopeful. By June 1943, the tide of the war was beginning to shift in favor of the Allies. France was still under occupation, but on the Eastern front, Soviet forces had just won a major battle at Stalingrad and Allied soldiers — including roughly 70,000 to 130,000 Free French — were preparing to launch their invasion into Italy. A year later, on June 6, 1944, the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy.

“After having set foot on French soil,” Uruguayan volunteer Delgado wrote in his memoir, “we could have the consolation that if fate had marked us to die in this chaos, we would fall into the land of heroes and thinkers, of ideals and greatness.”

Nearly three months later, on Aug. 25, 1944, de Gaulle marched into the French capital at the head of a liberation army.

The young Josset, from Tucuman, was among them. The previous day, his Romilly tank had been one of the first to enter Paris. There, in the midst of an insurrection, he met Odette, a young French woman who was pushing her father in a wheelchair along the cobblestone streets. They married three years later.

Latin America celebrated the liberation of Paris like a personal victory. Nowhere were the celebrations as boisterous as in Buenos Aires. About 200,000 people spontaneously gathered at the Plaza de Francia, a square in the capital’s Recoleta district. Cries of “Viva la Resistencia!” and “Viva la libertad!” resonated across the city.

According to Lida, at the University of San Andres, the liberation of Paris had a lasting effect on Argentina — and may have even played a role in the toppling of the military dictatorship one year later. The return to democracy in France gave Argentinians the push they needed to begin their own resistance to military rule. “Ya basta,” they cried — “That’s enough.” Spurred by the liberation, “society rose up to demand the end of the dictatorship,” Lida said.

The Free French in Argentina, she added, had shown that there are many ways to resist occupation. Despite their government’s lack of engagement, “Argentinian civil society refused to accept the fall of France and helped turn the tide of the Second World War,” Lida said.

“Governments can profess their neutrality all they want,” she added, “but the people can never be neutral.”