Monday, December 19, 2022

Brittney Griner’s Hollow Homecoming
It’s a relief she’s back. Now free the others.


By Zak Cheney-Rice, a New York features writer
Photo: Russian Federal Security Service/UPI/Shutterstock


When WNBA star Brittney Griner was arrested at a Russian airport in February for carrying hashish oil, as many as 30,000 people were in prison in America for simple marijuana possession. By the time she was released on December 8 as part of a prisoner swap that sent arms dealer Viktor Bout back to Russia, President Joe Biden had pardoned “thousands” who had been convicted of the same crime at the federal level. The exonerations were meant to correct our government’s “failed approach” to criminalizing cannabis, he said, but they also helped the Biden administration save face: Russia had invaded Ukraine a week after Griner’s arrest, cementing its status as a global villain, and its decision to prosecute her was seen as an extension of this villainy — even as the country lobbying for her release was persecuting thousands of people for the same offense. But if Biden was trying to wash America’s hands, Griner got a face full of dirt. Throughout her detention, right-wing media figures blasted her as an anti-American ingrate because in the summer of 2020 she’d voiced opposition to playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before her team’s games. Now “she expects that country to come in full bore to take care of her,” said Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro in August. The criticism ramped up after Griner’s release with some people proclaiming that Paul Whelan, an ex-Marine imprisoned in Russia on espionage charges, should’ve been exchanged for Bout instead. Rather than interrogating whether the U.S. and Russia should be imprisoning people for minor crimes at all, Americans were subjected to an argument about which prisoner deserved to suffer more.

This mentality reflected an ethos that has helped make the U.S. and (to a lesser degree) Russia world leaders in incarceration, accounting for almost 3 million total prisoners between them. Each has built its justice system on punishment unmoored from any clear standard of harm. Yet Griner’s story is being read as a straightforward parable of Russian iniquity rather than as the indictment of Russo-American criminal policy and political gamesmanship that it is.

Griner’s ordeal was harrowing. A six-foot-nine phenom and one of fewer than ten WNBA players to dunk during a game, the Texas native was nine years into a celebrated career with the Phoenix Mercury before her arrest. She had been a league champion once, a scoring leader twice, and an all-star six times, but the WNBA’s famously skewed revenue-sharing agreement — until 2021, its players received roughly a 20 percent share compared to 50 percent in the men’s league — had compelled her to play in Russia during the off-season. Back in Arizona, she’d been prescribed cannabis to manage her chronic pain, and she maintained — over the period when she was detained, charged, and pleaded guilty to passing through Russia with less than a gram of her medication — that she had brought the hash-oil cartridges by mistake. Russian authorities were not moved: After a jury convicted her of drug trafficking in August, Griner was sentenced to nine years in one of the country’s notorious penal colonies — successors to the Stalin-era Gulags immortalized in the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

During those ten months, Americans got little real-time insight into how Griner was coping, but the information that managed to get through was bleak. U.S. authorities reported that she was doing “as well as can be expected under the circumstances” based on their limited interactions with her, but photos showed her to be uncommonly gaunt and haunted-looking. News outlets published stories about the conditions she faced at the labor camp in Russia’s Mordovia region, based on the testimony of former inmates: 80 women housed in one room with three toilets, no hot water, and “planklike” beds, forced to work ten-to-12-hour days sewing police and army uniforms or, in the case of inmates with a “strong, athletic build,” loading sacks of flour or unloading “mountains of coal,” according to sources interviewed by Reuters. Women there are punished with solitary confinement for infractions as minor as leaving their wristwatch on a bedside table or appearing with a coat improperly buttoned. Shortly before her release, Griner cut her signature dreadlocks in preparation for a punishing winter because every time she washed them, the cold air would give her a chill, her Russian attorney said.

Griner’s anguished wife, Cherelle, spoke with her twice during her detainment, beginning this past summer, and was struck by how much she had deteriorated between the two conversations. “It was the most disturbing phone call I’d ever experienced,” Cherelle told CBS. “I don’t know if she has anything left in her tank to continue to wake up every day and be in a place where she has no one.”

There’s plenty to be outraged about concerning Griner’s treatment and plenty more to celebrate now that she is free. But it’s striking how aptly her conditions could describe those in the U.S., where she and Cherelle were recently reunited: Poorly compensated labor, overcrowding, squalid housing, solitary confinement, mental stability pushed to the breaking point, mounting hopelessness — all par for the course in the land of San Quentin and Parchman Farm. And if Russia’s villainy is reflected in the cruel way it treats its prisoners, then the plantation at Angola prison merits a similar indictment. If the misery that radiated outward from Griner’s incarceration suggests a system in which abject callousness is the norm — affecting her wife, her teammates, her league — then the suicide of Kalief Browder points to the same conclusion. U.S. officials and foreign-policy experts insisted that Griner was wrongfully detained, the victim of a politically motivated abduction inspired by American sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s government. Such an outcry rings hollow in a country where presidential clemency is withheld depending on how it might affect an election and tough-on-crime politics remain stubbornly en vogue.

Griner seemed to recognize that her life had become a political football. “She’s saying things to me like, ‘My life just don’t even matter no more,’” Cherelle continued on CBS. “‘Like, I’m just being tossed around for people’s enjoyment and gain.’ ” It’s widely believed that Putin slow-walked this prisoner swap until after the U.S. midterms so he could deny Biden a preelection victory. If such games did not vindicate Griner’s disillusionment, then the chorus of conservatives insisting that her protests made her unworthy of freedom surely did.

Countless people across the U.S. deserve the kind of reunion that Brittney and Cherelle Griner enjoyed in San Antonio, and there are many more levers that Biden could pull to make it happen — marijuana amnesty was one, but he has otherwise been frugal with his clemency powers. He’s far from alone: The officials and everyday citizens willing to tolerate mass suffering as long as it targets people branded as criminals are the lifeblood of local criminal-justice systems, in which most of that suffering takes place. Griner’s release is as good an opportunity as any to reassess. The spotlight on her predicament showed that her life was too full and meaningful for the fate to which the Russian criminal system had condemned it. The next step is recognizing that this was not because she is famous and talented, or was geopolitically useful at that particular moment, but because she is human — and America’s jails and prisons are overflowing with humans like her, desperate for the same chance.


The power of football in refugee integration and development

In-depth7 min read
Ramón Spaaij
14 December, 2022

In-depth: Global attention may focus on the World Cup, but it is at the grassroots level that football can have the most meaningful impact, particularly in breaking down barriers for those who have experienced forced
 displacement.

Amidst the ongoing human rights controversies surrounding the 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup in Qatar a different kind of story emerged – one of hope, inspiration, and aspiration.

Twenty-seven-year-old Awer Mabil, a member of Australia’s national Socceroos squad, reflected on his own journey to the highest ranks of the beautiful game, hoping to create a new narrative around refugees and forced migration.

Mabil’s parents fled the civil war in South Sudan in 1994 and he was born in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya the following year. Mabil first learned to play football in Kakuma, where he and his friends would make footballs from plastic bags and balloons.

At the age of 10, Mabil and his family migrated to Australia. He told Australian news channel SBS how in the face of cultural differences and language barriers, he used football as a way of communicating with his peers in this new school. “Football was like a saviour for me and it was a way I could communicate,” he explained.

"For the vast majority of children and young people with refugee backgrounds, the power of football is felt less at the elite sport level and more in the everyday realities of grassroots sports activities"

Mabil’s journey attests to the power of football in the context of forced displacement and migration to help people build hopes and dreams for the future.

For the vast majority of children and young people with refugee backgrounds, the power of football is felt less at the elite sport level and more in the everyday realities of grassroots sports activities in which they participate – in refugee camps, 'kicking around' on the streets, in programs run by NGOs, at local community clubs, and so on.

Football and other sports appeal to many young people with refugee backgrounds as a form of recreation where they can experience a temporary escape from the strains of life and the traumas of their past, allowing them to enjoy the pleasures of play, develop their skills, and experience a sense of belonging.

RELATED
In-depth
Basma El Atti

Breaking down barriers


Many young people who have experienced displacement are faced with several barriers to accessing opportunities to play, especially in organised sport, such as safety, cost, transport, and discrimination. South Sudanese Australian community leader and avid football player Deng explained the impact of these barriers and the importance of widening access to football.

“It’s a lack of opportunity, but also it’s a lack of I guess someone giving them that opportunity to start in the grassroots and evolve it, take it step by step, slowly. Because at the end of the day what will make the difference is creating a safe environment, making links with the families, getting their trust, their respect, that will make the difference,” he said.

“You can have a hundred girls who want to play in your club, but if they don’t feel safe, their parents don’t know you and they’re not allowed to take risks, then they’re not going to stay there.”

Many community-based programs around the world, often referred to as ‘sport for development’, work tirelessly to address these barriers. Public and private actors that support such programs include football federations, professional football clubs, local and transnational NGOs, government agencies, philanthropic entities, multinational corporations, and individual (former) players.

Some 150 refugees, mostly from Sub-Saharan African countries, took part in the first friendly football tournament between teams composed of asylum seekers in Italy on 24 October 2017. [Getty]

The objectives of these initiatives often go beyond access to and participation in sport to address wider social, health, and educational goals, such as health education, entrepreneurship, conflict transformation, and women’s rights.

In such programs, sports activities are principally a hook or educational context for working with young people, rather than simply an end in themselves. This is often referred to as ‘plus sport’, in which sport’s perceived ability to engage marginalised young people is part of a broader, holistic youth development approach supported by a range of interconnected activities.

Spirit of Soccer, whose slogan is “Football saves children’s lives”, exemplifies this “plus sport” model. It operates in conflict and post-conflict zones, and among its many activities, the organisation delivers clinics in schools, communities, and refugee camps in Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon to educate people about the dangers of landmines and Explosive Remnants of War, wrapping safety messages into football games and drills.

"Sport activities are principally a hook or educational context for working with young people, rather than simply an end in themselves"

Improving access to football for girls and young women


Historically girls and women have had fewer opportunities to participate in football, and football for development is no exception. Girls and young women with refugee backgrounds often face amplified barriers to participation, for example, a lack of culturally appropriate facilities, safety concerns, cost, and family and caring responsibilities.

There may exist a perception within their family or community that playing football is inappropriate for women, especially in the presence of men. Owing to the ongoing efforts of community activists like Deng, who tries to gradually build trust and transform gender norms in his community, there are now increased opportunities for girls and women to be involved in football.

Several 'sport for development' programs work specifically towards improving access to sports for girls and young women by creating female-friendly environments. The Sport for Protection Toolkit, developed by the United National High Commissioner for Refugees, International Olympic Committee, and Terre des Hommes organisation, documents practical strategies to increase girls’ engagement in sport, such as providing culturally-appropriate sports uniforms and women-only playing spaces, training female coaches, and increasing family buy-in and trust by actively engaging them in the process.

For example, World Vision’s football program in the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan actively trains female coaches to make parents feel more comfortable about letting their daughters play and to create “role models” for the participating girls.

RELATED
In-depth
John Duerden

The limits of 'football for development'

There are many proven social, health, and educational benefits associated with young people with refugee backgrounds participating in sports. However, football for development is not a panacea for addressing the precarious political, legal, and socioeconomic conditions that many refugees face.

Football for development programs tend to operate within a discourse of individual empowerment. They give participants opportunities to increase their confidence, skills, self-efficacy, and self-responsibility, but often without addressing the structural inequalities and power relations that shape refugees’ marginalisation.

Refugees commonly experience a denial of rights and politics of deterrence that, a recent study shows, manifest themselves in various ways including being denied the right to play in local football clubs and opportunities for playing with local residents being curtailed.

Players of Afghanistan's national women's football team, who were forced to flee after the Taliban came to power, attend a training session in Lisbon, Portugal on 30 September 2021. [Getty]

These forms of exclusion appear to be at odds with FIFA’s self-proclaimed commitment to promoting an inclusive global football community that treats everyone equally.

In most cases, the opportunities that sports programs afford to young people with refugee backgrounds primarily constitute moments of inclusion and belonging or a temporary safe space. They may enable refugees to survive and adapt as individuals within existing conditions, rather than work to challenge and alter those conditions.

It is therefore important not to romanticise or uncritically preach the “power of sport” for refugees. Instead, it is important to consider both its value and its limitations. Any lived experiences and outcomes are also highly contextual; there is no such thing as a single, unitary “refugee experience” in sport or society.

At the same time, there is the risk of framing the achievements of elite athletes like Awer Mabil only in terms of their (former) refugee status and the challenging circumstances that they endured.

"Football for development is not a panacea for addressing the precarious political, legal, and socioeconomic conditions that many refugees face"

Whilst the challenges that refugees face are real, their achievements should not be framed merely in relation to those labels. A strengths-based approach that recognises the capabilities, resilience, and talents of young people with refugee backgrounds is far more helpful.

There is a lot to learn from their journeys in football – not just at the elite level but, like Deng, at the everyday level of recreational football too. Mabil emphasises that it is important not to define refugees by their title or as “someone to feel sorry for”, but as a person with a strong mentality, values, and aspirations.

The FIFA World Cup provides a highly visible stage for some of these strengths, talents, and achievements to be displayed and celebrated. But despite all the focus on the World Cup, ultimately it is grassroots sport that deserves the attention and resources to support participation and social development in a meaningful and sustainable way.

Ramón Spaaij, PhD, is professor of sociology at the Institute for Health and Sport at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. He is a sociologist of sport, with a speciality in the intersections of sport, social inclusion, conflict, and development.


This piece is based on 'Refugees and Football in the Global and Middle East Context' in Football in the Middle East: State, Society, and the Beautiful Game (2022).
Africa: Beyond Vaccine Hesitancy - Understanding Systemic Barriers to Getting Vaccinated


Pixabay
(File photo).

ANALYSIS
By Terra Manca, Emmanuel Akwasi Marfo, Laura Aylsworth, Shannon E. Macdonald and S. Michelle Driedger

11 DECEMBER 2022

The term "vaccine hesitancy" was in wide use years before the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic. The term focuses on individual-level attitudes toward vaccines. Throughout the pandemic, much popular and scholarly discussion about COVID-19 transmission focused on individual-level decisions, making it easy to blame the unvaccinated.

By focusing on individual decisions, it is easy to overlook other reasons for suboptimal vaccine uptake. These include politicization, distrust of the health system due to systemic racism, social inequities, and barriers to access and acceptance.

The perspective that health is the result of only individual behaviours falsely disconnects well-being from important factors like systemic social inequities, community well-being and environmental health (such as One Health). The focus on individual decisions also reinforces widespread social norms and sanctions (such as the stigmatization of the unvaccinated), which make individuals personally responsible for keeping themselves healthy, including getting vaccinated to protect others.

Although there have been efforts across Canada to improve COVID-19 vaccine accessibility and acceptability among underserved populations, the success of these efforts is isolated to specific communities and ongoing efforts are needed to reduce inequities. As a result, many individuals who are blamed for being unvaccinated are often also denied equal access to health care and vaccination services, and credible information about vaccines from trusted sources.

We are a group of researchers whose work explores inequities in vaccination intentions, access and uptake among underserved populations, as well as public health communications and inequities resulting from pandemic responses. We also research vaccine hesitancy, public health communications and the use of vaccine information and misinformation to show how social inequities shape vaccine uptake.

What is vaccine hesitancy?


The Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) on Immunization at the WHO defines vaccine hesitancy as a "delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccination despite availability of vaccine services" for various reasons, including convenience. Convenience refers to the absence of barriers to accessing and accepting vaccines. This includes availability, location accessibility, affordability of vaccination, understandability of vaccine information and appeal of vaccine services.

Systemic social issues affect vaccine access and acceptability. Yet, the term vaccine hesitancy often overlooks these, and reduces the multiple factors that affect vaccine uptake to individual-level decisions. Researchers have also critiqued the focus on vaccine hesitancy because it distracts from the responsibility of government institutions to ensure vaccines are accessible and acceptable to the population.

Social inequities create barriers to vaccination


Pre-pandemic research shows substantial barriers to getting vaccinated exist, especially for certain populations. These include racialized and Indigenous Peoples, people with disabilities, people living in rural and remote areas, and those with low income. For example, a recent review of studies about barriers to adult vaccination listed access among the most frequently reported barriers.

In Canada and internationally, the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines has been much higher than for other pandemic and routine vaccines. Yet, it has been harder for those with fewer resources to get vaccinated.

Participants in our research identified many barriers to getting vaccinated in Spring 2021 when COVID-19 vaccines first became widely available across Canada. These barriers include technology access, language requirements, accessible transportation and childcare, gaps in accommodations for disability or health conditions, rigid work schedules and feeling unsafe.

Similar barriers have been previously recognized with routine childhood vaccines, adult vaccines and seasonal vaccines.

For racialized and Indigenous populations, whom Canada's National Advisory Committee on Immunization identified as being at increased risk of severe illness from COVID-19 disease, major barriers to accepting COVID-19 vaccines also include contemporary and historical medical racism, disregard and mistreatment.

Improving vaccine access and acceptance

Throughout the pandemic, local non-profit, community and Indigenous organizations tailored vaccine rollouts for the people they serve.

For example, urban Indigenous health service providers sought to improve the accessibility of culturally appropriate care for First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities, including people without shelter. However, some still noted lower uptake than in non-Indigenous populations.

Across Canada, First Nations, Métis, Inuit and Indigenous-led initiatives provided culturally and linguistically appropriate clinics, information and wellness support.

Similarly, local organizations worked to improve vaccine accessibility for diverse peoples, including newcomers, racialized populations and people with disabilities.

Provincial health authorities also worked to diversify vaccination services, providing mobile, walk-in, drive-through and pop-up clinics. Federal, provincial and territorial governments also provided pandemic and vaccine information in multiple languages to improve accessibility.

However, many of these efforts were initiated after mass vaccine clinics opened to the general public. This made it harder for populations that were recommended for vaccination early in rollouts to access the first available doses of COVID-19 vaccines.

Although these initiatives improved vaccination accessibility for some underserved communities later in the rollout, barriers to vaccination remained high for many throughout the initial rollout, even for people who wanted to be vaccinated.

The overemphasis of research and public discussion on vaccine hesitancy makes systemic barriers to getting vaccinated invisible to the public. Instead, individuals are blamed for not getting vaccinated, even when access to vaccines is not equitable.

Without resolving barriers to vaccine access and acceptability, efforts solely focused on reducing vaccine hesitancy will not optimize vaccine uptake. Vaccine programs must be intentionally designed for those with the greatest barriers, starting with the initial rollout.

To improve vaccine access and trust, rollouts must occur in a contextualized way and in partnership with organizations that have community trust and experience working to improve access to health care and social justice. As modelled by local non-profit, community and Indigenous organizations, vaccine programs must be embedded in wider efforts to improve social equality and access to health care.

Terra Manca, Research Associate, Faculty of Nursing, University of Alberta, Dalhousie University

Emmanuel Akwasi Marfo, Assistant researcher, Faculty of Nursing, University of Alberta

Laura Aylsworth, Research Assistant, Faculty of Nursing, University of Alberta

Shannon E. MacDonald, Associate Professor, Faculty of Nursing, University of Alberta

S. Michelle Driedger, Professor, Department of Community Health Sciences, University of Manitoba



This article is republished from The Conversation Africa under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.


The secrets shared by Afghan women

The pen name Paranda means 'bird'

By Lyse Doucet and Zarghuna Kargar
BBC News

"My pen is the wing of a bird; it will tell you those thoughts we are not allowed to think, those dreams we are not allowed to dream."


At times, voices of Afghan women rise from the streets of Kabul and other cities in small, loud, protests. Often, they ring out in speeches by women now far away, outside Afghanistan. But mostly, their thoughts are only expressed quietly, in safe places. Or they fester in their heads as they try to reconcile their lives with the increasingly rigid rules of the Taliban government. They restrict what women wear, where they work, what they can do, or not, with their lives.

In the months before the Taliban returned, in August 2021, 18 Afghan women writers wrote fictional stories, drawn from real lives, and published early this year in the book, My Pen is the Wing of a Bird. Many Afghan women felt let down and left alone by the international community. But these writers used their pens and phones to comfort each other and to reflect on issues now faced by millions of women and girls. Here, two writers in Kabul, with pen names Paranda and Sadaf, shared their thoughts written in secret.

'Is a pink scarf a sin?'


Paranda walks down the street wearing her pink scarf

"Today I woke up with determination. When I chose my clothes, I decided to wear a pink headscarf to fight with the black headscarf I wear daily... is it a sin to wear a pink headscarf?"


Paranda prefers to wear pink, to feel feminine
. But what women choose to put on is now a battleground. Strict Taliban edicts on modesty are enforced, often forcefully. In this traditional society, Afghan women aren't fighting against head-coverings - some just want their right to choose. You see it on the streets, in public spaces. A pink scarf. A sparkling trim. A little light in the dark.

'We cannot go back'


"Going backwards is not easy. Going forward is also a big hassle, should I be hopeful or not? We cannot go back," writes poet Hafizullah Hamim.

Afghan women have been leading the charge in rare public protests. Small brave crowds have taken to the streets in Kabul and other cities brandishing banners calling for "bread, work, freedom." They've been forcibly dispersed, and detained. Some have disappeared in detention. Across the border, in Iran, it's also the women leading calls for change with cries of "women, life, freedom" and a demand to end mandatory hijab. For Afghans, it's the right of women to work, for girls to be educated.

'Fear turns to anger'


Checkpoint in Mazar-i-Sharif

''The Taliban guard stopped our office car, he pointed at me… my heart beat faster, my body shook. It felt as if a wind was blowing across me... when our car moved away, it felt like the wind moved in another direction. My fear turned to anger."

It's the unpredictability that is so hard. Some Taliban guards are aggressive, some more accepting. Women's journeys are nerve jangling. For long distances over 72km (45 miles), a mahram - a male escort - is mandatory. Some Talibs invoke the rule at will - sending women home on a whim.

'Excitement of ice cream'



Afghan family enjoying an ice cream

"The excitement of eating ice cream as a child is equal to the excitement of travelling to space as an adult."

You often see queues at ice cream kiosks, crowds of women and children in cafes. These have become places to escape for a rare treat, a retreat. Now even public parks and women-only gyms and baths are off limits, "because women don't observe hijab", the strict dress code. All this means small spaces could get smaller still.

'Engaged at 13'



Girls waiting outside an ice cream restaurant in Kabul

"The public baths owner's daughter has been engaged. It's amazing. She's only 13. Her mother says the Taliban will never re-open schools, let her go to her home of luck... it seems that little girl is me... I was in despair the first time the Taliban arrived. I also accepted a forced marriage... the wounds still haven't healed... but I got up from the ashes and stood up."

It's repression on repeat. Afghan women recall, painfully, 1990s Taliban rule which also ended their education. Paranda, like many others, seized opportunities when the regime was toppled in 2001 - like going to school or getting divorced. A new generation of schoolgirls has grown up with even bigger dreams. Their pain is profound as their schools stay shut.

'Words men use against women'



Kabul evening scene

"I had used social media but now I have locked my lips. I'm upset with my society, the naked words men use against women. I believe the roots of Afghan women's problems are not the governments which change and bring new rules… it is the evil thoughts of men toward women."

Afghan regimes come and go; patriarchy stays put. Afghan women have long lived with limits set by men. But advances of recent years are reversing - with what the UN describes as "staggering repression". It has a knock-on effect - reinforcing conservative family norms which keep women and girls under wraps.

'Believe a good country will come'


Paranda writing


"I must write about what is happening. There are so few media now… I believe that, someday, Afghanistan will be a very good country for women and girls. It will take time. But it will happen."

Paranda is a pen name - it means bird. Women like her, especially educated women in the cities, refuse to be caged. Many have fled. Many still hope to. Small crowds bravely protest. Even in remote corners of the country, I've met illiterate women seething inside about their prison-like life.

'Write to heal'


Paranda's diary

"Write! Why are you scared? Who you are afraid of? ... Maybe your writing can heal someone's soul… Your pen becomes the support of someone's broken arms and brings a little hope to some hopeless people," writes Sadaf.

A writer's life anywhere can be fraught with doubt and fear. For Afghan women, it is especially so - to find safe quiet corners to write, to forge a sense of self and purpose. Being published in "My Pen is the Wing of a Bird" gave new life to their words.

"One of the students introduced the book in beautiful words, and the best part was when she mentioned my name. All my students cheered for me. I write this as the most pleasant memory of my life."

'I am the breadwinner'


A young girl chops wood with her family in Nuristan province

"My belief tells me I should not worry about money as God may have something better for me. But God knows why I am worried. We are a family of 10, and I am the only breadwinner. I did not earn much better in the last Republic and it isn't good in this Islamic Emirate."


Women's work hasn't been wiped away. Some female doctors, nurses, teachers, policewomen are still in their jobs, mainly working with women and girls. Some businesswomen are still in business - but there's a crushing economic crisis. And doors have been slammed shut for women in most government ministries. With girls' high schools closed, the link between women and work is being severed.

'You are strong'



Kandahar scene

"I said, 'No, no! I cannot commit suicide.' I comforted myself, saying, 'Maybe you don't want to live. Still, your suicide will affect many other lives. Please be kind to them, you are strong, everything will be fine, you can make it. This too shall pass.'"

It's a whisper you hear everywhere. Suicide attempts - especially among young women - are reported to be on the rise, but it's hard to confirm. Families keep their secrets. Public hospitals are told to hide any proof. A UN agency tells me when they meet women in the provinces, this issue comes up. Forced marriages of young girls blocked from school is cited as a cause.

'When will this end?'


Paranda holds the negative of a photo taken in Afghanistan in the 1970s

"How can we be normal and not become crazy? How much pain can we tolerate? Finally, my heart accepts that this land has faced everything inhumane and cruel. But when will this end?"

More than one generation now has only known war - it's been more than four decades. The country lurches from one conflict to the next. Afghans keep daring to dream the next chapter will be better than the last. It's a story which never seems to end.

'Sparkles of hope'



A group of women walk past a restaurant in Kabul

"I sprinkle sparkles of hope on the surface of my heart… There is a fire within me. There is a spirit within me telling me to fight. I have to hope the law of nature will send its orders in these dark days to change this darkness to a set of lights."

Afghans often say hope is the last thing to die. In recent years, before the Taliban took over, when everyday violence intensified, some said hope was killed too. But people who have lived through so much still hold fast to whatever hope still lives.

Photographs by Nanna Muus Steffensen

Untold's diary project is supported by the Bagri Foundation and the British Council. An anthology of these writers' short stories, My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women, was published by MacLehose Press.




BBC 100 Women names 100 inspiring and influential women around the world every year. Follow BBC 100 Women on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Join the conversation using #BBC100Women.

Henry A. Giroux and the Culture of Neoliberal Fascism

The Terror of the Unforeseen

HENRY A. GIROUX

HENRY A. GIROUX’s book The Terror of the Unforeseen analyzes the conditions that have enabled and led to Donald Trump’s rule and the consequences of that rule, that have ushered in an authoritarian version of capitalism. Giroux provides a realistic analysis that holds out the hope that, through collective efforts, change is possible and democracy can be saved.

There is an intellectual debate on whether or not the power wielded by the likes of Trump, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Matteo Salvini, Geert Wilders, Heinz-Christian Strache, or Jörg Meuthen and Alexander Gauland constitutes fascism. Some analysts — such as Noam Chomsky, Neil Faulkner, John Bellamy Foster, Robert Kagan, Gáspar Miklós Tamás, and Enzo Traverso — speak of creeping fascismnew fascism, or post-fascism. They find both continuities and discontinuities between the classical forms of fascism in Italy and Germany and these contemporary right-wing politicians. Representatives of this position hold that Trump is not Hitler, but stress certain similarities between the two.

Others — including Wendy Brown, Nancy Fraser, Roger Griffin, Chantal Mouffe, Cas Mudde, Robert Paxton, David Renton, and Slavoj Žižek — argue that it is an exaggeration to characterize Trump and other contemporary demagogues as fascists. They prefer terms such as the new authoritarianismlibertarian authoritarianismreactionary neoliberalismright-wing populismthe populist radical right, or demagoguery on behalf of oligarchy. They see Trump as dangerous, but stress that his authoritarianism is quite different from classical fascism and Hitler.

Giroux takes the first position. He speaks of “the new form of fascism updated under the Trump administration” and “an updated American version of fascism of which Trump is both symptom and endpoint.” He argues that Trump does not use storm troopers and gas chambers, but divisive language, language that is itself a form of violent action. Fascism is not uniform, but dynamic and therefore takes on variegated forms in different historical and societal contexts. For Giroux, Trump constitutes the rise of neoliberal fascism and the culmination of a long history of authoritarianism that includes historical moments such as the oppression of Native Americans, slavery, US imperialism, torture, and extrajudicial detention and imprisonment (Guantánamo). One of the backgrounds to Trump’s rise is the culture of fear since 9/11, but another is neoliberalism’s dismantling of public education, critical reason, and radical imagination that represents a “full-scale attack on thoughtful reasoning.”

Fascism can exist at the level of individual character, ideology, institutions, or society as a whole, but fascism on one of these levels is a necessary foundation but not a sufficient condition for fascism on the next. Erich Fromm and Theodor W. Adorno argued that the authoritarian, sadomasochistic, necrophilic personality was the psychological foundation of fascism. But the existence of political leaders with fascist characters, even if they communicate fascist ideology, does not automatically imply the existence of a fascist society. For a fascist society to come into existence, these leaders need to call forth collective political practices that result in the full institutionalization of authoritarianism.

In his essay “Anxiety and Politics,” Frankfurt School critical theorist Franz Neumann specifies conditions necessary for the emergence of a fascist society. They include political crises, the alienation of labor, destructive competition, social alienation that threatens certain social groups, political alienation, and the institutionalization of fascist practices, such as collective political anxiety, propaganda and terror, persecutory nationalism, political scapegoating, and xenophobia. A condition that needs to be added to Neumann’s list is the weakness of the political left, beset by rivalries, internal trench wars, factions, splintering, isolation, and orthodoxy, and its frequent miscalculation of the actual dangers of the political situation it is facing —in the Weimar Republic, the Communist Party of Germany did not consider the Nazis, but the Social Democrats as their main enemy. Stalinist Communists characterized the Social Democratic Party of Germany as “social fascism” and believed German capitalism would automatically collapse after Hitler’s rise to power.

Many observers agree that today we find leaders with an authoritarian personality and ideology in a significant number of countries and that there are conditions in these places that can lead to fascist regimes. But the claim that countries such as the United States have become fascist societies goes too far. In a fully fascist society, there is no rule of law and the political opposition and other identified enemies are imprisoned or killed by the exercise of terror. A fascist society is a political Behemoth. Trumpism poses a very negative development, and perhaps has the potential to fully develop into a fascist political economic system — especially if the opposition cannot establish an alternative — but there is still a difference between Trump’s character structure and policies and the total character of US society.

A key contribution of Giroux’s book is the creation of the notion of neoliberal fascism for characterizing the contemporary negativity of politics. But he also uses terms such as populist authoritarianismAmerican authoritarianismauthoritarian populismright-wing populism, and inverted totalitarianism. These terms are vague and create more confusion than elucidation. Both totalitarianism and populism can be used for arguing against both socialism and the far right; both, some argue, are threats to democratic societies. For example, Jan-Werner Müller writes in his book What is Populism? that populism is “a danger to democracy” and that Trump and Sanders are “both populists, with one on the right and the other on the left.” Such theorizations often end up in the legitimation of what Tariq Ali calls the “extreme center” of neoliberal ideology, which in action has the material effect of managing the state solely for the benefit of the wealthy.

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In The Road to Serfdom, the leading neoliberal theorist and ideologue Friedrich A. Hayek claims that socialism and fascism are “inseparable manifestations of what in theory we call collectivism.” He claims that both do not “recognize autonomous spheres in which the ends of the individuals are supreme.” As a consequence, Hayek rejects the notions of the “common good” and the “general interest.” He argues that only a neoliberal society, where society and its institutions are organized as markets and are based on the commodity form and capital accumulation, can secure democracy and freedom. Augusto Pinochet’s neoliberal, military, fascist regime in Chile already showed in the 1970s how mistaken it was to assume that capitalism spontaneously brings about and provides the foundation for democracy. And in the more than 45 years since Pinochet’s coup d’état in 1973, the rise of new authoritarian forms of capitalism have shown repeatedly that Hayek was wrong.

Trump’s plan to build a wall at the US-Mexican border and the resulting government shutdowns aimed at forcing through this project, the travel ban for citizens from majority-Muslim countries, the separation of children from families at the border, his racist attacks on socialist congresswomen, his attempt to dismantle the legal protection of Dreamers from deportation — these are all examples of the ideologically motivated cruelties of the Trump regime and what Giroux (following Rob Nixon) terms slow violence. Over time, an accumulation of such cruelties can reach a tipping point where the current system is devastated and democracy abolished.

Neoliberal fascism, Giroux writes, is a formation “in which the principles and practices of a fascist past and neoliberal present have merged,” and which connects “the worst dimensions and excesses of gangster capitalism with the fascist ideals of white nationalism and racial supremacy associated with the horrors of the [fascist] past.” Giroux reminds us of Horkheimer and Adorno’s insights that liberalism and capitalism have inherent fascist potential, that fascism is a terroristic version of capitalism, that fascist potential has not ceased to exist after the end of World War II, and that “whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism” (Horkheimer).

Trumpist policies favor the rich and US corporations, advance an economic version of Social Darwinism, with all-out competition ensuring that only the most powerful survive and the rest face precarity, debt, and ruin. Trumpism tries to compensate for the social void created by this neoliberal individualism by fostering what we can call repressive collectivism, and which, as the present author suggests, can be analyzed at three levels — economic, political, and ideological.

On the level of political economy, repressive collectivism is organized as an antagonism between austerity and precarity, which is used to advance protectionist policies that favor the interests of US capital.

At the level of politics and the state, deregulation, privatization, and commodification give wide freedoms to corporations while policing the poor, promoting law-and-order politics, and instituting progressively more draconian racist immigration policies.

At the level of ideology and culture, we find a combination of hyper-consumerist, narcissistic individualism, the cult of leadership, and nationalism. Under repressive collectivism, nationalism promotes the idea of the unity of US capital and US labor and advances the racist and xenophobic scapegoating of immigrants, refugees, people of color, Muslims, and foreigners.

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The conjuncture of neoliberalism and right-wing authoritarianism has brought to the fore an emotional, ideological anti-intellectualism, which impedes any discussion of socialist ideas and ideologically justifies and cements capitalism. Thus, the billionaire capitalist Donald Trump can successfully pretend to be a working-class hero. Right-wing authoritarians often appeal to the working class by displaying crude manners, showing a proletarian habitus, and using simple, dichotomous language. But in reality, of course, these ideologues oppose the interests of the working class. When in power, they often implement laws that give tax breaks to corporations and the rich and harm the working class by dismantling the redistributive effects of the welfare state and public services. Trump signifies the rise of the one percent’s direct rule of the state.

Giroux writes that “fascism begins not with violence, police assaults, or mass killings, but with language.” One of Trump’s infamous, but typical tweets reads: “The FAKE NEWS Media […] is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” Dismissing all criticism as “fake news,” he identifies his person with the American people, and labels any criticism of him as anti-American. Trump’s political anger and authoritarian character replace reason by ideology, facts by fiction, rationality by emotionality, truth by lies, complexity by simplicity, objectivity by prejudice and hate. His combination of anti-socialism, nationalism, and racism were evident recently when he tweeted that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib are “a bunch of communists” who “are Anti-America” and should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Such political communication is not best characterized as post-truth politics, but as propaganda that tries to create false consciousness by simplification, dissimulation, manipulation, diversion, and outright lies. In this context, Giroux argues that we do not live in a post-truth world but in a “pre-truth world where the truth has yet to arrive.”

The Cambridge Analytica scandal has shown how the far right uses data breaches, online data collection, and targeted ads for trying to manipulate elections. “Alt-right” platforms such as BreitbartInfoWarsDaily CallerPhilosophia PerennisUnzensuriertWestmonster, and the rest are projects that spread distortion, false news, and far-right conspiracies. Bots have partly automated the creation of political online attention, and it has become difficult to discern whether humans or machines are creating online content and attention. The culture of false news is one of the factors of Trump’s political success.

As I argued in Digital Demagogue: Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Twitter, Twitter and Trump are a match made in heaven. Trump uses first-person singular pronouns much more frequently than first-person plural pronouns, which is an indication of the narcissistic character structure that Erich Fromm argues is prone to engage in destruction for the sake of destruction. Twitter’s me-centered, narcissistic medium invites the authoritarian political communication Giroux characterizes as a show of evil banality: “Trump’s infantile production of Twitter storms transforms politics into spectacularized theater” — Twitter spectacles that are part of a culture of spectacle deeply ingrained in the capitalist tabloid culture that has turned political debate into superficial, personalized, high-speed events that lack the time and depth needed for exploring the complexities of antagonistic societies. In political television debates, candidates are asked to give answers in less than 30 seconds. The capitalist culture of speed, superficiality, tabloidization, and personalization is part of the apparatus that has enabled Trump the spectacle.

The liberal media and Trump have a love/hate relationship. Although these media are some of Trump’s fiercest critics, they helped create him. The Tyndall Report found that in 2015, Donald Trump received 23.4 times as much coverage in evening television newscasts as Bernie Sanders. The capitalist mainstream media are in a symbiotic and symmetrical relation to the political spectacle Trump. The capitalist media require Trump just like Trump requires the capitalist media.

When Trump took to Twitter to call Kim Darroch “a very stupid guy” and the “wacky Ambassador that the UK foisted upon the United States,” The New York Times immediately ran a story titled “UK Envoy’s Leaked Views Inspire More Insults in Trump Tweets.” No matter how silly or insulting, Trump’s tweets are what the mainstream media talk about. The liberal media thereby do not deconstruct Trump but help construct him, giving him the constant public attention that he instrumentalizes for his own political aims.

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Henry Giroux’s book takes inspiration from teachers who strike against terrible working conditions and young people who protest against racism, police violence, student debt, and sexual violence and stand up for gun control, peace, environmental protection, social security, equality, and prison abolition. He argues for a broad protest movement that forms a “united front” against neoliberal fascism, brings together the multiple interrelated issues, interests, and struggles, and “connects the dots among diverse forms of oppression.”

Giroux also stresses the importance of critical pedagogy as a central intellectual weapon in the struggle against neoliberal fascism. Developing “critical consciousness” helps form “knowledgeable citizens who have a passion for public affairs”:

Revitalizing a progressive agenda should be addressed as part of broader social movement capable of reimagining a radical democracy in which public values matter, the ethical imagination flourishes, and justice is viewed as an ongoing struggle. In a time of dystopian nightmares, an alternative future is only possible if we can imagine the unimaginable and think otherwise in order to act otherwise.


Giroux argues that driving back authoritarianism requires informed citizens, critical thinking, deliberative inquiry, a culture of questioning, dialogue, debate, and thoughtful action, cultural production, and at a minimum requires that we provide secure jobs for teachers.

A revival of the public sphere depends on the creation of new debate and news formats run on public service internet platforms and platform cooperatives, new formats that challenge the dominance of Fox News, CNN, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook in the organization of political communication. In order to save democracy, we need to reinvent communication so that digital tabloids and digital capitalism are replaced by digital public exchange and the digital commons. Challenging authoritarianism today requires the remaking of political culture and a radical reconstruction of the political economy of the media and the internet. Arguing for such change in this decisive moment for the future of US democracy, Henry Giroux’s book is an important contribution to the development of the intellectual tools needed in the anti-fascist struggle for 21st-century democratic socialism.

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August 12, 2019   • 

Christian Fuchs is professor of media and communication studies at the University of Westminster. He is the author of books such as Digital Demagogue: Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Twitter (2018) and Nationalism on the Internet: Critical Theory and Ideology in the Age of Social Media and Fake News (2019).