16 November 21
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I have a feeling, echoed in what I read in some of your comments to our posts here on Steady and elsewhere, that many of you, many of us, many here in this country and around the world, are exhausted.
Now the trevails of life are often exhausting. Illness, sadness, work, or the loss of work, strained relationships, all the stuff you need to do but have put off, these are but a few of the many prompts for exhaustion. And many of you are undoubtedly dealing with at least a few of these, or other ordeals.
But hanging over all of what would be the “normal” course of life, if there is ever such a thing, are some pretty existential wellsprings of exhaustion.
Covid, and our response to it, is exhausting.
The threats to our democracy are exhausting.
The former president and his allies are exhausting.
Vitriol is exhausting.
Our climate crisis is exhausting.
False equivalence is exhausting.
Injustice is exhausting.
Systemic racism is exhausting.
Income inequality is exhausting.
The fact that this list could go on and on (and on and on) is exhausting.
Now adding to all of this is the fact that we live in a media landscape where there is no limit to the size of the wave of information you can surf down into the depths of despair. You can doom scroll for hours, finding reasons for why you should be on edge, should give up hope, should be outraged with no seeming outlet to fix the outrage, which is even more cause for outrage. And after hours of this, days on end, well, you probably can see where I’m going. It’s exhausting.
It perhaps provides little solace to understand that exhaustion is not unique to our times. In fact, much of life, for most people, and most of history, was far more physically exhausting than what many of us are privileged to face. Ours is more a collective mental exhaustion - inputs and checklists of the mind that we can never fully contend with or complete.
We get to a point where the exhaustion is itself exhausting. And I firmly believe that the forces who seek to undermine our society, who seek to pit us against each other for their cynical gain, see exhaustion as a potent weapon at their disposal. The more exhausted people who care about solving difficult challenges become, the more uncertain success in these endeavors becomes. And I suspect many of you sense this as well. And find it exhausting.
There is a belief, and for good reason, that vigilance is necessary. But vigilance cannot be borne by any one individual alone. It is impossible to always be on the go. Remember even star athletes need a day off. Soldiers need R&R. Where would we be without a weekend?
Over the course of my career I have covered many protest movements that have ultimately proved successful. And I have found one of the hallmarks for that success is that they are collective actions where members of the group step up to help others when they get exhausted.
So not only is it okay to be exhausted, it’s okay, in fact necessary, to take a break. Step away from your screen or your newspaper and step outside for a walk. Talk to friends and family about topics other than politics or current events. Read for fun, or watch something escapist on television. None of this will solve the problems of the world. There is a place for action of course, and commitment. But resilience is a perspective that requires rest as well as determination.
We must acknowledge that not everyone can step back from exhaustion. To be able to take a break is its own form of privilege. There are people whose life circumstances never provide respite. But there is also a reason so many of the world’s religions have days of rest and reflection built into the calendar. The human body and mind cannot always be working, or it will cease to work well.
I say all of this not to diminish the challenges we face, quite the opposite. The world needs sustained effort and exertion. But effort and exertion requires energy. And energy requires us to acknowledge, attend to, and forgive our exhaustion.
President Biden signs the bipartisan infrastructure bill into law. (photo: CNBC)
The package will put $550 billion in new funds into transportation, broadband and utilities. Biden’s signature follows years of failed efforts in Washington to overhaul physical infrastructure, improvements that advocates have said will boost the economy and create jobs.
The legislation will put $110 billion into roads, bridges and other major projects. It will invest $66 billion in freight and passenger rail, including potential upgrades to Amtrak. It will direct $39 billion into public transit systems.
The plan will put $65 billion into expanding broadband, a priority after the coronavirus pandemic left millions of Americans at home without effective internet access. It will also put $55 billion into improving water systems and replacing lead pipes.
Funding will go out over a five-year period. It could take months or years for many major projects to start.
Before signing the legislation, Biden said “we’re finally getting this done” after years of failed attempts in Washington. He stressed the direct benefits Americans will feel from the law — part of a broader sales pitch he will carry out in the coming days and months ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
“So my message to the American people is this: America is moving again, and your life is going to change for the better,” he said.
A refresh of physical infrastructure fulfills one portion of Biden’s economic vision. On Monday, he made the case for Congress to pass what Democrats see as a complementary package: a $1.75 trillion investment in the social safety net and climate policy.
The House aims to pass its version of the bill this week. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tried to tie the plans as closely together as possible to ensure the centrist and progressive flanks of her party backed both.
The president said he is “confident that the House can pass this bill, and then we’re going to pass it in the Senate.”
“Together with the infrastructure bill, millions of lives will be changed for the better,” he said.
Many Democrats have said the bipartisan plan did not go far enough to address climate change or build an additional layer of support for households by addressing policies such as child care, education, household tax credits and heath care.
Biden celebrated the infrastructure plan’s passage with lawmakers from both parties who helped to write and pass it. Nineteen Republicans voted for the measure when the Senate approved it in August, while 13 GOP representatives backed it when the House passed it earlier this month.
Several GOP lawmakers attended the bill signing. About 800 people, including members of Congress, mayors, governors and union officials, came to the event.
Some Republicans who backed the measure have faced criticism and even alleged death threats for their votes.
Biden has looked for a signature achievement to celebrate as sustained inflation and the lingering pandemic, among other issues, put a dent in his approval ratings. Democrats hope to promote the social safety net and infrastructure bills on the campaign trail next year as they try to defend their congressional majorities in the midterm elections.
Biden will head to New Hampshire and Michigan on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, to sell the infrastructure plan.
The president was not the only one who highlighted the plan’s benefits after it became law. In statement Monday, the 10 Democratic and Republican senators who were its lead authors said in a joint statement that the law will “positively impact every American.”
Kyle Rittenhouse fatally shot two men and wounded a third during protests after the police shooting of Jacob Blake last year. (photo: NBC)
In its closing arguments, Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense team blasted the dead victims, calling one a “bad man” and another a “rioter” who “lifted his middle finger to police.”
On Monday the prosecution and defense presented the jury with their final arguments. Rittenhouse, now 18, shot and killed two men and injured a third during a chaotic night in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August 2020 during a protest against racial injustice. The teen had traveled to Kenosha from a nearby Illinois town, armed with an AR-15-style rifle, and presented himself as a medic who was there to help people.
The defense argued at length that Rittenhouse shot Joseph Rosenbaum, the first man killed that evening, in self-defense, whereas the prosecution aimed to show him as the instigator of the violence.
“Kyle shot Joseph Rosenbaum to stop a threat to his person,” said lead defense attorney Mark Richards. “I’m glad he shot him because if Joseph Rosenbaum had got that gun, I don’t for a minute believe he wouldn’t have used it against somebody else. He was irrational and crazy.”
Richards seemed to take issue with the prosecution describing those who attempted to disarm Rittenhouse as “heroes” and instead described those killed or shot by Rittenhouse as “rioters” or, in the case of Rosenbaum, as a “bad man.” He presented to the jury a slide that listed Anthony Huber—whom Rittenhouse shot and killed after Huber hit him with a skateboard—as a “rioter” who “lifted his middle finger to the police.”
A slide about Gaige Grosskreutz—whom Rittenhouse shot in the arm shortly after killing Huber—described the man as “an affiliate of the People’s Revolution.”
Richards also spent time attacking several witnesses as unreliable. He attacked the prosecution’s main argument—that Rittenhouse provoked the incident—as one they’re only using because the state’s case had “blown up in their face.”
Several times a fiery Richards implied that Thomas Binger, the assistant district attorney, was actively misleading the jury, if not flat-out lying. Within the first few minutes of his closing statements, Richards said Binger “lied to the jury’s faces.”
“This case is not a game; this is my client’s life,” said Richards. “We don’t play fast and loose with the facts.”
The prosecution presented their closing arguments to the jury earlier Monday and painted Rittenhouse as the instigator of the night’s bloodshed. Binger sought to convince the jury that the crowd that attacked Rittenhouse believed he was an active shooter who needed stopping. Binger compared Rittenhouse to a “quack doctor practicing without a license that puts lives at risk.” He asked the jury to “evaluate the defendant’s performance as a medic that night.”
“Well, on one hand, he wrapped up an ankle and I think helped somebody who had a cut on his hand, yay,” said Binger. “On the other hand, he killed two people, blew off Gaige Grosskreutz’s arm, and put two other lives in jeopardy.”
On Friday, the prosecution sought to include several “lesser included” charges against Rittenhouse, essentially hedging their bet—Judge Bruce Schroeder allowed for only a few to be included.
On August 25, 2020, Rittenhouse, then 17, traveled to Kenosha after seeing reports on social media of protesters flooding the streets and causing property damage during a protest sparked by local police shooting and paralyzing Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man. Armed with an AR-15-style rifle, Rittenhouse went to defend a car dealership, pretending to be a medic.
The defense and the prosecution agree that Rittenhouse shot and killed Rosenbaum, who was unarmed after Rosenbaum chased him in a parking lot. Rittenhouse then fled the scene and claimed he was headed toward police but was confronted by a group of people. He fell, and while on the ground, he shot at an unidentified man trying to kick him, shot and killed Huber, and also shot and injured Grosskreutz, who’d approached him with a handgun. (Grosskreutz testified he thought Rittenhouse was an active shooter.)
Eighteen jurors are currently hearing the trial—it was originally 19, but one was dismissed after making a joke about the police shooting of Blake to the rest of the jurors. Later Monday, 12 jurors from the 18 will be selected via a random draw to decide the verdict.
Deliberation will begin Monday night.
'The Pentagon is America's true god,' writes William Astore. (photo: Getty)
Back in 2007, in his first piece for TomDispatch, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore focused on the proliferation of self-congratulatory ribbons and medals on the chests of America’s generals. Here, for instance, was General David Petraeus at that time — and keep in mind that, before he commanded the 101st Airborne Division during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he had never even been to war. As Astore put it then, “I counted nine rows [of ribbons] on Petraeus’ left breast during his Congressional hearings. If they were a valid metric across time, he would be roughly thrice as capable and valorous as George C. Marshall, perhaps America’s greatest soldier-statesman, who somehow ran and won a world war while wearing only three rows of ribbons.” And, by the way, those nine rows weren’t even the sum total of the decorations on that uniform.
In other words, only six years into Washington’s disastrous post-9/11 wars, our losing generals were already treating themselves like minor deities from Olympus. In the ensuing years, much was written about evangelical Christianity and its role in supporting a twice-divorced, pussy-grabbing, religion-dismissing, profane salesman and bankruptee in the Oval Office, but remarkably little about the fervor of those who might be considered the truest evangelicals of our moment: America’s military high command and the Pentagon officials who were part and parcel of their world.
They were, of course, evangelists for a religion that Congress has subscribed to as well with remarkable unanimity, not to say staggering fervor. No matter that its god (about whom Astore will tell you momentarily) continues to suck up trillions of dollars in tithes from the American people as if there were no end to such funds. And mind you, despite all that dough and all those medals on all those chests, the Pentagon couldn’t keep a single promise it made globally when it came to its supposedly singular “skill”: making war. Think of those bemedaled generals then as evangelicals for a faith that couldn’t deliver, big-time — evangelists, in short, for an empire going down, down, down. Now, check out TomDispatch regular Astore, who also runs the Bracing Views blog, on this country’s true god. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The Pentagon as Pentagod
America’s Abyss of Weapons and Warmaking
In God We Trust is on all our coins. But, again, which god? The one of “turn the other cheek”? The one who found his disciples among society’s outcasts? The one who wanted nothing to do with moneychangers or swords? As Joe Biden might say, give me a break.
America’s true god is a deity of wrath, whose keenest followers profit mightily from war and see such gains as virtuous, while its most militant disciples, a crew of losing generals and failed Washington officials, routinely employ murderous violence across the globe. It contains multitudes, its name is legion, but if this deity must have one name, citing a need for some restraint, let it be known as the Pentagod.
Yes, the Pentagon is America’s true god. Consider that the Biden administration requested a whopping $753 billion for military spending in fiscal year 2022 even as the Afghan War was cratering. Consider that the House Armed Services Committee then boosted that blockbuster budget to $778 billion in September. Twenty-five billion dollars extra for “defense,” hardly debated, easily passed, with strong bipartisan support in Congress. How else, if not religious belief, to explain this, despite the Pentagod’s prodigal $8 trillion wars over the last two decades that ended so disastrously? How else to account for future budget projections showing that all-American deity getting another $8 trillion or so over the next decade, even as the political parties fight like rabid dogs over roughly 15% of that figure for much-needed domestic improvements?
Paraphrasing Joe Biden, show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you worship. In that context, there can’t be the slightest doubt: America worships its Pentagod and the weapons and wars that feed it.
Prefabricated War, Made in the U.S.A.
I confess that I’m floored by this simple fact: for two decades in which “forever war” has served as an apt descriptor of America’s true state of the union, the Pentagod has failed to deliver on any of its promises. Iraq and Afghanistan? Just the most obvious of a series of war-on-terror quagmires and failures galore.
That ultimate deity can’t even pass a simple financial audit to account for what it does with those endless funds shoved its way, yet our representatives in Washington keep doing so by the trillions. Spectacular failure after spectacular failure and yet that all-American god just rolls on, seemingly unstoppable, unquenchable, rarely questioned, never penalized, always on top.
Talk about blind faith!
The Pentagod advances a peculiar form of war, one that would puzzle most classic military strategists. In fact, its version of war is beyond strategy of the Clausewitzian sort. I think of it as prefabricated war, borrowing a term from the inestimable Ann Jones’s recent piece for TomDispatch on our Afghan disaster. It’s a term pregnant with meaning.
Prefabricated war is how the Pentagod has ruled for so endlessly long. There is, as a start, the fabrication of false causes for war. In Vietnam, it was the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, the “attacks” on U.S. Navy ships that never happened. In Afghanistan, it was vengeance for the 9/11 attacks against a people who neither planned nor committed them. In Iraq, it was the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein didn’t have. Real causes don’t matter much to America’s war god since false ones can always be fabricated, after which enough true believers — especially in Congress — will embrace them fervently and faithfully.
But prefabricated war doesn’t just start with or consist of manufactured causes. It’s fabricated far ahead of time in a colossal cathedral of violence — President Eisenhower’s military-industrial-congressional complex — that sends its missionaries and minions around the planet on a mission of global reach, global power, and full-spectrum dominance. War is prefabricated on 750 military bases scattered across the globe on every continent except Antarctica, in America’s giant arms corporations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, and by Special Operations forces that act much like the Jesuits of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, spreading the one true faith to 150 countries.
Since America’s war god is also a jealous deity, it insists on dominating all domains — not just land, sea, and air but space as well. Even more ethereal realms like cyberspace and virtual/augmented realities must be captured and controlled. It seeks omnipotence and omniscience in the name of your safety and, if you let it, will also know everything about you, while having the power to smite you, should you stop blindly worshipping it and feeding it more money.
Yet, as strong as it may be, its urge to fabricate threats and exaggerate vulnerabilities never ends. China and Russia are allegedly the biggest threats of the moment, two “near-peer” rivals supposedly driving a new cold war. China, for example, now reportedly has a navy of 355 ships, an ostensibly alarming development (even if those vessels are nowhere near as powerful as their American equivalents). That naturally requires yet more shipbuilding by the U.S. Navy.
Russia may have an economy that’s smaller than California’s, but it’s allegedly leading in hypersonic missile development (and China, too, has now entered the fray with, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs put it recently, something “very close” to a “Sputnik moment”). As a result, the Pentagod demands yet more money to bridge this alleged missile gap. Like earlier bomber and missile gaps from the previous Cold War, such vulnerabilities exist mostly in the minds of its proselytizers.
And in that context, here’s an article of faith rarely questioned by true believers: while America prides itself on having the world’s best and most powerful military, it perennially declares itself in danger of being overmatched. As a result, from aircraft carriers to stealth bombers to nuclear missiles, ever more weaponry must be fabricated. Who cares that it takes the next 11 nations combined to come close to matching the American “defense” budget. Beware the cry, “O ye of little faith!” should you dare to question any of the Pentagod’s fabricated “needs.”
The notion of prefab war goes deeper still, notes Ann Jones. As she wrote me recently:
“I would also carry the implications of prefabricated war to its source in the industrial world that does the material fabrication that dictates the strategy and style of war and pockets the profits.
“In Afghanistan prefabrication meant forcing Afghan soldiers to drop their trusty Kalashnikovs and retrain endlessly on new U.S. rifles (I forget the model) so heavy and temperamental as to be close to useless; they were particularly sensitive to dust, which in Afghanistan is the principal constituent of the air. The U.S. also trained Afghan soldiers how to enter houses, to search inside and kill every occupant; it erected on the training ground some prefabricated wooden houses for the practice of home invasions. (I witnessed this stuff myself.)”
To her point, I’d add the notion of a prefab “government in a box,” a bizarre aspect of the Afghan surge early in President Barack Obama’s first term in office. The idea was to drop ready-made mini-democracies into less-than-stable regions of Afghanistan that had been conditionally secured by U.S. troops. Those prefab governments would then supposedly provide a democratic toehold, freeing American troops to do what they did best: apply “kinetic” force elsewhere through massive firepower.
But the Pentagod didn’t deliver democracy in a box to Afghanistan. Instead, it brought prefab war, made in the U.S.A., exported globally. Or, as Ann Jones put it to me, “The Afghan war was pulled from a box to be used to pave the way for the Big Box war already planned for Iraq by the Bush/Cheney administration.” That such a “Big Box” war then failed so dismally led, of course, to no diminution in the Pentagod’s power or authority, blind devotion being what it is.
Judging by the Vietnam, Afghan, and Iraq wars, a shoddy yet destructive form of prefab war has been the ultimate American export of these years.
Losing My Religion
I was once an acolyte of the Pentagod. I served for 20 years in the U.S. Air Force, working in Cheyenne Mountain near the end of the original Cold War. I hunkered down there waiting for the nuclear Armageddon that fortunately never came (though the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was certainly a near miss). A cathedral of power, Cheyenne Mountain could have served as the ultimate temple of doom, but America ultimately “won” the Cold War when the Soviet Union imploded after a disastrous conflict in Afghanistan. That proved a setback indeed for a deity that feared the very thought of a “peace dividend” in the wind. Fortunately, that singular moment of victory proved only temporary, as America’s incessant conflicts since Desert Storm in 1991 have shown.
In 1992, the year after the Soviet collapse, I found myself walking around the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where the first atomic blast rumbled and roared in July 1945. You might say that, before using two atomic bombs on the Japanese, this country used the first one on ourselves, or at least on all the creatures living near ground zero at that desert site.
“I have become death, the destroyer of worlds,” mused J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, after his “gadget” exploded, irradiating the surrounding desert in a historically unprecedented way. Oppenheimer himself emerged a changed man. He tried unsuccessfully to block the development of the far more powerful hydrogen bomb, an act of clarity and conscience for which, he would be accused of communist sympathies in 1953 and stripped of his security clearance. He and others who followed learned how unwise it is to resist America’s god of war and its drive for yet more power.
During that same trip in 1992, I visited Los Alamos National Laboratory, the site where those atomic “gadgets” were first assembled. Fifty years earlier, during World War II, America began to bring together its best and brightest to create a device more destructive than any ever built. They succeeded, in a sense, in tapping into the power of the gods, even if in a remarkably one-sided fashion, gaining an astonishing ability to destroy, but none whatsoever to create. Armageddon, not genesis, became and remains the Pentagod’s ultimate power.
Back in 1992, the mood at Los Alamos was glum. A national laboratory to create ever newer, more powerful nuclear warheads and weapons didn’t seem to have a promising future with the demise of the Soviet Union. Where, then, did the future lie? Perhaps the best and brightest could turn their thoughts from bombs to consumer goods, or computers, or even what we today call green-energy technologies?
But no such luck. So here I sit, 30 years later, a bit heavier, my hair and beard greying, having lost whatever faith I had. Why? Because the god I served always wanted more. Even now, it wants to spend up to $2 trillion in the coming decades to build “modernized” versions of the nuclear weaponry that I knew, even then, could only create a darker future.
Consider the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, or GBSD. It’s an innocuous acronym for what someday will be hundreds of land-based nuclear missiles, one leg of this country’s nuclear “triad” (the others being the Navy’s Trident submarine force and the Air Force’s strategic bombers). Deploying the GBSD, the Air Force plans to replace its “aging” ICBMs with “youthful” ones, even though such missiles, old or new, were rendered redundant decades ago by equally accurate ones that could be launched from stealthy submarines.
No matter. Northrop Grumman won the contract at a potential lifecycle cost of $264 billion. Think of those future missiles and the silos where the present ones sit in flyover states like Wyoming and North Dakota as so many subterranean chapels of utter destructive power, serviced by dedicated Air Force crews who believe that deterrence is best achieved by a policy that once was all-too-accurately known as MAD, or mutual assured destruction.
Yet, before I bled Air Force blue, before I was stationed in a cathedral of military power under who knows how many tons of solid granite, I was raised a Roman Catholic. Recently, I caught the words of Pope Francis, God’s representative on earth for Catholic believers. Among other entreaties, he asked “in the name of God” for “arms manufacturers and dealers to completely stop their activity, because it foments violence and war, it contributes to those awful geopolitical games which cost millions of lives displaced and millions dead.”
Which country has the most arms manufacturers? Which routinely and proudly leads the world in weapons exports? And which spends more on wars and weaponry than any other, with hardly a challenge from Congress or a demurral from the mainstream media?
And as I stared into the abyss created by those questions, who stared back at me but, of course, the Pentagod.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Jennie was 19 and walking home from school when she was attacked. (photo: Amber Bracken/Al Jazeera)
She never knows when the nightmares will come. But when they do, they overwhelm her.
“I tried to get away, tried to scream, to do anything,” the 29-year-old explains as she recounts the events of 10 years ago that play out - over and over again - when she sleeps. “But I was just in shock.”
Before that crisp fall day in November 2010, Jennie says she led a relatively normal life.
She is Gitxsan First Nation, from Kitwanga, meaning People of the Place of Rabbits, in northwest British Columbia.
It is a spectacular landscape of colossal jagged mountains, thick forests and freshwater rivers 241km (150 miles) from the North Pacific Ocean.
Kitwanga village lies on the northern bank of the Skeena River, a bustling salmon migration route. It is 3km (2 miles) from a national historic park called Battle Hill; a knoll in a valley that was once a fortress occupied by a warrior chief named Nekt.
According to legend, the fortress was man-made, built to repel outside raiders, and was the scene of epic tribal battles during which it was defended by rolling large logs covered in spikes down upon the attacking forces.
But no one was around to defend Jennie that day.
She was attacked just outside Kitwanga village along Highway 37, which is one of only two routes from British Columbia to the Yukon Territory and the State of Alaska to the north. It is just a few kilometres off Highway 16 - a villainous stretch of road where dozens of mostly Indigenous women and girls have disappeared or been found murdered since the 1950s, earning it the moniker Highway of Tears.
As a child, Jennie lived more than an hour’s drive west from Kitwanga in the city of Terrace, British Columbia. But when she was 11, her mother inherited her grandfather’s home in Kitwanga and the family moved there.
She loved the opportunity it allowed her to learn about her culture, language and traditional dance. But even then, she knew of the dangers that lurked nearby. She had heard of Indigenous girls being snatched away along the Highway of Tears, never to be seen again.
But she had never imagined she could be one of them.
That November afternoon, Jennie missed the school bus so she began walking home from her school in the centre of Kitwanga, as she had done several times before.
She remembers it being a chilly but bright, sunny day. As she approached an area the locals call Snake Hill - a steep, rounded hill on the highway that takes about 15 minutes to climb - a white pick-up truck appeared from the top of the hill. It slowed down as it approached her and the two white men inside began to catcall. She ignored them and kept walking.
“They were yelling, saying that I was being disrespectful by not acknowledging them. Like I should be grateful that they wanted to give me a ride. They told me they should teach me a lesson.” She looks down; her hands are trembling.
The men, who she estimates to have been between 25 and 35 years of age, pulled off into a side road, got out and began walking towards her.
Sensing danger, she dropped her checkered black and white backpack filled with school books and ran.
“I tried to throw it [the backpack] onto the road because lots of people knew my bag and that I walked that way,” she says, explaining that she wanted to leave some kind of evidence in case she was murdered.
“They tackled me down the side of the hill,” she says, referring to the muddy, tree-filled embankment.
Her whole body begins to shake and she gasps for air. “They started ripping my clothes off and I just remember the mud being cold…Both of them raped me.”
It is this that plagues her nightmares.
Sitting in her living room, surrounded by craft supplies, books and the cages that house the guinea pigs, lizards and small snakes she cares for, Jennie takes a moment to catch her breath. She is crying but determined to keep talking.
“One of them would hold me down, while the other raped me. One of them kept his hand on my neck, it was hard to breathe at times. I remember the bite marks I had on my arms and stomach. They were disgusting … and then it was like I just drifted.”
The sun was still out when the two men left her naked in the mud - beaten, cold and disoriented.
“I was frozen after they left, I didn’t know what to do.”
Eventually, she stood up, gathered her clothes, dressed and retrieved her backpack from the road.
But she didn’t want to go home.
Jennie’s mother is a survivor of the residential school system in which Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and often endured spiritual, verbal, emotional, physical and sexual violence. She didn’t think her mother could handle knowing what had happened to her, so she went to a friend’s house, where she took a long shower.
“I just wanted to wash them off me,” she says, running her hands down her arms as though doing the same now.
Then Jennie’s friend found a ride to take her to the hospital in Hazelton. Once there, she says she was met by nurses who rolled their eyes at her account of the rape. No one examined her.
“They seemed like they didn’t believe me. They didn’t even look at me,” she says.
The hospital called in the RCMP. Jennie told the male officer what had happened.
“The officer listened but didn’t take any notes. He kept saying that it didn’t sound right, didn’t seem believable. He said typically you’re hurt by someone you know. He kept repeating that. At that point I’m crying, hyperventilating, because they think I’m crazy. I just walked out because it was too much, too hard.”
When asked about this, Corporal Madonna Saunderson, the RCMP’s media relations representative for British Columbia’s North District, told Al Jazeera via email that the New Hazelton detachment was unable to locate a file relating to the offence described but that “the RCMP has standard investigative procedures in place for Sexual Assaults, including police attendance, statements, photographs if injured, a sex assault kit done by medical staff at a hospital or clinic, a referral to Victim Services if wanted, to name but a few.”
“Hospitals also have a protocol and are very cooperative with the investigation, assuming the victim is willing and consents to a medical examination. At small hospitals or clinics there can be a delay for an available medical doctor to conduct the examination but [it] is done if the victim consents,” she added.
Many families of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) in Canada claim their loved ones’ cases are not taken seriously or properly investigated by the police. This despite the fact that Indigenous women in Canada are 3.5 times more likely than non-Indigenous women to be victims of violence - a result of underlying factors such as poverty, historical marginalisation, racism, and the legacies of colonialism.
The head of the RCMP apologised to the families of MMIWG in 2018 during Canada’s national inquiry into the crisis.
“I’m sorry that for too many of you, the RCMP was not the police service that it needed to be during this terrible time in your life,” RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki told a packed room of families and survivors in Regina, Saskatchewan in June 2018. “It is very clear to me that the RCMP could have done better and I promise to you we will do better.”
But for as long as the RCMP has existed, there have been conflicts with Indigenous people. It was the RCMP that enforced the federal government’s Indian Act of 1876, forcing First Nations onto reservations and only allowing them to leave with the consent of a federal Indian agent. And it was the RCMP that imprisoned parents who refused to send their children to residential schools where abuse was rife.
Today, the conflict takes on a different form - but it remains all the same.
According to a report by Canada’s Globe and Mail, more than one-third of the people shot to death by RCMP officers over a 10-year period, from 2007 to 2017, were Indigenous. Canada’s prison watchdog, meanwhile, found that more than 30 percent of inmates in Canadian prisons are Indigenous. This is despite the fact that just 4.9 percent of the population of Canada identifies as Indigenous.
“We’re not high on their [the RCMP’s] priority list as Indigenous women, and it hurts,” says Jennie, who worries for the future of her two young daughters.
The two men who brutally raped her were never caught, and 10 years later, she is still afraid to travel alone, even if it is just to the corner store. She lives in a near-constant state of fear, she says.
She doesn’t know where the men came from, but she knows they weren’t from Kitwanga.
As the energy industry has boomed in northern British Columbia, it has brought with it an influx of mostly male industry workers. Many of these workers come from outside the area and are housed in labour camps - temporary, dormitory-style accommodation that can sometimes house thousands of people - commonly referred to as ‘man camps’.
These workers are helping to build the multi-billion dollar Coastal GasLink (CGL) natural gas pipeline through northern British Columbia.
“The man camps that have been created have increased the violence towards Indigenous women. And it’s frustrating because the government will forcibly remove Indigenous Peoples from their traditional territories for the industry projects [like the Wet’suwet’en] but will not direct resources to protect Indigenous women and girls,” laments Jennie.
The construction phase of the 670km (416 mile) pipeline is expected to last until 2023.
Studies have shown that an increase in the population of rural areas like those along the Highway of Tears can lead to increases in physical and sexual violence, including rape, sexual assault, sexual assault of minors, and sex trafficking.
A 2017 report released by the Indigenous research and policy consulting company Firelight Group and the Lake Babine Nation and Nak’azdli Whut’en First Nation found a correlation between the presence of man camps and increased rates of sexual assault and violence against Indigenous women, along with higher rates of addiction, sexually transmitted infections, and family violence in the areas in the vicinity of the camps.
In its final report, released in June 2019, the National Inquiry into MMIWG called on resource industries and regulators to consider the safety and security of Indigenous women and girls at all stages of project planning and development.
TC Energy, the company behind the CGL pipeline project, declined a request to be interviewed for this series but did email a statement saying it recognises “and takes seriously the concerns about gender and sexualized violence against Indigenous women - a broad social issue that transcends industry”.
Suzanne Wilton, communications manager at TC Energy, wrote: “Having been engaged with Indigenous and local communities for the past number of years as this project was developed, we are aware of the Highway of Tears and the tragic stories associated with it - and which pre-date the establishment of Coastal GasLink’s workforce accommodation sites.”
Wilton added that CGL employs Indigenous advisers who live and work at the accommodation sites to promote an inclusive workplace.
The problem extends south of the border, into the US.
For well over a decade, Indigenous tribes in North Dakota have witnessed the violence that extractive industries can bring. Following the North Dakota Bakken oil boom that followed the discovery of an oil field in 2006, reports of violence against Indigenous women in and near the Fort Berthold Reservation - which is home to approximately 6,000 people from the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation - have steadily increased.
In 2013, North Dakota’s Uniform Crime Report showed an annual increase of 7.2 percent in the total number of reported violent index crimes such as murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults. The report showed an increase of 17 percent in rapes alone.
Last February, seven men were arrested in Minnesota in a human trafficking sting operation by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), the Tribes United Against Sex Trafficking (TRUST) task force and the Itasca County Sheriff's Office. Two of the men were pipeline workers helping to build Enbridge’s Line 3 project, which transports tar sands crude oil from Alberta, Canada, to Superior, Wisconsin.
During the permitting process for this pipeline, state regulators had said: “The addition of a temporary, cash-rich workforce increases the likelihood that sex trafficking or sexual abuse will occur."
In a January statement, Enbridge wrote that it “absolutely rejects” the suggestion that sexual exploitation would increase along the pipeline construction route. "Enbridge will not tolerate this exploitation by anyone associated with our company or its projects," the company said.
Michele Audette, a former commissioner for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), says industry has a lot to answer for. She is Inuu from the northeastern portion of the Quebec-Labrador Peninsula and relays a story about the caribou central to the Innu way of life.
“For us, the man, the woman and caribou are one,” Michele explains from her home in Montreal. “There is a story that says when there’s no caribou there will be no Innu people. We have less caribou; the caribou are sick. We were sick…now we’re coming back and we hear that some herds are coming back.”
But industry had a hand in breaking that cycle of life, she adds. “Our connection, reciprocity with the land, all of that was taken away. It’s like raping us and industry is part of that.”
She believes industry must implement strict protocols for workers, such as providing training about Indigenous peoples and culture and firing workers who step out of line.
“It only takes one rotten apple for our women to get hurt.”
Julie Kaye, an assistant professor in the sociology department at the University of Saskatchewan and author of Responding to Human Trafficking-Dispossession, Colonial Violence, and Resistance among Indigenous and Racialized Women, says perpetrators prey on Indigenous women and girls because of embedded colonial mindsets.
“So often we want to look at individual perpetrators. But look at the context in which he was able to become who he is,” Kaye tells Al Jazeera.
“Canada is founded on colonial gendered violence. It targets the land, the taking of the land. The land here was seen as empty. Empty of life itself and people. And [colonisers believed] that the land is for extraction.”
The violence within man camps operates within that mindset, she explains.
“Man camps, they’re going to be violent spaces. Canadian laws, systems are designed around protecting [the interests of] whiteness. We need to point to the fact that genocide is the way our governments and courts function. So how are Indigenous women supposed to safely exist within their lands?”
Back near the Highway of Tears, Jennie preps supper and waits for her two young daughters to get home from school.
“It’s amazing, magical being a mom,” she says. “But it’s terrifying. I’m not naïve to think nothing will happen to them.”
Her husband gets there first and embraces her in a long hug.
She feels lighter; it feels good to talk about the rape, she says, instead of letting it churn in her stomach like a dark, nauseating mass.
She takes out a couple of prescription pill bottles, explaining that they are for anxiety and depression. She hopes that in the future, she won’t have to rely on them to get through the day.
“I didn’t think I was going to make it after that. I didn’t want to live,” she says. Her chihuahua tugs at her leg, she picks him up and he licks her face incessantly.
With tearful gratitude, she smiles and says she is determined to heal - she is tired of being afraid.
Migrants at the Belarusian-Polish border in the Grodno region of Belarus. (photo: Leonid Scheglov/Getty)
European authorities accuse Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko of mounting “hybrid warfare” by letting thousands of migrants amass at the Polish border. But Poland’s nationalist government is also using the crisis to crack down on migrants — with the EU’s blessing.
In the meantime, a serious humanitarian tragedy is unfolding, as encampments of migrants needing food, shelter, and medical attention are stranded in the freezing borderland forests. The situation has become so desperate that migrants have tried to storm the border unarmed — only to be repelled by Polish border guards. In total there have been thirty-three thousand recorded attempts to cross the border: one solidarity activist compared the back and forth to a soccer game. On Friday, a Syrian man was found dead near the village of Wólka Terechowska, the ninth dead since this crisis began.
Even if the EU’s accusations are true about Belarus’s plans, “hybrid war” is an inappropriate term for what Lukashenko is doing. He is attempting to extract a deal from the EU, where Belarus will be paid — like Turkey — to keep migrants out of Europe. In particular, his aim is to get Brussels to lift sanctions imposed after his repression of protests last summer. He can also look to the example of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whom the EU has granted €6 billion euros in aid since 2016 to keep Syrian refugees in Turkey. Erdoğan has himself has threatened to open the border when he feels the Europeans aren’t coddling him enough. This is not war, but business — the act of a smart opportunist with good commercial sense.
Europe denounces Lukashenko’s schemes for using migrants as pawns. Yet, its own addiction to a repressive border regime is what ultimately allows such a situation to occur. Lukashenko is well aware of the racism of an EU that loves to flaunt its humanitarianism, and of Brussels’s inability to dismantle “Fortress Europe.” As a result, under Lukashenko’s pressure the EU suffers daily embarrassment at its purported “values” being so openly contradicted.
Poland’s Anti-Migrant Line
Across the border in Poland, the government in Warsaw has exploited the border crisis to boost its “patriotic” credentials. It invokes the “hybrid war” thesis to justify its hard line on preventing migrants from crossing — but also to build up a wider nationalist posture.
The ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) has always seen itself as the only force which could ensure the orderliness of post-1989 capitalist Poland — even if the means deployed to this end often intensify social antagonisms, as evident in the backlash against its anti-abortion policies. PiS’s hard-line response to the crisis is a result of its determination to make a great show out of the preservation of “order,” even when the single-mindedness with which it pursues its actions contributes to an even greater crisis.
Today, Poland’s answer to the huddled masses on its border has been to repel them. The state is not even using its own established asylum system. Instead, it started building a wall on its border and sent thirteen thousand border guards and soldiers to “protect” Poland’s frontier. Tear gas and water cannons have been used to push back refugees. A state of emergency has been in place since September 2, making it nearly impossible for journalists, human rights monitors, and aid workers to reach the border.
Now, the Polish government is talking about holding joint consultations with its NATO partners under the alliance’s Article 4, which can only be invoked if “the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.” This means further militarizing the situation.
For the Polish government, humanitarian crisis and geopolitical escalation is the price they are willing to pay for nationalist excitation. In reference to the crisis, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called the Polish border not merely a line on the map but “something sacred, for which generations of Poles shed their blood.” On November 11, Polish independence day, both Law and Justice’s chairman Jarosław Kaczyński and Polish president Andrzej Duda used the occasion to declare that the fatherland was in danger and must be defended.
PiS is using the situation to boost its legitimacy as the elite of the Polish nation. Indeed, it needed such an opportunity. In recent weeks, the government has faced discontent over its conflict with Brussels, with which it is in deadlock over billions of euros of post-COVID recovery funds. The money is currently being denied to Poland because of PiS’s assertion of control over the court system. Under this pressure, fear of an outright break with the EU — unpopular in Poland, a net beneficiary of funding from the bloc — was giving steam to the opposition. Now, hysteria over a Belarusian “hybrid war” has strengthened the ruling party’s hand.
The beefing up of the border guard on the Belarusian border, the mobilization of the army, and the bombastic rhetoric of Duda, Kaczynski, and Morawiecki has now been given a seal of approval by the EU. European liberals and Polish nationalists, formerly at odds, have been brought together by a combination of self-interest and self-delusion. Europe’s pathological fear of migrants complements the Polish government’s patriotic self-indulgence — all evident to cunning Lukashenko, clear-eyed enough to see their failings, and exploit them.
The ringed antpipit (corythopis torquatus) was among the 77 species examined in the recent study. (photo: Majority World/Getty)
Not only were the birds declining in number, but their bodies were also shrinking in size.
"We found that size is not only shrinking for those sensitive species — it was declining for everyone," said researcher Vitek Jirinec of Louisiana State University.
Jirinec's findings are contained in a new study published in the journal Science Advances last Friday.
It was enough to raise alarm bells for Jirinec's supervisor, Philip Stouffer.
"The thing that is the most striking about this to me is that this is in the middle of the most intact tropical rainforest in the world," Stouffer said.
The study examined 77 species over a 40-year period, during which time the rainforest had become warmer. It found they were rapidly evolving — perhaps because smaller birds shed heat more efficiently as they have more surface area in relation to volume.
Brian Weeks of the University of Michigan explained it this way:
"You could imagine lots of little ice cubes in a glass of water, as opposed to one big ice cube, and the little ice cubes melt faster because smaller things have larger surface area-to-volume ratios, so they exchange heat more quickly."
Weeks didn't work on this particular study, but he did research the size of more than 50 species of migratory birds in North America a few years back. He too found that nearly all of them were shrinking decade by decade.
The two studies reinforce the idea that birds all over the planet, migratory or not, may be changing shape due to a warming climate. Weeks said these sorts of changes should concern all of us.
"All around the world, people depend on natural systems. Intact natural systems provide more economic benefits to humanity than the entirety of the world's GDP, so they matter to you whether or not you know it," he said.
Jirinec said the timing of his paper's publication could not be more fitting.
"Our study [came] out on the same day as the conclusion of the U.N. climate change conference in Glasgow. So those results really underscored the pervasive consequences of our actions for the planet," he said.
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