American Gulag

 

BY EVE OTTENBERG

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The U.S. tops any other country in the world for its number of prisoners – over 2,300,000. China, by contrast, has roughly 200,000 prisoners. But the U.S. general population is only 330 million, while China’s is 1.4 billion. American prisoners constitute a much larger percentage of the population than those in any other nation. The U.S. has clung to this dubious distinction for decades.

Equaling the Soviet gulag at its height in the 1950s in numbers of prisoners, the U.S. also locks away 61,000 of them in the torture called solitary confinement and 2700 in the terror called death row. These are not the policies and actions of a civilized society. This is barbarism. As long as this continues, any American politician who climbs up on a high horse about government abuse of citizens in another country is a pathetic hypocrite who deserves to be laughed out of public life.

Privatization of prisons has made things worse. Of federal prisoners, 19.1 percent are in private prisons, as are 6.8 percent of those in state prisons. These privately run hellholes turn a profit by jacking up fees for inmates from everything from phone calls to mail to video-conferencing with a lawyer. They also make money by skimping on decent food and proper medicines and have lots of other ingenious ways to squeeze dollars out of their captives. Politically, private prisons are a reactionary force, promoting, naturally, tougher crime laws and longer sentences. Because that’s how they make money – for them, the more prisoners, the better. Private prisons contributed to the 408 percent increase in the U.S. prison population from 1978 to 2014.

Originally, Quakers advanced prisons, as a reform, an alternative to the horrors of corporal and capital punishment. But, as abolitionist Mariame Kaba argues in her new book, We Do This Till We Free Us, prisons became their own kind of nightmare. The introduction quotes Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “We live in the age of human sacrifice.” Prisoners are our human sacrifice: people locked away in tiny cages for decades. In response, Kaba would abolish prisons and the police. She advocates transformative and restorative justice, which would impose consequences on those who harm – such as reparations, public apologies, loss of any position of power or privilege, counseling, etc. – but not destroy them. Kaba writes: “Prison is simply a bad and ineffective way to address violence and crime.”

Unsurprisingly, her prescriptions would necessitate a social and economic revolution, for which Kaba, who is anti-capitalist, has worked for years. “Harm originates from situations dominated by stress, scarcity and oppression,” she writes. “Our punishment system, which is grounded in genocide and slavery and which has continued the functions and themes of those atrocities, can never be made just.”

Like many abolitionists, Kaba drew hope from the George Floyd rebellion last summer and joined those calling for defunding the police.  Here’s her list of police “reforms” to be avoided: “1) reforms that allocate more money for the police; 2) reforms advocating for more police; 3) technology-focused reforms; 4) individual dialogues with individual cops funded by tax dollars.” Instead she supports: “1) reparations to victims and families of police violence; 2) decreasing policing and prison funding and redirecting it to other social goods; 3) elected independent civilian police accountability boards with power to investigate, discipline and fire cops and administrators; 4) disarming the police; 5) simplifying dissolving police departments; 6) data transparency (stops, arrests, budgeting, etc.)”

Kaba is against police or prison reform. She does not describe policing as broken, because that reaffirms reform and undercuts abolition. Police kill about 1000 people a year, she notes, but since 2005, there have been only 110 prosecutions of officers who shot people, with convictions in less than 42 cases. But Kaba also notes abolitionists’ successes: removing former Illinois state’s attorney Anita Alvarez; helping to win reparations for torture victims during the reign of “infamous police commander Jon Burge in Chicago – a city that has, over the past two decades, become a hub of abolitionist organizing;” and several campaigns to free women imprisoned for self-defense against sexual abusers.

Women’s right to self-defense against abuse, whether it’s a wife and her husband or a sex worker and a client, is central to Kaba’s thinking. In fact, she titled one chapter, “Organizing to End Sexual Violence Without Prisons.” She describes the abuse survivor’s position thus: “I was hurt. Somebody did it. I want them to know that they did it. I want to see that they have some remorse for having done it.” That’s a far cry from tossing the abuser in a cage for decades, so that by the time he’s free, he’s elderly and unemployable.

But the even deadlier consequence of the current criminal justice approach is that women who defend themselves land in prison. “Prosecuting and incarcerating survivors of violence,” Kaba writes “puts courts and prisons in the same punitive role as their abusers.” Here she reviews several prominent cases, for instance, Cyntoia Brown who, aged 16, “shot and killed Johnny Allen, a 43-year-old Nashville resident who picked her up for sex.” Brown explained she shot him in self-defense. She was “tried as an adult and was convicted of first degree premeditated murder and ‘especially aggravated robbery.’” With concurrent life-sentences, she would have been eligible for parole after 51 years in prison. However, Brown’s case drew much media attention, and she was pardoned. Kaba cites other such cases.

“In 2017, there were 219,000 women in U.S. prisons and jails, most of them poor and of color,” Kaba writes, observing that the incarceration rate for black women is double that for white women. She argues that abuse survivors are systematically punished “for trying to protect themselves and their children,” that it is “hurt people who hurt other people,” and that prison simply should not figure in the equation.

This book recounts terrible stories of women punished for defending themselves, but one, from Florida, presents a very bitter irony: Marissa Alexander fired a warning shot into the air to force her violent husband to back off. For this, she faced 60 years in prison. She would have seemed a likely candidate for Florida’s infamous “stand your ground law” – right? But the judge said no, because she had not demonstrated fear. She was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison. (After three years in prison and two under house arrest, she was released, thanks to a national campaign to free her and to some very effective lawyers.)

One cannot help wondering, had Marissa Alexander been male and white, like George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin – how would the judge have ruled then? Would he have let her go, like the judge who let Zimmerman off? Because apparently, at least in Florida, what’s self-defense for a man is outright attempted murder for a woman.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Birdbrain. She can be reached at her website.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/02/26/american-gulag/

Give Dealmaking Another Try

 

The Biden Administration has the chance to start building a better relationship with Iran.

(By Dmitriy Prayzel/Shutterstock)

FEBRUARY 23, 2021

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12:01 AM

PETER VAN BUREN

As the new administration plays dress up to re-drag us through the muck of failed Obama-era politics, one leftover bit of foreign policy does deserve a second chance: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or Iran nuclear deal. Steps toward peace were a good idea in 2015 and an even better idea in 2021.

The United States and Iran again have an opportunity to end decades of hostility. The nuclear deal, however imperfect, would bind the two nations, along with NATO and other actors, to years of engagement, opening the door to fuller relationships. As Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif wrote, the accord “is not a ceiling, but a solid foundation.” For roughly the last six decades the U.S.-Iranian relationship has been antagonistic, unproductive, and often violent. Untangling that requires small steps forward; the accord could be one of them.

As Biden takes control, then, Iran remains isolated globally. At the same time, Iran is in many ways an even stronger regional power than it was a few years ago, and the U.S. thus weaker. The U.S. eliminated Iran’s border enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and handed Tehran the Iraqi oil reserves and pipeline pathway to the sea. U.S. friction with China assures they will not participate in sanctions on Iran and will remain a steady petroleum customer. While the U.S.-Iran proxy war is over in Iraq, it continues in Yemen and Syria, and maybe elsewhere in Africa; holding the U.S. to a status-quo draw counts as a win for Iran.

It’s an ugly history. Things began to fall apart in 1953 when the CIA helped oust Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, who made the mistake of trying to nationalize Iran’s oil industry. The White House installed a puppet leader, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and lapped up the oil like a hobo scoring a bottle of the good stuff. Through the 1970s, the U.S. also supplied nuclear fuel and technology to build on Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” initiative, which had kicked off Iran’s nuclear program in 1957.

Fast forward to 1979, when the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in the Islamic Revolution. Iranians took over the American Embassy in Tehran, holding hostages for 444 days. The antagonism continued in the 1980s as the U.S. went on to assist Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran. In 1988, an American cruiser in the Persian Gulf shot down a civilian Iran Air flight, killing all 290 people on board. 

In 2003, when Iran reached out to Washington following American military successes in Afghanistan, George W. Bush declared the country part of his “Axis of Evil.” Iran responded to this by taking control of the Shiite insurgency in Iraq. At one point U.S. forces raided an Iranian diplomatic office in the country. The U.S. and Israel gutted Iran’s nuclear program with malware. The Trump administration killed Iranian general and national hero Qasem Soleimani. The Iranians responded with a missile attack on an American base in Iraq. 

Of course, the U.S. walked away from the 2015 JCPOA. Washington imposed economic sanctions on Iran and its oil, driving it into a deeper relationship with China. The U.S. grew even closer to Israel and Saudi Arabia, and fashioned peace accords with various Iranian rivals, former friends, and Gulf neighbors. And in the end Iran basically won the U.S.-Iraq war and today runs Iraq as a client state. 

The same folks are still in power in Tehran and are not going away. Iran is probably the most stable Muslim nation in the Middle East. While still governed in large part by its clerics, the country has nonetheless experienced a series of increasingly democratic electoral transitions. Most significantly, unlike nearly every other nation in the Middle East, Iran’s leaders do not fear an Islamic revolution. They already had one.

Deal or no deal, Iran remains a nuclear threshold state, a very powerful position nearly akin to (and in some ways better than) actually having the bomb. A threshold state holds most or all of the technology and materials needed to make a weapon, but chooses not to take the final steps. Dozens of nations exist in some version of that state, from South Korea to Saudi Arabia. Just exactly how close a country is to a working weapon is called “breakout time.”

If Iran were to get too close, a devastating attack by Israel, and probably the United States, would be inevitable. The Israelis destroyed Saddam’s program, as they did Syria’s. The cyber attack on Iran’s nuclear centrifuges was a clear warning to back away, and, like the drone killing of Soleimani, a clear message to Tehran that the West has powerful tools. Call it a terrible game of chicken—Iran recently increased the purity of its uranium enrichment and threatens additional steps—but it is one in which the players involved know who has to blink first.

Iran knows that while it cannot get too strong it also cannot become too weak. After watching Libya be destroyed and Qaddafi killed after he voluntarily gave up his nuclear ambitions, never mind Iraq and non-nuclear Saddam, the lessons are all too clear. So think of the 2015 JCPOA as turning the dial down, but not much. There was no mechanism in the agreement to denuclearize and neither side intended it to do so. If a new accord is signed with the same text Iran will slowly move away from its current breakout time. Iran doesn’t have nukes now; Iran would not have nukes if there had been no deal, and Iran won’t have nukes with a deal. The agreement will eliminate weapons of mass destruction that may never exist.

So why bother making a deal? Because it’s how diplomacy works. There are bilateral and regional issues far beyond Iranian breakout time that need attention, and a new accord would be the start of the start. The goal is not a one-step quick-fix. The goal is to achieve a mutually agreeable resolution to a specific problem. Then on to the next one. And for those who don’t yet see the gorilla in the room, almost all of the above applies to North Korea, too, except that the Kims managed to actually go nuclear while the U.S. was distracted by its global war on terrorism. They’re watching. Biden won’t make progress with North Korea without the Iranian example to point to.

The passage of the last few years of relative peace, despite incidents, suggests a growing maturity in Tehran. As did the practical cooperation between the U.S. and Iran that defeated ISIS. Of course there will be saber rattling and grumbling about what is non-negotiable in a new accord. That’s how deals have begun in the Gulf for a long time.

When I was in Iran a few years ago, a takeaway from everyone I met was that Iranians fail to understand the role of domestic politics in U.S. foreign policy. There was only faint awareness of the influence of the evangelical voting bloc on Israel policy, and so little sense then of the powerful role U.S. domestic politics played in moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. Instead, Washington’s actions are imagined as nefarious evidence of anything and everything. Iran is a nation under attack. Zionist banks control the media. There is a dictatorship of the United Nations, Hollywood, and the International Monetary Fund. Then by the third cup of tea you get to the crazy stuff.

But the Iranian reaction has softened, to the point where they may be—maybe—ready to work within the complicated intersection of U.S. domestic policy, U.S. foreign policy, and their own needs for a new status quo in the Gulf that would allow some lifting of sanctions. 

The Iranians, for example, did not overreact to the Jerusalem move. They did not press against the tender edges of the deal, when it was in place or not. They did not rise to the constant war bait the Trump administration dangled. They waited for Trump to leave office. They seemingly understood America’s motives are more complex than once thought, and they showed they are taking steps toward working inside the current geopolitical system by not seeking to muck things up.

People from the foreign ministry and former diplomats I met in Iran reflected on a deep frustration over having no Americans to talk to, unsure why more than 40 years after the Islamic Revolution the United States still questions the stability of Iran’s complex democratic theocracy. They wonder why the Voice of America still tries to stir up revolution.

Meanwhile, since I traveled, many of the people I met in Iran are now under USG sanction, first by Trump and continued by Biden. Staying in touch arouses the FBI’s suspicion and invites requests to “talk.” The silence from Washington, one older Iranian diplomat said, was like a phantom itch that people who have lost limbs sometimes experience, left from some past, stuck in the present, an itch there is no way to scratch. “The Americans seem to have quit trying,” he said.

It is time to try again. Reviving the nuclear deal is a place to start.

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People,Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/give-dealmaking-another-try/

Hot Off the Press: Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla Admits Israel Is the 'World's Lab.'

GILAD ATZMON • FEBRUARY 27, 2021 

If Israelis are confused by the fact that their government treats them like laboratory pets, if they wonder why their freedom to travel, to socialise or even earn a living have evaporated, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla produced a genuine answer yesterday. In an interview on NBC Bourla said:

“I believe Israel has become the world’s lab right now because they are using only our vaccine at this state and they have vaccinated a very big part of their population, so we can study both economy and health indices.”

I have no issue with medical experiments involving humans if the participants are fully aware of all possible circumstances and considerations involved in their consent. This didn’t happen in Israel. By means of ‘green passports,’ the government practically threatens to penalise anyone reluctant to participate in a ‘lab’ experiment for a giant pharmaceutical company with a very problematic record.

The results of this Pfizer-Israeli experiment aren’t necessarily encouraging. Though it may be possible, as some studies suggest, that most vaccinated people have at least short-term protection from Covid-19, no one can deny the astonishing fact that in just 8 weeks of mass vaccination the total number of Covid-19 deaths in the Jewish State almost doubled from the number accumulated in the prior ten months.

Since Israel morphed into a nation of Guinea pigs, a virus that used to prey on the elderly and those with severe health issues has now changed its nature completely. After just 2 months of a ‘successful’ mass vaccination campaign, 76% of new Covid-19 cases are under 39. Only 5.5% are over 60. 40% of critical patients are under 60. The country has also detected a sharp rise in Covid-19 cases amongst pregnant women, with m ore than a few in critical condition. In the last few weeks, new-born Covid-19 cases saw a large 1300% spike (from 400 cases in under two-year-olds on November 20 to 5,800 in February 2021).

The evidence collected in Israel points at a close correlation between mass vaccination, cases and deaths. This correlation points at the possibility that it is the vaccinated who actually spread the virus or even a range of mutants that are responsible for the radical shift in symptoms above.

When CEO Bourla was asked by NBC whether one could infect others after receiving two doses of the vaccine, Bourla admitted:

“It is something that needs to be confirmed, and the real-world data that we are getting from Israel and other studies will help us understand this better.”

If CEO Bourla isn’t sure whether his ‘vaccine’ prevents the spreading of the disease, why is he selling it around the world? Why should any government allow this substance being used until all necessary precautions have been taken? Furthermore, in the light of the emerging concern that the vaccinated can spread the disease (which CEO Bourla doesn’t deny), what is the meaning of the ‘green passport’? I guess that such a document could be easily replaced by a ‘gullible certificate’ awarded to those who were foolish enough to turn themselves in.

But Bourla doesn’t have to wait much longer for the ‘results’ from his ‘lab.’ I can provide him with the most relevant numbers assuming that either he or anyone else in Pfizer can read basic graphs. Every country that fell into the mass-vaccination trap has seen a similar unprecedented spike in cases and death.

The following collection graphs point at the undeniable correlation between mass vaccination and an exponential surge in Covid-19 cases and deaths. The spike in cases is often detected just 2-3 days after the launch of the mass vaccination campaign.

At the time Israel vaccinated itself, it was witnessing a sharp exponential rise in morbidity and death. Palestine, literally the same land, saw its number of cases and deaths plummeting

Bourla and PM Netanyahu should make an intellectual effort and explain to us how it’s possible that in Gaza, an open-air prison and one of the most densely populated pieces of land on this planet, the numbers of Covid-19 cases are minimal and without a ‘vaccine.’

But Palestine is not alone, as the situation in Jordan is similar. While Israel saw its Covid-19 death figures breaking through the roof, Jordan’s Covid-19 deaths from mid-November onwards look like a slippery slope.

Britain went through a similar, if not identical, tragic experience. It launched a mass vaccination campaign on 7 December just to see its numbers of Covid-19 cases and deaths rising like never before.

At the time, Britain saw its NHS crumbling, while the kingdom’s neighbours that were slow to make a decision on vaccination saw their Covid-19 numbers dropping rapidly.

I am obviously not the only one who sees that something went dramatically wrong in Israel. A group of dissenting researchers who looked into the numbers involved with the current Pfizer Israeli experiment published a detailed study two week ago. “We conclude” they wrote, “that the Pfizer vaccines, for the elderly, killed during the 5-week vaccination period about 40 times more people than the disease itself would have killed, and about 260 times more people than the disease among the younger age class.”

Based on the Pfizer/Israeli ‘laboratory’ experiment, I drew the following sarcastic conclusion: If you catch coronavirus you may die, but if you follow the Pfizer path, not only do you have a 95% chance to survive on top of the 99.98% provided by Covid-19, you may also kill some other people on the way.

https://www.unz.com/gatzmon/hot-off-the-press-pfizer-ceo-albert-bourla-admits-israel-is-the-worlds-lab/

(Republished from Gilad Atzmon by permission of author or representative)

‘Propaganda arm of the British regime?’ BBC reporter hounded for misquoting former Scottish premier

 

27 Feb, 2021 12:35 / Updated 14 hours ago

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Alex Salmond makes his opening statement to The Committee on the Scottish Government Handling of Harassment Complaints at Holyrood, in Edinburgh, Scotland, February 26, 2021 © Reuters / Andy Buchanan

Scots are demanding the BBC’s Sarah Smith be held accountable after she claimed that former First Minister Alex Salmond said that current leader Nicola Sturgeon “should resign.” The only problem: Salmond said no such thing.

Former Scottish National Party leader and First Minister Alex Salmond appeared before a parliamentary inquiry on Friday, nearly a year after he was acquitted of serious sexual misconduct charges. Salmond told the inquiry that he had seen text messages implicating current First Minister Nicola Sturgeon in the case against him, and accused Sturgeon – his former protege – of pressuring police to investigate him, of pushing witnesses to testify against him, and of engaging in the “construction of evidence.”

Describing the day’s events to cameras outside Holyrood, the BBC’s Sarah Smith told viewers that Salmond had said Sturgeon had “broken the ministerial code,” and “should resign.”

Whether intentional or accidental, the quote was completely false. Salmond said that he believes Sturgeon broke the ministerial code, but followed that up by saying “it's not the case that every minister who breaks the ministerial code resigns,” and that it is “not for me” to decide whether she resigns or not.

Smith was soon bombarded with calls to resign, and accused of deliberately stoking the intra-party drama to weaken the Scottish National Party, and with it the cause for Scottish independence.

Smith apologized soon afterwards, claiming that she meant to describe Salmond as saying “I've got no doubt that Nicola has broken the ministerial code but it’s not for me to suggest what the consequences should be.” The BBC’s press team issued the same statement minutes later.

Twitter commenters weren’t buying it. Smith was accused of covering her backside in case regulators investigate her, and Scottish nationalists pointed out that the BBC reporter has misrepresented the words of Scottish politicians at least twice before.

The fiasco within the SNP comes as multiple opinion polls show a majority of the Scottish public supports independence from the UK. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, however, has thrown cold water on any plans for a second independence referendum, calling the 2014 vote, in which independence was rejected by 55 to 45 percent, “a once in a generation event.” 

India Targets Climate Activists With the Help of Big Tech

 Tech giants like Google and Facebook appear to be aiding and abetting a vicious government campaign against Indian climate activists.

Naomi Klein

February 27 2021

Climate activist Disha Ravi is granted bail during a hearing at Patiala House Court in New Delhi on Feb. 23, 2021.

 

Photo: Sanjeev Verma/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

THE BANK OF cameras that camped outside Delhi’s sprawling Tihar jail was the sort of media frenzy you would expect to await a prime minister caught in an embezzlement scandal, or perhaps a Bollywood star caught in the wrong bed. Instead, the cameras were waiting for Disha Ravi, a nature-loving 22-year-old vegan climate activist who against all odds has found herself ensnared in an Orwellian legal saga that includes accusations of sedition, incitement, and involvement in an international conspiracy whose elements include (but are not limited to): Indian farmers in revolt, the global pop star Rihanna, supposed plots against yoga and chai, Sikh separatism, and Greta Thunberg.

If you think that sounds far-fetched, well, so did the judge who released Ravi after nine days in jail under police interrogation. Judge Dharmender Rana was supposed to rule on whether Ravi, one of the founders of the Indian chapter of Fridays For Future, the youth climate group started by Thunberg, should continue to be denied bail. He ruled that there was no reason for bail to be denied, which cleared the way for Ravi’s return to her home in Bengaluru (also known as Bangalore) that night.

But the judge also felt the need to go much further, to issue a scathing 18-page ruling on the underlying case that has gripped Indian media for weeks, issuing his own personal verdict on the various explanations provided by the Delhi police for why Ravi had been apprehended in the first place. The police’s evidence against the young climate activist is, he wrote, “scanty and sketchy,” and there is not “even an iota” of proof to support the claims of sedition, incitement, or conspiracy that have been leveled against her and at least two other young activists.

Though the international conspiracy case appears to be falling apart, Ravi’s arrest has spotlighted a different kind of collusion, this one between the increasingly oppressive and anti-democratic Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Silicon Valley companies whose tools and platforms have become the primary means for government forces to incite hatred against vulnerable minorities and critics — and for police to ensnare peaceful activists like Ravi in a high-tech digital web.

The case against Ravi and her “co-conspirators” hinges entirely on routine uses of well-known digital tools: WhatsApp groups, a collectively edited Google Doc, a private Zoom meeting, and several high-profile tweets, all of which have been weaponized into key pieces of alleged evidence in a state-sponsored and media-amplified activist hunt. At the same time, these very tools have been used in a coordinated pro-government messaging campaign to turn public sentiment against the young activists and the movement of farmers they came together to support, often in clear violation of the guardrails social media companies claim to have erected to prevent violent incitement on their platforms.

In a nation where online hatred has tipped with chilling frequency into real-world pogroms targeting women and minorities, human rights advocates are warning that India is on the knife edge of terrible violence, perhaps even the kind of genocidal bloodshed that social media aided and abetted against the Rohingya in Myanmar.

“The silence of these companies speaks volumes. They have to take a stand, and they have to do it now.”

Through it all, the giants of Silicon Valley have stayed conspicuously silent, their famed devotion to free expression, as well as their newfound commitment to battling hate speech and conspiracy theories, is, in India, nowhere to be found. In its place is a growing and chilling complicity with Modi’s information war, a collaboration that is poised to be locked in under a draconian new digital media law that will make it illegal for tech companies to refuse to cooperate with government requests to take down offending material or to breach the privacy of tech users. Complicity in human rights abuses, it seems, is the price of retaining access to the largest market of digital media users outside China.

After some early resistance from the company, Twitter accounts critical of the Modi government have disappeared in the hundreds without explanation; government officials engaging in bald incitement and overt hate speech on Twitter and Facebook have been permitted to continue in clear violation of the companies’ policies; and Delhi police boast that they are getting plenty of helpful cooperation from Google as they dig through the private communications of peaceful climate activists like Ravi.

“The silence of these companies speaks volumes,” a digital rights activist told me, requesting anonymity out of fear of retribution. “They have to take a stand, and they have to do it now.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, left, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, right, hug at the conclusion of a town hall meeting at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., on Sept. 27, 2015.

 

Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

REFERRED TO IN the Indian press variously as the “toolkit case,” the “Greta toolkit,” and the “toolkit conspiracy,” the police’s ongoing investigation of Ravi, along with fellow activists Nikita Jacob and Shantanu Muluk, centers on the contents of a social media guide that Thunberg tweeted to her nearly 5 million followers in early February. When Ravi was arrested, the Delhi police declared that she “is an Editor of the Toolkit Google Doc & key conspirator in document’s formulation & dissemination. She started WhatsApp Group & collaborated to make the Toolkit doc. She worked closely with them to draft the Doc.”

The kit was nothing more than a Google Doc put together by an ad hoc collection of activists in India and the diaspora designed to generate support for the movement of farmers that has been staging enormous and relentless protests for months.

The farmers oppose a set of new agricultural laws that Modi’s government rushed through under the cover of the coronavirus pandemic. At the heart of the protests is the belief that by doing away with longtime price protections for crops and opening up the agricultural sector to more private investment, small farmers will face a “death warrant,” and India’s fertile lands will fall into the hands of a few large corporate players.

Many nonfarmers have looked for ways to help, both in India and in the global South Asian diaspora, as well as more broadly. The youth-led climate movement felt a particular responsibility to step up. As Ravi said in court, she supports the farmers “because they are our future, and we all need to eat.” And she has also pointed to a climate connection. Drought, heat waves, and flooding have all grown more intense in recent years, and India’s farmers are on the front lines of these climate impacts, often losing their crops and livelihoods, experiences Ravi knows about firsthand from witnessing her farmer grandparents struggle with weather extremes.

Much like countless such documents of the digital organizing age, the toolkit at the center of this controversy contains a buffet of familiar suggestions for how people can express their solidarity with India’s farmers, mainly on social media. “Tweet your support to the Indian Farmers. Use hashtag #FarmersProtest #StandWithFarmers”; take a picture or a video of yourself saying you support the farmers; sign a petition; write to your representative; participate in a “tweetstorm” or “digital strike”; attend one of the protests in person, whether inside India or at an Indian embassy in your country; learn more by attending a Zoom information session. An early version of the document (soon deleted) talked about challenging India’s peace-and-love, or “yoga & chai,” public image.

By arresting and imprisoning Ravi for an alleged role as an editor of the toolkit, she is in essence being criminalized for making India look bad in front of the world.

Pretty much every major activist campaign generates clicktivist how-to guides exactly like this one. Most mid-sized nongovernmental organizations have someone whose job it is to draft such documents and send them to potential supporters and “influencers.” If they are illegal, then contemporary activism itself is illegal. By arresting and imprisoning Ravi for an alleged role as an editor of the toolkit, she is in essence being criminalized for making India look bad in front of the world. Under that definition, all international human rights work would need to be shut down, since that work rarely presents governments in a flattering light.

This point was made forcefully by the judge who ruled on Ravi’s bail: “Citizens are conscience keepers of government in any democratic Nation. They cannot be put behind the bars simply because they choose to disagree with the state policies,” he wrote. As for sharing the toolkit with Thunberg, “the freedom of speech and expression includes the right to seek a global audience.”

This seems obvious. Yet somehow this most benign of documents has been latched onto by multiple government officials as something far more nefarious. General VK Singh, Modi’s minister of state for road transport and highways, wrote in a Facebook post that the toolkit “revealed the real designs of a conspiracy at an international level against India. Need to investigate the parties which are pulling the strings of this evil machinery. Instructions were laid out clearly as to the ‘how’, ‘when’ and ‘what’. Conspiracies at this scale often get exposed.”

The Delhi police quickly took its cue and set out to find evidence of this international conspiracy to “defame the country” and undermine the government, using a draconian colonial-era sedition law. But it didn’t stop there. The toolkit also stands accused of being part of a secret plot to break India apart and form a Sikh state called Khalistan (more sedition), because a Vancouver-based Indo-Canadian who helped put it together has expressed some sympathy for the idea of an independent Sikh homeland (not a crime and nowhere mentioned in the toolkit). And remarkably, for one Google Doc that the police claim was mainly written in Canada, this same toolkit stands accused of inciting and possibly plotting violence at a large farmers’ “tractor rally” in Delhi on January 26.

FOR WEEKS, these claims have gone viral online, much of it under coordinated hashtag campaigns spearheaded by India’s Ministry of External Affairs and faithfully echoed by top Bollywood and cricket stars. Anil Vij, a government minister in the state of Haryana, tweeted in Hindi that “Whoever has seeds of anti-nationalism in their mind has to be destroyed from the roots, be it #Disha_Ravi or anyone else.” Challenged as an obvious example of hate speech by a powerful figure, Twitter claimed that the post did not violate its policies and left it up.

Indian print and broadcast media has relentlessly echoed the preposterous charges of sedition, with well over 100 stories about Ravi and the toolkit appearing in the Times of India alone. Television news shows have run crime-stopper-style exposés of the international toolkit “conspiracy.” Not surprisingly, the rage has spilled out into the streets, with photos of Thunberg and Rihanna (who also tweeted in support of the farmers) burned at nationalist rallies.

Modi himself has even weighed in, speaking of enemies who have “stooped so low that they are not sparing even Indian tea” — widely taken as a reference to the deleted “yoga & chai” line.

And then, earlier this week, the whole frothy mess seem to fall flat. Rana, in his order releasing Ravi, wrote that “perusal of the said ‘Toolkit’ reveals that any call for any kind of violence is conspicuously absent.” The claim that the kit was a secessionist plot was also entirely unproven, he wrote, an elaborate guilt-by-association inference.

As for the charge that disseminating critical information about India’s treatment of farmers and human rights defenders to prominent activists like Thunberg constitutes “sedition,” the judge was particularly harsh. “The offence of sedition cannot be invoked to minister to the wounded vanity of the governments.”

The case is ongoing, but the ruling represents a major blow to the government and a vindication for the farmer’s movement and the solidarity campaigns supporting them. However, it is hardly a victory. Even if the toolkit case loses steam as a result of the judge’s slap-down, it is just one of hundreds of campaigns that the Indian government is waging to hunt down activists, organizers, and journalists. Labor organizer Nodeep Kaur, one year older than Ravi, was also jailed for her support of the farmers. Just released on bail, Kaur claimed in court that she had been badly beaten while in police custody. Meanwhile, hundreds of farmers remain behind bars and some of those arrested have disappeared.

The real threat that the toolkit represented to Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party was always, at root, about the power of the farmers’ movement.

The real threat that the toolkit represented to Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, was always, at root, about the power of the farmers’ movement. Modi’s political project represents a powerful merger of unleashed Hindu chauvinism with highly concentrated corporate power. The farmers challenge that dual project, both in their insistence that food should stay outside market logics and in the movement’s proven ability to build power across the religious, ethnic, and geographic divisions that are the lifeblood of Modi’s rise to power.

Ravinder Kaur, a professor at the University of Copenhagen and the author of “Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First-Century India,” writes that the farmers are “perhaps the largest mass mobilisation in post-colonial India’s history, one that spans rural and urban populations, and conjoins the revolt against deregulated capitalism to the struggle for civil liberties.” For Modi’s powerful merger of transnational capital with a hypernationalistic state, “the anti-farm law mobilisation poses the most sustained and direct challenge to this alliance yet.”

Protests by farmers in and around Delhi have been met with water cannons, tear gas, and mass arrests. But they keep coming, too big to defeat with force alone. That is why the Modi government has been so determined to find ways to undermine the movement and suppress its message, repeatedly blocking the internet ahead of protests and successfully pressuring Twitter to cancel over a thousand pro-farmer accounts. It is also why Modi has sought to muddy the waters with tales of devious toolkits and international conspiracies.

An open letter signed by dozens of Indian environmental activists after Ravi’s arrest made this point: “[T]he current actions of the Central Government are diversionary tactics to distract people from real issues like the ever-rising cost of fuel and essential items, the widespread unemployment and distress caused due to the lockdown without a plan, and the alarming state of the environment.”

The Modi government is attempting to drag the public debate away from terrain where it is obviously weak and move it to the ground on which every ethnonationalist project thrives.

It is this quest for a political diversion, in other words, that helps explain how a simple solidarity campaign has been recast as a secret plot to break India apart and incite violence from abroad. The Modi government is attempting to drag the public debate away from terrain where it is glaringly weak — meeting people’s basic needs during an economic crisis and pandemic — and move it to the ground on which every ethnonationalist project thrives: us versus them, insiders versus outsiders, patriots versus seditious traitors.

In this familiar maneuver, Ravi and the broader youth climate movement were simply collateral damage.

Yet the damage done is considerable, and not only because the interrogations are ongoing and Ravi’s return to jail remains distinctly possible. As the joint letter from Indian environmental advocates states, her arrest and imprisonment have already served a purpose: “The Government’s heavy-handedness are clearly focused on terrorising and traumatising these brave young people for speaking truth to power, and amounts to teaching them a lesson.”

The still wider damage is in the chill the entire toolkit controversy has placed over political dissent in India — with the silent complicity of the tech companies that once touted their powers to open up closed societies and spread democracy around the world. As one headline put it, “Disha Ravi arrest puts privacy of all Google India users in doubt.”

Indeed, public debate has been so deeply compromised that many activists in India are going underground, deleting their own social media accounts to protect themselves. Even digital rights advocates are wary of being quoted on the record. Asking not to be named, a legal researcher described a dangerous convergence between a government adept at information war and social media companies built on maximizing engagement to mine their users’ data: “All of this stems from a stronger weaponization of social media platforms by the status quo, something that was not present earlier. This is further aggravated by the tendency of these companies to prioritise more viral, extremist content, which allows them to monetise user attention, ultimately benefitting their profit motives.”

SINCE HER ARREST, the entrails of Ravi’s private digital life have been laid out for all to see, picked over by a voracious and salacious national media. Televised panels and newspapers obsessed over her private text messages to Thunberg as well as other communications among activists who were doing nothing but editing an online pamphlet. Police, meanwhile, have repeatedly insisted that Ravi’s decision to delete a WhatsApp group was proof that she had committed a crime, rather than a rational response to government attempts to turn peaceful digital organizing into a weapon directed at young activists.

Ravi’s lawyers have asked the court to order the police to stop leaking her private communications to the press — information they seemingly have as result of seized phones and computers. Wanting still more private information for their investigation, the Delhi police have also made demands of several major tech companies. They have asked Zoom to disclose the list of attendees of a private activist meeting which they say relates to the toolkit; police have made several requests to Google for information about how the toolkit was posted and shared. And according to news reports, police have asked Instagram (owned by Facebook) and Twitter for toolkit-related information as well. It is unclear which companies have complied and to what extent. The police have touted Google’s cooperation publicly, but Google and Facebook did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. Zoom and Twitter referred to their corporate policies, which state that they will comply with relevant national laws.

The entrails of Ravi’s private digital life have been laid out for all to see, picked over by a voracious and salacious national media.

Which may be why the Modi government has chosen this moment to introduce a new set of regulations that would give it levels of control over digital media so draconian they come close to China’s great firewall. On February 24, the day after Ravi’s release from jail, Reuters reported on the Modi government’s planned “Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code.” The new rules will require media companies to take down content that affects “the sovereignty and integrity of India” within 36 hours of a government order — a definition so broad that it could easily include slights against yoga and chai. The new code also states that digital media companies must cooperate with government and police requests for information about their users within 72 hours. That includes requests to trace down the originating source of “mischievous information” on platforms and perhaps even encrypted messaging apps.

The new code is being introduced in the name of protecting India’s diverse society and blocking vulgar content. “A publisher shall take into consideration India’s multi-racial and multi-religious context and exercise due caution and discretion when featuring the activities, beliefs, practices, or views of any racial or religious group,” the draft rules state.

In practice, however, the BJP has one of the most sophisticated troll armies on the planet, and its own politicians have been the most vociferous and aggressive promotors of hate speech directed at vulnerable minorities and critics of all kinds. To cite just one example of many, several BJP politicians actively participated in a misinformation campaign claiming that Muslims were deliberately spreading Covid-19 as part of a “Corona Jihad.” What a code like this would do is enshrine in law the double digital vulnerability experienced by Ravi and other activists: They would be unprotected from online mobs revved up by a Hindu nationalist state, and they would be unprotected from that same state when it sought to invade their digital privacy for any reason it chose.

The “lethal” new code is “aimed at killing the independence of India’s digital news media. This attempt to arm bureaucrats with the power to tell the media what can and can’t be published has no basis in law.”

Apar Gupta, executive director of the digital rights group Internet Freedom Foundation, expressed particular concern about parts of the new code that may allow government officials to track down the originators of messages on platforms like WhatsApp. This, he told the Associated Press, “undermines user rights and can lead to self-censorship if users fear that their conversations are no longer private.”

Harsha Walia, executive director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association and author of “Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism,” puts the dire situation in India like this: “The latest proposed regulations requiring social media companies to assist Indian law enforcement is yet another outrageous and undemocratic attempt by the fascist Hindutva Modi government to suppress dissent, solidify the surveillance state, and escalate state violence.” She told me that this latest move by the Modi government needs to be understood as part of much broader pattern of sophisticated information warfare waged by the Indian state. “Three weeks ago, the Indian government shut down the internet in parts of Delhi to suppress information about the farmers protest; social media accounts of journalists and activists at the farmers protest and in the Sikh diaspora were suspended; and Big Tech cooperated with Indian police in a number of baseless but chilling sedition cases. In the past four years, the Indian government has ordered over 400 internet shutdowns, and the Indian occupation of Kashmir is marked by a prolonged communications siege.”

The new code, which will impact all digital media, including streaming and news sites, is set to take effect within the next three months. A few digital media producers in India are pushing back. Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of The Wire, tweeted last Thursday that the “lethal” new code is “aimed at killing the independence of India’s digital news media. This attempt to arm bureaucrats with the power to tell the media what can and can’t be published has no basis in law.”

Do not expect portraits of courage from Silicon Valley, however. Many U.S. tech executives regret early decisions, made under public and worker pressure, to refuse to cooperate with China’s apparatus of mass surveillance and censorship — an ethical choice, but one that cost companies like Google access to a staggeringly large, lucrative market. These companies appear unwilling to make the same kind of calculation again. As the Wall Street Journal reported last August, “India has more Facebook and WhatsApp users than any other country, and Facebook has chosen it as the market in which to introduce payments, encryption and initiatives to tie its products together in new ways that [CEO Mark] Zuckerberg has said will occupy Facebook for the next decade.”

For tech companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Zoom, India under Modi has turned into a harsh moment of truth. In North America and Europe, these companies are going to great lengths to show that they can be trusted to regulate hate speech and harmful conspiracies on their platforms while protecting the freedom to speak, debate, and disagree that is integral to any healthy society. But in India, where helping governments hunt and imprison peaceful activists and amplify hate appears to be the price of access to a huge and growing market, “all of those arguments have gone out the window,” one activist told me. And for a simple reason: “They are profiting from this harm.”

Naomi Klein’s latest book is “How to Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other,” just published by Simon & Schuster. 

https://theintercept.com/2021/02/27/india-climate-activists-twitter-google-facebook/?fbclid=IwAR28eYuQXjO92l761C_kRi51TKkhTvGDM1j-r_8iHuMrAtYrFalBdtoYhQk