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We follow the writer’s black cigarette jeans and iconic leather jacket through a maze of corridors, almost running after his lean silhouette deep into the cool darkness of empty seats.
Every theater dreams of untold stories.
We were the only spectators in the theater that day, surrounded by empty seats waiting to be filled by an audience who would one day come to listen to stories about Ukraine’s victory.
Instead, we watched over a scene of cardboard boxes waiting to be sent to soldiers and civilians on the frontline, in the blue light of a broken-windowed theater converted into a volunteer center on Feb. 24.
Sitting there among the empty seats and crude forgotten spotlights, I understood why I had traveled halfway across the country to meet Serhiy Zhadan. There was no other way to meet him than in Kharkiv. It’s his city, after all.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began, Zhadan has remained in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, doing humanitarian work and conducting numerous interviews in the city he couldn’t leave behind.
“The war caught me on the train on my way to Vinnytsia for a concert with the band. We learned about it and came back to Kharkiv,” he said.
“We” being “Zhadan and the Dogs” (“Zhadan i Sobaky”), the writer’s rock band founded in 2007, only one of Zhadan’s numerous artistic projects over the years – with literature as his guiding light.
Zhadan looks the part. Only his gray, sleek haircut betrays the passing of time on the 47-year-old writer, easily labeled as Ukraine’s “enfant terrible.”
Writer, poet, musician, humanitarian worker, political activist, Zhadan is on every front, avoiding labels as fast as he walks.
With 12 poetry books and seven novels, his cult status helped put the country’s contemporary literature on the map, especially in eastern Ukraine, where his characters evolve between hallucinated landscapes of war and picaresque quests.
Inspired by the country’s 1920’s avant-garde, and compared to the likes of William Burroughs, his abrasive style cuts to the chase.
“Let’s start by whispering the names, let’s weave together the vocabulary of death,” Zhadan wrote in his 2020 poem “New Orthography,” long before Russia’s invasion began on Feb. 24.
Many words were whispered that day. Among them, one unwavering statement: There would be no Ukrainian literature without Ukraine’s sovereignty.
“If Ukraine wins, there is some future for us,” he told the Kyiv Independent. “If Russia wins, there will be no literature, no culture, nothing.”
Kharkiv was always Ukrainian
Outside, the eerie silence overwhelming Kharkiv, broken only by the distant sounds of artillery, is a constant reminder of Russia’s looming shadow.
The city used to be a vibrant place filled with students from all over the world, taking classes at one of the city’s 38 universities. With its student life and numerous coffee shops and bars, Kharkiv was the “cool” city of eastern Ukraine.
“It was quite a cosmopolitan environment, democratic and open,” Zhadan said. “And now it’s half empty.”
Most of the city center’s windows are shattered, with some buildings blown apart by heavy missile strikes.
The black, burned skeleton of the Kharkiv Regional State Administration stands on Freedom Square as a monument to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s brutality.
The windows are missing from Kharkiv’s Puppet Theater, where Zhadan has established the headquarters of his volunteer organization. Wood panels and black curtains cover the holes for the time being, like a grieving sign of the city’s ordeal.
“The buildings we will rebuild,” Zhadan said.” The worst thing is not the buildings, but those who have died, because we cannot bring them back.”
Zhadan doesn’t have time for art at the moment.
“A lot is happening right now, the last thing I think about now is my art, and I think more about what’s happening in my country and how to help,” he said. “I think reflections and art will take place a bit later.”
Born in now Russian-occupied Starobilsk, near Luhansk, Zhadan spent most of his life in Kharkiv, which stands on the edge of two worlds by its proximity to Russia.
But Kharkiv is not a Russian city, Zhadan said. “Even though Russia is 40 kilometers from here, Kharkiv has always been Ukrainian.”
If Kharkiv was a character, it would be Enei, said Zhadan. “Enei is a Cossack and a traveler who has a light and positive character despite everything happening to him,” he said.
Zhadan was referring to the Ukrainian mock-heroic poem “Eneida” by Ivan Kotliarevsky, a classic in Ukrainian literature published in 1798 that is widely considered to be the first literary work published wholly in modern Ukrainian. In this burlesque parody of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” Aeneas is a Ukrainian Cossack.
The poem, which makes Ukrainian school children roll their eyes to the sky, begins with these words: “Enei was a lively fellow/ And quite a Cossack for a lad/ For mischief he was more than mellow/ While courage above all he had” – a good description of Kharkiv in Zhadan’s views.
Kharkiv as a Russian city is mostly a stereotype propagated by Russians themselves, partly supported by (Ukraine’s) own politicians, Zhadan said.
The term “Russian-speaking Ukrainian” doesn’t make sense for Zhadan, as it implies they speak Russian and Ukrainian is a foreign language for them.
Many Kharkiv residents switched to Ukrainian because it’s a marker during this war, an effort Zhadan finds moving as they spoke Russian their whole life.
“Speaking Ukrainian is a marker that you’re a local, and that you refuse the language of the occupier,” Zhadan said.
The switch to Ukrainian is a natural process that gained momentum after Russia’s first invasion of 2014, he said, admitting that Ukraine will always have to fight Russia’s dangerous zone of influence.
“It became clear to Ukrainians that we either fight for our identity or be a part of this post-Soviet empire.”
Love poems
For Zhadan, the sole fact of writing in Ukrainian is political. By choosing which language to write in, writers indicate their political and ideological positions.
“That’s why even if you write love poems but do it in Ukrainian, you take a certain position in one way or another, it has a political connotation,” he said.
Zhadan predicts this war will divide Ukrainian literature into two periods, pre-war and post-war, but it will take time to see a new opus emerge. “The reality is too close, too bloody, and too rough to easily talk about,” he said.
Culture is deeply intertwined with politics in Ukraine, and Zhadan, involved in politics since the early 1990s, knows this all too well.
He has taken part in every revolution the country has seen since independence in 1991, becoming a prominent voice of Kharkiv’s local Euromaidan in 2014, fighting against the made-up ‘Russian Spring’ manufactured by Kremlin proxies in Ukraine’s Donbas.
He believes writers have a role to play in the fight against Russia’s colonial attitude, by building the country’s identity through art. As mediators, writers can’t stay idle in such times.
“We are a highly politicized society, which is understandable because we’re a postcolonial society and we’re trying to build our own identity to escape the influence of the Russian empire.”
This is what distances Ukraine from Russia, he said. “And Russians know this, which is why from time to time, they try to destroy Ukrainian literature.”
Ukrainian writers paid a hefty price to defend their language, he said, referring to the “Executed Renaissance,” the systematic execution of Ukraine’s intelligentsia by Stalin from the 1930s to 1940s.
In the early 1920s, Ukrainian artists and writers settled in Kharkiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine, making it an avant-garde hub. But Stalin soon cracked down on Ukrainian intellectuals who threatened the dictator’s totalitarian dream of Soviet culture.
Many of these writers and poets lived in the “Slovo” Building in central Kharkiv, a cooperative built in the late 1920s to house prominent Ukrainian cultural figures. Already seen as a threat, the phone lines were tapped and mass arrests ensued. On March 7, the building once again came under attack – this time damaged by Russian shelling.
The campaign to exterminate the Ukrainian intelligentsia culminated during the 1938-1938 Great Purge, with 223 writers being imprisoned or executed.
According to estimates, nearly 30,000 Ukrainian intellectuals were repressed during Stalin’s Great Purge. In 1930, the works of 259 Ukrainian writers were published, but by 1938 only 36 of those writers remained – the rest were executed, exiled, disappeared, or committed suicide.
Colonial empire
Zhadan always refers to Russia as “the empire,” a term suiting Russia’s colonial behavior towards Ukraine. For Russians, Ukraine is just a part of Russia, Zhadan said.
“Ukraine is just an appendix, a part of Russia, the same people that for some reason they constantly destroy, and Ukrainians have no right to their own independence,” he said.
“And Ukrainians see a history where they are their own people, an independent nation, who was always opposed to the empire.”
Ukrainians want to build an independent and democratic country while Russians feel quite comfortable in totalitarian conditions, Zhadan added.
The “Executed Renaissance” is just one of many dark chapters in Russia’s colonial attitude towards Ukraine — a behavior Zhadan describes as a clash between two countries that are light-years away over their perception of past and future.
“In their vision of the past, the main role belongs to Russians, as they monopolized the whole memory of World War II,” a distorted vision they still use today to justify the horrors they inflict on Ukraine.
Yet Russia’s invasion showed Ukrainians that they have no other option than to completely disconnect from Russians because any mingling with Russia ends up with the destruction of Ukraine, he said.
“I think Russians have done everything for Ukraine to be destined for its independence and freedom.”
While we were leaving the comfortable darkness of Kharkiv’s Puppet Theater for the city, Zhadan’s words reverberated in the city’s windy streets, intertwined with a far echo of his poem:
“To stand and talk about the night
Stand and listen to the voices
of shepherds in the fog
incanting over every single
lost soul.”
Russian president Vladimir Putin in Moscow. (photo: Mikhail Metzel/Getty)
To date, Putin has justified the invasion by saying, baselessly, that he's preventing Ukraine and what he described as a neo-Nazi government from committing genocide against ethnic Russians. He has also said that NATO's eastward expansion threatens Russia's national security.
Putin, speaking with students on Thursday after visiting an exhibition about Peter the Great, Russia's first emperor credited with making the country a major power in the early 18th century, compared himself to the ruler and said they were both destined to expand Russia.
"Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well," he said. "And if we operate on the premise that these basic values constitute the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in achieving our goals."
In addition to seizing territory in a 21-year war with Sweden in the late 17th century, Peter captured the territory of Azov from Crimean Tatars, who were aligned with Turkey, in 1696, and he seized territory on the Caspian Sea from Persia in 1723.
"On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it," Putin said of Peter. "He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was doing."
In a tweet on Friday, Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said Putin's comments prove his "contrived pretexts of people's genocide" in Ukraine were false and demanded "immediate de-imperialization" of Russia.
Putin's attempts to expand Russian territory started long before his invasion of Ukraine on February 24.
Putin invaded Georgia in 2008 and still backs pro-Kremlin factions there. In 2014, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine and invaded the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine via proxies that same year.
Just two days before invading Ukraine, Putin said claims he wanted to restore the Russian empire were false.
But Western leaders have long maintained that this was not the case.
"He has much larger ambitions than Ukraine. He wants to, in fact, reestablish the former Soviet Union. That's what this is about," President Joe Biden said on February 24, the first day of the invasion.
Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, moderates a panel discussion during the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center February 23, 2017, in National Harbor, Maryland. (photo: Getty)
The Post reported last month that Thomas sent emails to two Arizona House members, in November and December 2020, urging them to help overturn Biden’s win by selecting presidential electors — a responsibility that belongs to Arizona voters under state law. Thomas sent the messages using FreeRoots, an online platform intended to make it easy to send pre-written emails to multiple elected officials.
New documents show that Thomas indeed used the platform to reach many lawmakers simultaneously. On Nov. 9, she sent identical emails to 20 members of the Arizona House and seven Arizona state senators. That represents more than half of the Republican members of the state legislature at the time.
The message, just days after media organizations called the race for Biden in Arizona and nationwide, urged lawmakers to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure” and claimed that the responsibility to choose electors was “yours and yours alone.” They had “power to fight back against fraud” and “ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen,” the email said.
Among the lawmakers who received the email was then-Rep. Anthony Kern, a Stop the Steal supporter who lost his reelection bid in November 2020 and then joined U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) and others as a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence, a last-ditch effort to overturn Biden’s victory. Kern was photographed outside the Capitol during the riot on Jan. 6 but has said he did not enter the building, according to local media reports.
Kern did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. He is seeking his party’s nomination for a seat in the Arizona state Senate and has been endorsed by former president Donald Trump.
On Dec. 13, the day before members of the electoral college were slated to cast their votes and seal Biden’s victory, Thomas emailed 22 House members and one senator. “Before you choose your state’s Electors … consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead,” the email said. It linked to a video of a man urging swing-state lawmakers to “put things right” and “not give in to cowardice.”
Speaker of the House Russell “Rusty” Bowers and Rep. Shawnna Bolick, the two recipients previously identified, told The Post in May that the outreach from Thomas had no bearing on their decisions about how to handle claims of election fraud.
But the revelation that Ginni Thomas was directly involved in pressing them to override the popular vote — an act that would have been without precedent in the modern era — intensified questions about whether her husband should recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 presidential election and attempts to subvert it. Ginni Thomas’s status as a leading conservative political activist has set her apart from other spouses of Supreme Court justices.
Ginni Thomas did not respond to requests seeking comment for this report. She has long insisted that she and her husband operate in separate professional lanes.
A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not respond to questions for Clarence Thomas.
The Post obtained the emails under Arizona’s public records law, which — unlike the laws in some other key 2020 swing states — allows the public to access emails, text messages and other written communications to and from state lawmakers.
In March, The Post and CBS News obtained text messages that Ginni Thomas sent in the weeks after the 2020 election to Mark Meadows, then Trump’s chief of staff. The messages showed Thomas spreading false claims and urging Meadows to keep fighting for Trump to remain in the White House.
“That conflict of interest just screams at you,” said Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who serves on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, on MSNBC in response to The Post’s May report revealing the emails to Bolick and Bowers.
Schiff pointed to Clarence Thomas’s decision not to recuse when Trump went to the Supreme Court to try to block the House committee from getting access to his White House records. The high court declined to block the release of those documents. Thomas, siding with Trump, was the only justice to dissent.
“Here you have the wife of a Supreme Court justice,” Schiff said, trying to “get Arizona to improperly cast aside the votes of millions. And also, to add to it, her husband on the Supreme Court, writing a dissent in a case arguing against providing records to Congress that might have revealed some of these same e-mails.”
After the May article, Mark Paoletta — a longtime ally of the Thomases who, as a member of the George H.W. Bush administration, played a role in the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court — confirmed that Ginni Thomas signed the emails, but he sought to minimize her role.
“Ginni signed her name to a pre-written form letter that was signed by thousands of citizens and sent to state legislators across the country,” Paoletta wrote on Twitter on May 20. He described Thomas’s activities as “a private citizen joining a letter writing campaign” and added, sarcastically, “How disturbing, what a threat!”
The letter-writing campaigns were organized on FreeRoots.com, which advertised itself as a platform to amplify grass-roots advocacy across the political spectrum. A Post review of its archived webpages shows that it was heavily used in late 2020 by groups seeking to overturn the presidential election results.
One of those groups was Every Legal Vote, which organized the campaign to send the message that Ginni Thomas sent on Nov. 9. In those first days after the Nov. 3 election, Every Legal Vote described itself online as a “labor of love by American citizens, in partnership” with the nonprofit United in Purpose, according to webpages preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. United in Purpose, which harnesses data to galvanize conservative Christian voters, in recent years hosted luncheons where Thomas presented her Impact Awards to right-wing leaders.
On Dec. 14, 2020, Biden electors in Arizona cast their votes, after the election results were certified by Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) and Gov. Doug Ducey (R).
Trump electors met in Arizona that day and signed a document declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified Electors.” One of them was Kern, the outgoing state representative.
Kern was among more than a dozen lawmakers who signed on to a letter to Congress that same day calling for the state’s electoral votes to go to Trump or “be nullified completely until a full forensic audit can be conducted.”
The lawmakers’ letter was an exhibit in Kern and Gohmert’s lawsuit asking a federal court to rule that Pence had the “exclusive authority and sole discretion” in deciding which electoral votes to count for a given state. The plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to intervene after the case was dismissed in lower courts. The day after the Jan. 6 insurrection, the court declined in an unsigned order.
Palestinians attend the state funeral of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh at the President's Residency in Ramallah. (photo: Ilia Yefimovich/Getty)
From the persecution of Chevron opponent Steven Donziger to the murder of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, the US government disregards free speech in situations where corporate allies stand to benefit.
After Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem debunked Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s claims that a stray bullet fired by Palestinians struck Abu Akleh, the Israeli government called for a joint probe into the journalist’s murder with the Palestinian Authority (PA), requesting the handover of the bullet and Abu Akleh’s body to conduct an autopsy. The PA has refused, citing the historic lack of transparency and accountability in investigations of other civilian murders and the illegal occupation of the IDF in the Palestinian territories. The PA instead chose to conduct an independent probe.
The PA’s investigation concluded that the bullet matched a weapon regularly used by the IDF, the Ruger Mini-14. Al Jazeera correspondent Nida Ibrahim reported that the bullet that killed Abu Akleh “was 5.56mm, and it corresponds with Mini Ruger sniper fire weapon.” The Israeli probe has made no progress.
The US State Department has made clear that it will rely on the findings from Israel’s investigation. The government’s nominal commitment to free speech, it appears, is less important than placating its allies, ranging from foreign governments to multinational corporations.
Silence From the States
A small number of Congressmen, led by Representatives André Carson (D-IN) and Lou Correa (D-CA), have penned a letter requesting the Biden administration conduct an independent investigation of the Palestinian American journalist’s murder. “We . . . request the US Department of State determines whether any US laws protecting Ms. Abu Akleh, an American citizen, were violated,” reads the letter. “As an American, Ms. Abu Akleh was entitled to the full protections afforded to US citizens living abroad.”
Despite the extrajudicial murder of an American citizen and journalist by a foreign government, the Biden administration has refused to conduct its own independent investigation. Instead, Secretary of State Antony Blinken intends to rely on the results of the Israeli probe, which refuses to proceed without Abu Akleh’s buried body.
This is not the first time the US federal government has refused to investigate the death of an American citizen at the hands of the IDF. In 2003, it left the murder of activist Rachel Corrie in Gaza to be deliberated by Israeli courts.
The call for US-led investigations into IDF war crimes in Israel’s illegally occupied Palestinian territories has fallen on deaf ears for many years. The IDF receives $3.8 billion in American public money annually in military aid, as per the renewed ten-year Memorandum of Understanding signed by the Obama administration in 2016. Demanding a US-led investigation into the murder of Abu Akleh opens legal avenues for Palestinian and American activists and politicians alike to challenge this continued financial support to the IDF.
The United States absolutely has the power to conduct such investigations. The freedom “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of choice” is protected by Article 19(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, of which the US and Israel are ratified signatories.
And should the investigation reveal war crimes, the United States’ financial support for the IDF would come under automatic scrutiny. As per Leahy Law, the US federal government is prohibited from providing “assistance . . . to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of State has credible information that such unit has committed a gross violation of human rights.”
A US-led investigation is critical not only to attaining accountability for the IDF’s murder of Abu Akleh and eighty-six other journalists reporting from the Palestinian territories since 1967, but for challenging Israel’s taxpayer-funded illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories. And that’s precisely why the State Department is uninterested in pursuing it.
The Military-Industrial Complex
Given the United States’ long history of providing diplomatic immunity to Israel, having vetoed at least 53 UN Security Council resolutions critical of Israel in the past five decades, the United States’ lack of interest in accountability for the murder of Abu Akleh comes as no surprise. However, outside the well-covered geopolitical reasons the United States has in historically giving Israel impunity, one underreported facet of the human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories is the vested interest of the American military-industrial complex in arming the IDF.
The sniper rifle used to murder Abu Akleh, the Ruger Mini-14, is manufactured and sold by American weapons manufacturer Sturm, Ruger … Co., which has a distribution dealership in Israel and promotes its firearms by highlighting the IDF’s use of them.
Israel is the fourteenth-largest importer of weapons globally, with 92 percent of its imports coming from the United States. Effectively, US military aid to Israel subsidizes purchases from American weapons manufacturers and defense contractors. As sociologist Max Ajl writes, “‘US ‘military assistance,’ more accurately understood as a circular flow through which US weapons firms profit off the colonization of Palestinian land and Israeli destabilization of the surrounding states, is a long-term structuring element of the U.S.-Israel ‘special relationship.'” In other words, the neoliberal economic orientation that tasks the government with promoting the interests and profits of private-sector firms above all else extends to US foreign policy.
According to Open Secrets, between 2001 and 2021, American defense contractors and weapons manufacturers directed “$285 million in campaign contributions and $2.5 billion in lobbying spending to influence defense policy.” These companies include Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Technologies, and General Dynamics.
Among the most prominent lobbyists for both domestic and foreign arms sales are the infamous National Rifle Association and the lesser-known National Shooting Sports Foundation, which spent $1.2 million in lobbying expenditures in 2021. The NSSF’s president, Steve Sanetti, was a chief executive and later president of Sturm, Ruger … Co. — the manufacturer of Abu Akleh’s murder weapon.
Neoliberal Censorship
The insinuation that American defense contractors and weapons manufacturers condone the killing of American journalists may invite disbelief. But a reflection on the case of human rights lawyer Steven Donziger attests to its plausibility.
Donziger successfully represented the indigenous Ecuadorian group the Amazon Defense Coalition in its legal battle against American oil company Texaco, holding them accountable for 16 billion gallons of toxic waste dumped into the Lago Agrio region of the Amazon rainforest between 1972 and 1992. Since then, Donziger’s professional and personal life have been under attack by Texaco’s parent company, the American multinational oil giant Chevron.
In 2011, Chevron refused to pay the $9.5 billion settlement for the pollution carried out three decades prior, and launched a countersuit against Donziger accusing him of bribery and fraud. The company claimed that Donziger embellished the extent of the pollution and Texaco’s accountability, having been bribed by Ecuadorian officials to scapegoat the oil company for the state’s role in failing to mitigate the pollution in Lago Agrio. Chevron’s claim has been thoroughly debunked.
Leaked Chevron documents from 2009 reveal that company officials made it an explicit long-term strategy to “demonize” the human rights lawyer to turn the tide of the legal battle against him. Meanwhile, the Amazon Defense Coalition has not received any of the agreed settlement.
Chevron filed a “racketeer influenced and corrupt organizations” (RICO) suit, usually levied against organized crime rings, against Donziger. The federal court judge who presided over Donziger’s case was Lewis A. Kaplan, a former corporate lawyer for the tobacco industry who held investments in Chevron. Kaplan found Donziger guilty of the RICO charges in 2014.
The district attorney’s office in New York refused to prosecute Donziger despite Kaplan’s ruling. Kaplan then took an unusual action for a federal court judge: he invoked Rule 42, which allows a federal judge to appoint a private law firm to prosecute on behalf of the courts if prosecutors refuse to. Kaplan appointed the law firm Seward … Kissel, of which Chevron is a regular client, to represent the US government and ensure that the criminal charges would be brought against Donziger.
Leading up to the trial against Donziger by Seward … Kissel, in another unusual move, Kaplan skipped the standard random assignment process for choosing a judge and directly appointed senior District Judge Loretta Preska to preside over the case. Preska has served on the advisory board of the Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a significant financial contributor.
In August 2019, Preska confiscated Donziger’s passport and sentenced him to house arrest for the trial’s duration. On October 1, 2021, after two years of house arrest, Preska found Donziger guilty of all charges and sentenced him to six months in jail, the maximum sentence.
“Corporate influence over our federal judiciary has increased dramatically in recent years,” said Donziger during the trial. Chevron “has captured an element of power from the government and deployed it against a human rights activist.”
The Corporate War on Free Speech
In the Steven Donziger’s case, the United States took direct action on behalf of the oil and gas industry. In Shireen Abu Akleh’s case, the US is pursuing inaction, at least partly on behalf of arms manufacturers and the broader military-industrial complex.
Donziger was released from prison April 26 and is finally free of persecution. But Abu Akleh is dead and, due to the United States’ refusal to launch an independent investigation, is unlikely to have justice.
In both cases, the US government has sided with corporate interests over the value of free speech, including journalists’ right to report without fear of harassment and violence and the public’s right to information from a free press. Abu Akleh and Donziger’s cases reveal the cold, calculated pragmatism with which multinational corporations rope the US government into their project of maintaining global economic hegemony.
Our news cycles are dominated by talk of “cancel culture,” and yet average people pay little attention to cases like Abu Akleh’s and Donziger’s. If the mainstream conversation is going to center on free speech, it should highlight the blatant collusion between neoliberal governments and multinational corporations to silence journalists and activists challenging exploitation and injustice around the world.
Sellers post photos of a gun with accompanying language designed to shift the sales conversation to private message. (photo: AP)
The Post reported that Facebook’s guidelines also include a five-strikes system for gun sellers and buyers who call for violence or voice support for a “known dangerous organization” before they lose Facebook access. Facebook reportedly banned the private sale of guns on its website more than five years ago but has not publicly explained in much detail how the company enforces the ban.
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone told the Post that the company takes down posts that violate its policy quickly and applies increasingly severe consequences for repeat offenders, up to permanently suspending an account.
“If we identify any serious violations that have the potential for real-world harm, we don’t hesitate to contact law enforcement,” Stone said.
He said almost 90 percent of those who receive one strike will not receive more than one additional one, adding that violators are mostly unaware of Facebook’s policies and don’t violate them again once they are told about it.
But the Post reported that Facebook did not dispute that it has a 10-strikes rule.
After the story was published, Stone responded on Twitter, saying the article “distorts” the company’s approach to penalizing violators.
The Post reported that Facebook’s system for enforcing the ban is “shrouded in secrecy,” but Stone posted that the guidelines are available online. They lay out the penalties for up to “five or more” violations but do not mention the 10-strike system. The story does mention this system but states the website does not explain what warrants a full ban or how certain types of policy violations are compared to others.
Stone wrote that penalties become more severe for repeated violations and most violations are unintentional, which the Post included in its story. He wrote the story “excluded key examples” but did not clarify what they might be.
Stone added that there are “one-and-done” violations and said the story mischaracterized how strikes and “other factors” cause an account to be removed at one strike. The Post’s story does note that users who post child pornography or terrorist images are immediately removed.
The two reporters on the story spoke to six current and former employees about the policy on condition of anonymity. Two of them said the strike threshold for gun sale violations was more than 10 until 2020, but it was reduced to 10 after some argued it was too high.
The company introduced a five-strike rule for gun sellers with other types of violations late last year. A user will be immediately removed and referred to law enforcement for making a direct or “credible” threat to kill a specific person, but this happens rarely, the employees said.
The story came amid renewed discussions on gun violence following the latest rash of mass shootings.
Starbucks' lawyers met twice with the unionized workers of the Ithaca store to offer them the option of applying to transfer to another location after announcing the store closure. (photo: Getty)
ALSO SEE: Federal Judge Rules Starbucks Doesn't Need to Reinstate
Employees Fired for Union Activity
This decision has left workers with less than a week's notice and resulted in them calling for a boycott of other Starbucks stores around the city.
Starbucks' lawyers met twice with the unionized workers of the store to offer them the option of applying to transfer to another location. However, the company would not guarantee the workers' jobs moving forward, leaving them scrambling.
Cornell student Alayna Earl, who is a member of the union, has been working as a barista for two years at the store, which is the closest Starbucks to campus.
Most Cornell students don't have cars, she said, so even if they are transferred to another store, workers who are also students would face the challenge of getting to and from work.
Though unable to attend the protest, Earl sat in on the second bargaining meeting between unionized workers and lawyers on Wednesday. She said the conversation went in circles, with lawyers reiterating that they would not reopen the store anytime soon. Along with not being guaranteed transfers, the lawyers told the workers that they could not guarantee the same hours.
"One thing that we're worried about is if we transfer to a different store that already has a fully staffed team, are we still gonna get the same amount of hours that we've been getting at our old store?" Earl said.
Questions remain as to why the College Avenue store had to close, as Starbucks refused to provide company data on the decision. Starbucks did not respond to NPR's request for comment.
During the Wednesday meeting, Earl said that the reasoning provided by the lawyers didn't resonate with her or the workers.
"They said things like ... our efficiency wasn't up to par, and they wanted to improve the customer and barista experience. But we weren't consulted. They didn't ask whether our store was efficient for us, it was kind of based on Starbucks standards, but then they weren't really going over what the standards entailed," she added.
Earl said that to her, the coffee shop has been integral to Cornell's campus, with customers coming in and out all the time for coffee and to study, which sparked even more confusion among workers regarding its closing.
"A lot of us were confused [as to] why it was closing so suddenly because [the lawyers] said things about us not being efficient, or closing for business needs. But it's the most profitable store in Ithaca because of how close it is to Cornell's campus and because of how many students visit that store each day," Earl said.
Workers speculate that the store's closing is in retaliation for their unionization.
Two months ago, the College Avenue store had achieved a historic victory after it became unionized on the same day as the other two stores in Ithaca, making national headlines as the first city to have all unionized Starbucks stores.
Out of the three stores, the workers at the College Avenue location were the most vocal when it came to demanding what they labeled as fair treatment and a quality work environment. On April 19, they had held a strike due to a broken, overflowing grease trap in the store.
The workers now believe that this, along with their historic unionization, angered Starbucks leaders and provoked them to close the store.
"College Avenue was a pretty vocal store in terms of unionizing. I think that people were having issues with us voicing our concerns and actually speaking up. I think rather than addressing our needs, they closed the store with little to no notice," Earl said.
Though the next steps are still unclear, Earl said that she and others hope to get their old store back and job security. At the least, they hope for fair working conditions and for their voices to be heard. The boycott has received much support not only from local workers, but also from Starbucks unions across the country via social media.
"We do feel supported by other Starbucks workers. I think that all the stores in Ithaca have a tight-knit community, and we are willing to support each other if we notice that something isn't being done correctly, or being done fairly," Earl said.
Pola Lopez, with her dog Chiquita, contemplates the remains of a ponderosa pine grove on family property in Tierra Monte. (photo: Michael Benanav/Searchlight New Mexico)
Residents of the New Mexico canyon scorched by the Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon fires blame the government for the acres they lost
Pola Lopez gestures in their direction, southward toward Hermits Peak. Before a tsunami of flames ripped through this canyon in Tierra Monte, the canopy was so thick that it was impossible to see the nearby mountain. But two prescribed burns set by the US Forest Service (USFS) – one on Hermits Peak, the other in Calf Canyon to the south-west – have changed all that.
When the blazes merged to form the biggest wildfire in state history, flames engulfed nearly 160 acres (65 hectares) of riparian forest that once belonged to her father. “It wiped us out,” Lopez said.
Like so many in the devastation zone, she squarely places the blame on the USFS, not only for starting a prescribed burn in the windy month of April – when gusts reached 70 mpg – but for a century of conflict with rural communities. Known locally as La Floresta, the USFS is often seen as a feudal lord, a faraway government entity that has accumulated vast holdings with little idea of how to properly steward them or enough funds to do the job.
The community’s fury runs almost too deep for words, says Antonia Roybal-Mack, a Mora native whose family lost hundreds of acres to the fire. “Really pissed off is literally an understatement.”
In nearly two dozen interviews with people affected by the Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon fires, the same sentiments emerge: the USFS has a history, locals argue, of mismanaging the forest. In particular, they say the agency has limited or prohibited people from the long-held tradition of collecting firewood and other timber, the kind of maintenance the forest needed. If they had been able to tend to it the way they had for generations, they believe the conflagration would have been far less devastating.
“The prescribed burn was the match,” says Roybal-Mack. “But the fuel was there for decades when they wouldn’t let people into the forest to collect vigas or firewood.”
Centuries-old harms
Embedded in the tension is the history of land grants in New Mexico, a system that allowed Spanish settlers, Indigenous peoples and others of mixed descent to obtain tracts of land at the edge of the northern frontier, during Spanish and Mexican rule. From the late 1600s forward, scores of these settlers were granted ejidos, or wildland and forest commons.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, a mostly Anglo cadre of speculators and profiteers began to claim ownership of the commons, using subterfuge and legal loopholes to essentially transfer the forests to private ownership or the federal government. Well over 1m acres (405,000 hectares) eventually ended up in the jurisdiction of the USFS, the University of New Mexico’s Land Grant Studies Program estimates.
In today’s fire zone, the descendants of the dispossessed are among the Forest Service’s sharpest critics. They are joined in their distress by villagers, small-scale farmers, loggers, foragers of traditional food and medicine, Indigenous peoples and acequia parciantes, caretakers of the age-old irrigation ditches now compromised by flames. The USFS has fallen short of its commitment to the land and those who live alongside it, they say.
As the conflagration whips through public and private lands – as of 6 June, burning nearly 500 sq miles – anger, frustration and grief define the tenor at public forums, in evacuation centers and on social media. Some locals say that, if given the chance, they would have practiced far more sustainable forest thinning in partnership with the USFS, thereby lessening the impacts of a catastrophic fire. Others criticize the way fire crews heavily relied on backburning, a fire-suppression tactic that involves starting smaller fires to deprive a larger wildfire of fuel.
The Santa Fe national forest, for its part, is committed to working in tandem with local residents and sustaining “traditional communities, their cultures, traditions and values”, according to spokesperson Julie Anne Overton. “Collaboration and partnerships will continue to be the foundation for our work in managing our public lands,” she says.
But so fierce are the emotions and so profound the losses that Roybal-Mack, a lawyer who now lives in Albuquerque, expects to file a lawsuit on behalf of hundreds of plaintiffs, along with the firm Bauman … Dow.
The forests belong to the people, as San Miguel county commissioner Janice Varela puts it.
“We locals, we feel like, hell yes, it’s our forest,” says Varela, a longtime water activist. “Yeah, we let the forest service manage it and we let everybody in the world come here, but it’s our forest. We have ownership from our proximity to it, from our history and cultural connection to it, from our heart.”
‘It was Armageddon’
Chaos ensued when villagers from Mora were ordered to evacuate on 2 May, nearly a month after the fire began. “It was Armageddon,” says Travis Regensberg, a general contractor who towed his bulldozer in from Las Vegas to cut fire lines around homes.
The closest command center and evacuation center were 40 minutes away in Las Vegas. Everyone, especially the elderly, felt “defenseless and lost”, Regensberg says. There seemed to be no one in authority on the ground.
Anger reached yet another height in late May, when the forest service released the news that it was responsible for the Calf Canyon fire. A botched prescribed burn in January had turned it into a “sleeper fire” that smoldered for months before leaping to life in April and merging with the Hermits Peak inferno – also ignited by a prescribed burn gone wrong.
Back-burning, however, has caused the greatest enmity. To fight ferocious blazes, wildland firefighters are trained to set small back fires to burn grasses and other tinder, starving the larger blaze of fuel.
In Mora, back-burns were set without private property lines in mind, says Patrick Griego, the owner of a small logging business who stayed behind to protect his property. He saw several of his neighbors’ lands get back-burned and, determined to save his 400 acres (162 hectares) from a similar fate, cut an extensive fire line with his grader. The wildfire was still distant, he says. To his shock, wildland firefighters appeared one night and back-burned a swath of his property anyway. He recalls watching, seething and feeling helpless, as they set his land on fire. The flames shot 30 feet high in places. Forty acres (16 hectares) were gone in 15 minutes, he says.
“I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say.” He calls the people who set the back-burn “arsonists”.
Some residents say they’ve felt like sacrificial lambs, losing their land for what was arguably the greater good. The back-burns, they add, seemed to be excessive.
It’s not that back-burning isn’t helpful, says Isaac Herrera, the Guadalupita volunteer fire department chief, who himself lost 130 acres (53 hectares) to the fire. “It’s a great tool when done responsibly,” he notes. But Herrera believes there were times in recent weeks when it was “done irresponsibly and recklessly”, disregarding the deep knowledge of the terrain that he and other locals possess.
In response, managers of the wildfire-fighting effort say they had to make decisions amid the chaos. “We don’t want to burn up anybody’s timber,” says Jayson Coil, who oversees the Southwest Area Incident management team. “But there’s been a lot of choices that we’ve been forced to make about what’s most important to save.” Their first priority is to save homes, for example.
If the conditions had afforded firefighters more time and resources, Coil says – and if they’d had several choices at hand – “we would pick something different”.
The ever-present past
Recovering from the fire will depend to a certain extent on extinguishing pain from the past. And the past can seem omnipresent in northern New Mexico.
Over the past 60 years, intense conflicts have erupted over how the USFS has managed the forests, limiting people’s ability to graze livestock, hunt for food and repair acequia headwaters. Some of the protests are still talked about.
In 1966, land-grant activists occupied part of the Carson national forest, declaring that the land had been appropriated; a year later, they carried out an infamous armed raid on the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse, attempting to win the release of fellow activists.
Even a casual conversation in the fire zone can suddenly pivot to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which promised – and failed – to protect the rights of land-grantees and allow them to keep their commons.
Today, almost one-quarter of the Carson and Santa Fe national forests are made up of former land-grant commons. In other parts of the state – in a district of the Cibola national forest, for example – a staggering 60% is made up of these commons, research shows.
The forest service has taken local needs into account, spokesperson Overton wrote in an email. For example, people with permits are allowed to cut firewood in designated areas, she notes. Many employees of the Santa Fe national forest are members of the community, she adds. “They grew up here, they have the same ties to community and cultural heritage as their neighbors.”
But today, this offers little comfort. Pola Lopez can still remember how her father, the late state senator Junio Lopez, made it his life’s mission to reunite the dispossessed with their land. He was unable to produce wide-scale change, however, and the purchase of the 157 acres (64 hectares) now blackened by the fire was a kind of consolation prize. That land, his daughter says, “became his sanctuary”.
In 2009, Pola had the property designated a conservation easement, to protect the forest from development for what she thought was perpetuity.
Now, the willows and scrubby oak are razed and the stream that once flooded the banks of the canyon are completely desiccated. But Lopez is most brokenhearted by the loss of the old-growth forest, the “grandfather trees”, as she calls them. Some were scorched so badly that only holes full of ash remain.
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