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… read about India’s authoritarian slide amid its democratic anniversary.

This month marks 75 years of India as a post-colonial democracy, at least on paper. That the anniversary coincides with the economic stagnation and internal repression of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s second term suggests that while the democratic form remains, democratic backsliding is entirely possible. It’s a calculus and a consideration that foreign countries must keep in mind, as the European Union and the United States both seek to include India in a league of democracies to counterbalance authoritarians ruling Russia, and especially China. “The frequency of brazen violence against minorities, as well as infringements of civil freedoms (both implicitly and explicitly state-sanctioned), seems to be increasing,” writes Manali Kumar [[link removed]], who goes on to note that “parliamentary processes have also been systematically undermined, with members of the opposition being suspended to stifle debate and policies passed with little deliberation.” Reactionary majoritarian government, with the tacit endorsement of violence against minorities deemed internal enemies, is hardly unique to India. However, overlooking it at home and abroad makes the notion of democratic alliance against authoritarianism a sham. “The Hindu hardliners believe the BJP is not doing enough to ensure the rights of the majority and to install a Hindu state, while minorities, especially the country’s sizeable Muslim community, are increasingly afraid of their very right to exist,” writes Kumar.

espionage react

The Espionage Act [[link removed]] is a piece of national security law that dates back to World War I and just never left the books. It has seen renewed prominence in the 21st century, first as a way to punish whistleblowers in the US government, and then most recently as the reason for an FBI raid and seizure of classified documents from former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago. While the Justice Department is right to investigate Trump under the act, writes Freddy Martinez [[link removed]], reforms are needed to ensure the act is not used to punish whistleblowers.

Martinez highlights the case of whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and “Thomas Drake, a high-ranking NSA official who unsuccessfully [[link removed]] attempted to raise concerns to Congress and his inspector general about a massive, expensive, and faulty post-9/11 information collection program. The DOJ ultimately charged Drake with the unauthorized possession of national defense information, some of which was unclassified [[link removed]] at the time.”

At the same time, whistleblowers were prosecuted, and favorable leaks from presidential staffers, generals, and appointees were treated with a light hand (if punished at all). Any reform, like the bill put forth by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), should safeguard disclosures in the public interest without adhering to the double standard of forgiving them if they support the president in power.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Confess and See

War is horrific in mundane ways. It’s the occupation and abandonment of a village, the looting of old medals and fresh groceries, juxtaposed with the street execution of civilians and the digging of shallow graves in gardens. In an interview collected by Russian investigative outlet iStories, and translated into English by Meduza [[link removed]], a Russian soldier involved in the occupation of Andriivka, Ukraine, confessed to killing civilians.

“I, Daniil Andreyevich Frolkin,” he told iStories, “confess to all of the crimes I committed in Andriivka: to executing civilians, to stealing from the civilian population, to confiscating their phones, and [I confess that] our command does not give a fuck about our fighters or any of our infantry who are fighting on the front lines.”

The confession is remarkable not just on its own merits but because it shows the dissatisfaction of the soldiers with the leadership of the war they are fighting. Frolkin resigned from the army and told iStories that he hopes this confession will keep the survivors of his unit from the front and out of harm’s way.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Imagining Empire: Part II

Memorials are made in the present and for the present. Monuments to the past, especially statues linked to specific historical events and persons, are active statements about what parts of the past should be remembered, by who, and in what way. Last week, Critical State [[link removed]] looked at the way President Vladimir Putin’s commitment to an imperial understanding of Russia led him to cite the removal of Soviet statues in Ukraine as a casus belli. This week, the question of memory and empire turns to relations between South Korea and Japan.

Memorialization is an act of present politics, argues Eun A Jo in “ Memory, Institutions, and the Domestic Politics of South Korean–Japanese Relations. [[link removed]]” Eun A points to a “memory boom” that had found form in the erection of “dozens of ‘comfort women’ statues, commemorating victims of Japanese sexual slavery during World War II” across South Korea in the past decade. These statues, along with efforts since the 1990s by survivors of forced labor to win reparations from Japanese companies through courts, are acts about historical memory with a present political context.

“Today's historical disputes cannot be understood separately from the battling and intermingling domestic narratives in South Korea over its future as a postcolonial and post-authoritarian society,” writes Eun A.

A postcolonial identity is primarily domestic and about how a country understands its relation to its former occupiers. This is the historical grounding of South Korea’s memory practices, highlighting the longevity of abuses from the 35-year Japanese occupation of Korea. But the post-authoritarian nature of South Korea is crucial to understanding why historical memory of atrocity carries weight, even when the governments formally normalized relations in 1965. In linking the abuses of authoritarian government at home to the legacy of colonial rule, protest movements in South Korea made redress for grievances historic and present into sympathetic movements.

One major shift in South Korea was the emergence of nongovernmental organizations and the fall of authoritarian rulers from power. This meant, in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, new actors in the public sphere could shape memory, whereas previously, under less democratic rulers, the security imperatives of cooperation with Japan had shaped some narratives away from past abuses.

“In this new colonial-authoritarian frame, grievances against Japan and grievances against the state were mutually supportive; postcolonial reckoning required post-authoritarian justice,” writes Eun A. “It was as new narrators entered the stage and their narratives of humiliation and shame found broader traction that, for the first time in South Korean history, collective memory truly began to bind.”

Collective memory in the post-authoritarian era has been shaped by actors outside the state, constraining both domestic and foreign policy choices taken in the name of colonial victims without directly consulting with those victims. For South Korea, any path forward in politics has to reckon with public understanding of memory rather than trying to route around it in secret.

More broadly, writes Eun A, “the plurality of memories in the public sphere may be indicative of democratic cohesion; and what should be worrisome, instead, are the proliferating attempts to rehabilitate the past in service of a thick mnemonic consensus.”

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman reported [[link removed]] on vaccination efforts in West Africa, where cases and deaths are climbing amidst public skepticism over the vaccine. To counter skepticism, especially fears and concerns spread on social media that claim vaccination can cause illness or death, healthcare workers are going to the people directly rather than waiting for them to show up at clinics. Dini-Osman spoke with 27-year-old cricketer Edmond Ernest Jr., who “said that he missed out on many competitions because of his previous refusal to get vaccinated. But now, after healthcare workers spent time with him, responding to his concerns, he got the shot. Today, he is advocating for other people to get the shot.”

Anna Romandash interviewed [[link removed]] Yuriy Lubarov, a civil servant living in Mykolaiv, Ukraine. Lubarov had planned to leave his job in the city’s cultural ministry this winter, putting in his notice and taking a vacation in February. Then the war came, and as one of the civil servants who stayed in the city, he went to work, documenting all the cultural events the city is not putting on as normal thanks to the war and the city’s proximity to the fighting near Kherson. “More than half of the city libraries are open, and locals go there, not only for bread but also to get books and newspapers. People keep on reading despite everything,” Lubarov told Romandash.

Michael Fox covered [[link removed]] a pro-democracy protest in Brazil, where reactionary president Jair Bolsonaro is trailing in the polls and casting doubt on the integrity of the same electoral apparatus that brought him to power. The protest featured the reading of a letter signed by over a million Brazilians, including former presidents, Supreme Court justices, bankers, artists, and others, that warned against retreat to dictatorship. The protest, reports Fox, was “inspired by a similar letter [[link removed]] that was read during protests on Aug. 11, 1977, which denounced the military dictatorship [[link removed]] that ruled Brazil at the time and demanded the rule of law.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

When you scream into the void, the void screams back [[link removed]].

American decline is mostly a side-effect of trying to fit under too-short showerheads [[link removed]].

Subcultural unintelligibility [[link removed]] will be the new way to hide coded messages in plain sight.

Every meme surfs a sea of many internets [[link removed]].

Better reds [[link removed]] than the undead [[link removed]].

All the money in the world [[link removed]] and it won’t keep people from using your likeness to make World Baby [[link removed]].

The 17th, or maybe the 19th, Brumaire [[link removed]].

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Follow The World: DONATE TO THE WORLD [[link removed]] Follow Inkstick: DONATE TO INKSTICK [[link removed]]

Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton with Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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