13 November 21
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Twitter took down the clip as a TOS violation, but some scenes were shown in this video report at the Independent. The clip was based on the “Attack on Titan” Anime series ( summarized here). Presumably the Anime series was the idea of a younger staffer, since I doubt Gosar knows what Anime is.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez replied on Twitter:
So while I was en route to Glasgow, a creepy member I work with who fundraises for Neo-Nazi groups shared a fantasy video of him killing me
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 9, 2021
And he’ll face no consequences bc @GOPLeader cheers him on with excuses.
Fun Monday! Well, back to work bc institutions don’t protect woc https://t.co/XRnMAKsnNO
Gosar entitled the piece “attack on immigrants” rather than “attack on Titans.” Gosar’s paternal grandparents were Slovenians and his maternal grandparents were Basque immigrants from Spain. Immigrants.
A planner of the January 6 Capitol insurrection, Ali Alexander, maintained that there had been extensive consultations over the event with Gosar. It is pretty clear that the insurrectionists would have killed Rep. Ocasio-Cortez if they had caught her in the Capitol, so it is not impossible that Gosar was involved in an actual plot on her life.
Gosar defended the video as “just a cartoon.” Actually, though, cartoons showing real people can land you in jail. Possession of cartoon child pornography showing a close likeness to an actual child is illegal in the US and the law is even broader in the UK. America will never take murder as seriously as sex, but if the question is whether a cartoon can break the law, it can.
Since Gosar is saying the video was “symbolic,” he might consider that from a Freudian point of view the symbolism is pretty obvious. Gosar’s violent fantasy of sticking swords in a 32-year-old young American woman of Puerto Rican heritage reeks of symbolic war rape.
The purpose of the cartoon was to intimidate Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and all the other uppity women in Congress who oppose Gosar’s vision of a white nationalist, patriarchal and fascist Amerika. Those women, he is saying, should be afraid to open their mouths, to speak, to advocate. Or else. That his video might well incite another fascist nutcase to try to take out AOC would not come as a surprise. Nor is he ignorant of the fact.
The atmosphere in Washington today reminds many historians of the three decades before the Civil War, when slavers mounted several attacks on abolitionists in Congress. Some 70 acts of violence against congressional representatives took place in that era.
Becky Little at History.com explains one of the more notorious of these:
“The Senate had just adjourned on May 22, 1856, when Representative Preston Brooks entered its chamber carrying a cane. The pro-slavery southerner walked over to Senator Charles Sumner, whacked him in the head with the cane and then proceeded to beat the anti-slavery northerner unconscious. Afterward, Brooks walked out of the chamber without anyone stopping him.”
Gosar is a latter-day Preston Brooks, deeply entangled in the web of violent white supremacists that have already invaded the Capitol with murder on their minds. Gosar’s fantasy video just finished the job that his colleagues among the Oath Keepers and Boogaloo Boys could not. I hope his stunt leads the January 6 Commission to look closely at subpoenaing him.
Dr. Joseph Varon comforts a patient in the Covid-19 intensive care unit at United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, Nov. 26, 2020. (photo: Go Nakamura/Getty Images)
Yet nearly every major U.S. news outlet — the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC, CBS, and others — published stories or photos about United Memorial in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the pandemic’s iconic pictures shows the hospital’s then-chief of staff, Dr. Joseph Varon, embracing an older patient. No other hospital came close to getting as much coverage in the early phase of the pandemic.
The reason is simple: Unlike virtually every other hospital in the country, United Memorial was opening its doors to journalists trying to document the suffering on the front lines of the pandemic. The photographer who shot the picture of Varon visited the hospital more than 20 times. Because journalists were being turned away elsewhere, they flocked to United Memorial.
“One of the things a hospital has to do, to provide care for an acute illness, is to educate the public,” Varon told The Intercept. “And the only way I can educate the public is through the media. I need the world to understand what is going on.”
An investigation by The Intercept reveals that in the first months of the pandemic, only a small number of the more than 6,000 hospitals in the U.S. let journalists inside — and when access was permitted, it was usually limited to a short time span. The upshot is that most hospitals, citing safety and privacy concerns, turned themselves into vaults that hid the strongest evidence of the virus’s lethality. Doors were shut so firmly that an award-winning documentarian even gave up on his effort to film in the U.S. and instead made his documentary about a country where he could get access to Covid patients: China.
When it began in the U.S., the pandemic was a mass casualty event with few pictures of the casualties.
Journalists who have covered wars and epidemics told The Intercept that the obstacles they encountered during the first waves of the pandemic were unparalleled in their careers. Isabeau Doucet, who reported on cholera in Haiti, was completely shut out. “I spent months trying and failing to get access to hospitals or even to get permission to interview doctors who I had spoken to off the record,” Doucet said. “The stonewalling from hospitals was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.”
Misha Friedman, who worked in public health before becoming an award-winning photojournalist, was shocked at the obstruction in New York City. “I tried to go through doctors and nurses, I tried to go to the top, I even went to someone who was on the board [of a hospital], a billionaire, and he said, ‘I understand, but I don’t want to get involved,’” Friedman explained. Lucas Jackson, a photographer with Reuters, noted recently that he “worked for one of the biggest news companies in the world and couldn’t get access to a single hospital within 100 miles of NYC.”
One of the few photographers who had success early in the pandemic was Victor Blue, working for the New York Times. But Blue is deeply critical of what happened to other reporters. “NYC hospitals should be ashamed for keeping out journalists — I believe it worsened and prolonged the pandemic,” Blue wrote on Twitter earlier this month, adding, “I was frustrated and angry more hospitals weren’t opening up. … There was plenty of room for every outlet to get access.”
The experience of being shut out was not universal. Blue worked alongside Sheri Fink, who has a medical degree from Stanford University and embedded in an Ebola treatment unit in Liberia in 2014. Fink reported from inside a number of hospitals early in the pandemic and noted in an interview that the early months were truly the great unknown, with tremendous fears that hospitals could spread the virus. “In previous emerging outbreaks, hospitals have become points of amplification,” she noted. “They have become places where the disease explodes and spreads.”
The Times seems to have gotten more access than other news organizations in the first months of the pandemic, but even so, its front pages featured just a few images of people afflicted with Covid-19 in American hospitals. For the month of March, the newspaper had just one front-page photo of a patient in a U.S. hospital. The next month, the Times had only three front-page photos of patients inside U.S. hospitals, on April 5, April 13, and April 26. There were a lot of photos in the Times and other outlets about Covid-19 — pictures of empty streets, of people wearing masks, of socially distanced lines, of exhausted doctors and nurses — but scant photos of anyone sick with the virus in a hospital, which is where virtually all acute cases could be found.
There are many reasons the U.S. Covid death toll has surpassed 750,000, beginning with dismissive rhetoric from the Trump administration that encouraged Americans to doubt the seriousness of the virus. But there is a less examined reason too: Hospitals hid the human devastation in the pandemic’s early days, when opinions and policies were indelibly shaped. The Covid-19 pandemic began as a mass censorship event.
Heroes and Bureaucrats
The work of medical staffs — nurses, doctors, custodians, and others — is rightly regarded as heroic. These workers saved innumerable lives, sometimes at the cost of their own. But hospital bureaucrats undercut those efforts by turning away journalists seeking irrefutable evidence that could reduce the skepticism in America. Hospital administrations even investigated staff members who shared videos they had shot themselves.
Administrators who spoke with The Intercept or provided written statements emphasized that they limited access because of privacy and safety concerns as well as worries about medical staff being deluged. It’s certainly true that in the early months of the pandemic, everyone was overworked and exhausted, there was a shortage of personal protective equipment, and fears of spreading the virus led hospitals to close their doors even to the spouses and children of patients who were dying. Many final farewells had to be made using iPads.
“At the height of the pandemic, during March and April, we thought that embedding media in the hospital would be a distraction both to the hospital and to the staff,” said Steve Clark, a spokesperson for St. Barnabas Hospital in New York City. St. Barnabas is in the Bronx, a part of the city that was hit particularly hard by Covid-19. Clark described the hospital’s staff as overwhelmed in the first months of the pandemic and added, “We had a policy that we followed very closely that we didn’t let any media into the building.”
Even hospitals that opened their doors tended to do so sparingly. Houston Methodist Hospital, one of the largest hospitals in Texas, allowed a team from the Times to report from its Covid care units in the summer of 2020, when the state was going through the first of its Covid waves. But that was it — no other journalists were given access in those crucial months, not even from the local newspaper, according to Stefanie Asin, the hospital’s media relations director.
“It would be poor practice to let a bunch of journalists into Covid wards, into waiting rooms, into cafeterias,” Asin said. There was a singular reason, she explained, for giving a green light to the Times: The writer was Fink, who had reported from the hospital in the aftermath of hurricane Harvey. “We didn’t want to bring in outside people who we didn’t know,” Asin said. “We didn’t allow spouses into the Covid units. We’re not going to let in a photographer.”
Decisions of this sort, occurring one by one at hospitals across the country, created a visual drought. Some of the fiercest criticism is now coming not just from journalists but also from medical staff who sought greater public awareness of the harm caused by the virus as the pandemic got underway.
“There was no appetite to let anyone in,” said Dr. Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, speaking about hospitals in general. Spencer, who treated Ebola patients in Guinea in 2014 and contracted the disease himself, has been frank about his disdain for policies set by administrators. “My presumption is that they would assume it would only be embarrassing. There was no benefit to them showing the apocalypse and what it looked like. Having patients all over the emergency department on oxygen canisters and people intubated is not going to be a good image for your hospital. At the end of the day, hospitals are a corporation with a focus on the bottom line.”
Power of Photography
There is a long-running debate about the impact of photography — whether pictures or videos can really change public opinion and government policy. But in the early days of the pandemic, a short burst of graphic images of the dying and the dead had a concrete effect, leading President Donald Trump to take the virus more seriously. Unfortunately, instead of encouraging hospitals to allow more access, things went in the opposite direction.
The breakthrough occurred in late March, when freezer trucks were used in New York City to store corpses for whom there was no room inside hospital morgues. Pictures and video emerged of body bags being transferred to these freezer trucks, and some images showed rows of corpses inside the portable morgues. Trump, who had vowed to reopen the country from a brief lockdown, announced on March 29 that the lockdown would continue. He specifically cited the imagery coming out of New York.
“I’ve been watching that for the last week on television, body bags all over in hallways,” Trump said in a Rose Garden press conference. “I have been watching them bring in trailer trucks, freezer trucks — they are freezer trucks because they can’t handle the bodies, there are so many of them. This is essentially in my community in Queens — Queens, New York. I have seen things I’ve never seen before. I mean, I’ve seen them, but I’ve seen them on television in faraway lands.” Trump added, “These are trucks that are as long as the Rose Garden, and they are pulling up to take out bodies, and you look inside, and you see the black body bags. You say, ‘What’s in there? It’s Elmhurst Hospital, must be supplies.’ It’s not supplies; it’s people.”
This was a pivotal moment: Trump was swayed not by his science advisers or elected officials but by pictures he saw on his television. If this had been constructed as an experiment — can graphic images change the mind of the most powerful Covid cynic in the country? — the hypothesis would have been proved. Yet hospitals reacted by tightening their crackdowns on anyone trying to get this kind of opinion-changing footage.
Some of the imagery that shocked Trump came from Brooklyn Hospital Center. In late March, photographer Braulio Jatar shot a particularly chilling picture of a body wrapped in sheets as it was carried by a forklift onto a freezer truck outside the hospital. But when Jatar returned to the hospital in April, a fence had been built to keep the bodies out of view. This was happening at other hospitals too. The president and the rest of the country would not be discomforted by further publication of disturbing imagery.
“It was a tough time emotionally,” said Lenny Singletary, Brooklyn Hospital’s senior vice president of external affairs. “My feelings at the time were a bit of frustration: ‘Wow, have some dignity for the loved ones.’ … We didn’t want people taking photos of bodies being transported.”
Singletary’s reaction is understandable. In ordinary times, it would be ghoulish to facilitate photography of body bags. In ordinary times, the sheer numbers of corpses, the statistics on their own, would be proof enough. But these were not ordinary times. “The numbers have become a concrete wall,” noted historian Mary Dudziak. “Covid-19 tables and graphs both reveal and conceal. They are intended to illuminate, but turning casualties into numbers accomplishes an erasure of the dead themselves.”
For some Americans, erasure was preferable. A telling example came as Los Angeles was going through its worst days of the pandemic in 2020. A Washington Post reporter, Scott Wilson, visited a mortuary and posted pictures of bodies wrapped in white cloths on Twitter. By the end of the day, he deleted his post due to complaints from other accounts on the social media site.
“Mass death is ugly,” Wilson wrote. “But I’ll self-censor.”
And it wasn’t just hospitals or social media that sanitized what the public would see as the pandemic got underway. When photographer George Steinmetz flew a drone over a mass grave on New York City’s Hart Island, officers from the city’s police department charged him with a misdemeanor and confiscated his equipment. Though the charge was later dropped, the incident was another manifestation of the barriers that prevented Americans from seeing the pandemic’s true toll.
“If people had seen the reality of what it was like, they would have been more likely to follow social distancing and all the things we were recommending as public health measures,” said Spencer, the Columbia University doctor. “I think that if people were to have a better understanding of what it looks like for hospitals that are completely overwhelmed and struggling, what it looks like to be intubated — if people were able to see the apocalyptic conditions inside hospitals, I think it would change how willing people are to adhere to public health guidelines.”
War Hospitals
Whether in a pandemic, hurricane, or war, hospitals function as calamity’s mirror. I saw this during the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s.
The Bosnian capital was surrounded by Serb troops who bombed and strafed the city, killing and wounding civilians by the thousands. Sometimes a journalist would be present when a mortar exploded at a marketplace or a sniper’s bullet hit its mark — one day I happened to see a man get shot and try to crawl to safety — but much of the time we caught up with the wounded at Kosevo Hospital, which would often get bombed too. There were no restrictions; you could talk to any doctors or patients who were willing to speak.
The war’s tragic face was revealed at this hospital. After all, how could you understand a war, how could you feel in your gut its darkness, how could you convey this to the rest of the world, without seeing the wounded and the dead and knowing their stories? How can anyone understand a calamity without seeing its victims? To be shut out of Sarajevo’s hospital would have meant being shut out of one of the most important battlegrounds of the war.
I cannot remember a doctor or patient declining to talk. They wanted the rest of the world to know the war’s brutality and inhumanity. Stories and images of victims are inherently powerful; casualties are evidence. The less evidence we see, the less we might believe or be aware of the disaster. That’s why, for instance, the U.S. military tries to prevent photographers from taking pictures of injured or killed soldiers. For nearly two decades, the Pentagon even banned journalists from covering the transfer of military coffins at Dover Air Force Base.
It is dark outside as I write these words, and I wonder why hospital photography has taken such a hold on me. There is an answer. I have spent much of my life writing about the dying and the dead, not in pandemics but in war, and on one occasion I got some photographic evidence that was scant at the time, and it was stolen from me. This was in 2005, when I got on a U.S. military flight in Baghdad that was heading for Kuwait. Before boarding, I was asked by a soldier whether I was willing to travel with “HR.” I didn’t know that military acronym, so I asked what it meant. Human remains, he said, not looking up.
The plane was a C-17, and it carried a dozen flag-draped coffins that were made of a shiny metal. The flight lasted for what seemed like hours. My knees were inches from a coffin. At the Kuwait military airport, an honor guard removed the caskets with aching respect. It was nighttime, so I held my camera at chest level, turned off the flash to attract minimal attention, and shot a set of photos. This was against the rules: Photos of coffins were still forbidden. After the last coffin was removed, the passengers, mostly soldiers and contractors, filed out of the back of the plane and onto a bus.
As the doors of the bus were about to close, a military police officer jumped on board.
“Someone was taking pictures,” he announced. “Who was it?”
I stayed quiet as a soldier raised her hand. The MP deleted her photos and left. But a few seconds later, the MP returned and asked, standing at the front of the bus, “Who else was taking pictures?”
I was traveling with a photographer, Gilles Peress, and didn’t want to jeopardize the photos he had taken during our work together in Iraq. The MP might confiscate his film. So I raised my hand, and the MP walked down the aisle to me. As he deleted my photos, he said he had the same camera and he really liked it. He smiled as he handed it back to me. My photos of the dead were gone.
Pandemic Economics
When there is a hurricane, flood, or wildfire, the damage is not hidden. In those emergencies, there are few restrictions on what journalists and the public can see — the snapped trees, submerged streets, bodies floating in water, houses in flames. But the worst destruction of Covid-19 is not on display in places where journalists can bear witness as they wish. Most of the sick, dying, and dead are in medical facilities whose economic interests are best served by keeping journalists away. That’s how you get a cataclysm without the visuals of cataclysm.
U.S. hospitals are a mix of for-profit and not-for-profit entities, though all must focus on the bottom line, some more fiercely than others. Their executives often earn salaries on an exorbitant par with the rest of corporate America. At Mass General Brigham, a not-for-profit hospital system in Massachusetts, 17 executives earned more than $1 million in 2018; the chief executive earned about $4 million that year. One of the system’s main hospitals, Massachusetts General, told The Intercept in a statement last year that it did not allow photographers inside “for the privacy of our patients and also for their safety and that of our staff.”
The economics concept of “positive externalities” may help explain, in addition to safety and privacy concerns, why hospitals supposedly devoted to saving lives would refuse to allow journalists inside their walls during a pandemic. “Positive externalities” describe a situation in which the benefits of a company’s activity do not accrue entirely to the company paying for it. If the activity is costly to perform, the company will do less of it than society would like.
That might sound confusing, but here’s an example: When a hospital grants access to a journalist, the abundant upside of its action — public awareness of the danger of Covid-19 — would be spread across society rather than concentrated in the hospital. In doing so, however, the hospital may face a variety of potential costs, such as the publication of off-brand photos of chaos in its wards, a malpractice suit if a journalist sees something go awry, a privacy lawsuit if a patient’s identity is disclosed without permission, or the liability of a journalist contracting Covid-19.
“It’s a private cost and a public benefit,” said Ashvin Gandhi, an assistant professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management. Gandhi, who researches the health care industry, noted that “the more an activity helps third parties, the more of it that society as a whole wants to be done.” But that doesn’t change the core problem. The company performing the activity — let’s say it’s letting journalists into a Covid ward — doesn’t derive enough benefits to justify doing more of it. As a result, Gandhi added, “the larger a positive externality, the greater underprovision there will be.”
That raises a question about the relatively few hospitals that opened their doors a crack in the early days of the pandemic: Why did they?
Brooklyn Hospital, although it erected a fence to shield the transfer of body bags, did allow two teams of journalists inside in March 2020. Singletary, the hospital’s head of external affairs, played a key role. He was a newcomer to the health care industry, joining the hospital in 2018 after a career on Wall Street, and when the moment came to decide on giving access to journalists, “I was naive enough to take the risk,” he told The Intercept.
One consideration, he said, was that his hospital is a minor player in the industry: It’s a community facility that’s not affiliated with a large chain, and most of its patients do not have health insurance. Unlike the major medical centers everyone has heard about in New York — Mount Sinai, NYU Langone, NewYork-Presbyterian — Brooklyn Hospital has a hard time getting attention and is not drenched in donations from billionaires. Singletary said that as the pandemic began, a hospital trustee told him it could be an opportunity for good publicity.
“The statement was that it would be a shame if we wasted this crisis,” Singletary said. “In order for us to get a little place like ours the attention it so deserved, we had to do something a little bit different.”
Singletary said he asked his staff to contact the New York Times and he personally facilitated the visit of the newspaper’s journalists. After their first story was published, the hospital was inundated with requests from other media outlets. Singletary allowed one more team inside — a crew from CBS — but refused all others.
New York to Wuhan
When the U.S. death toll reached 500,000 early this year, the New Yorker published a story about the milestone, using a photo that showed a crematorium worker amid stacks of coffins. But these were not U.S. victims — they were Italians. The photo was shot in Italy in 2020.
It has not been unusual for U.S. publications to use pictures from other countries to illustrate the human toll of the pandemic. When the New York Times published a “Year in Pictures” portfolio for 2020, the main photo for March was from Bergamo, the epicenter of Italy’s outbreak. The photo, which shows medical workers around a Covid patient at his home, was shot by Fabio Bucciarelli and is one of the strongest images to emerge from the pandemic’s early phase. The picture’s intimacy stemmed from Bucciarelli gaining close access to Covid patients, access that most U.S. photographers could only dream of.
“It was very frustrating to see in March that all of the great stuff was coming from Italy,” noted Friedman, the photographer who was turned down across New York City. “They understood and were giving people more access.”
The saga of documentarian Hao Wu is instructive. Born and raised in China, Wu has lived in the United States for nearly 30 years, and in 2018 he directed the award-winning documentary “People’s Republic of Desire.” When the pandemic began, he wanted to make a documentary about Wuhan, the Chinese city where the pandemic originated, and New York City, where he lives. But he had no luck getting access to hospitals in New York, so he focused his attention on Wuhan, where it turned out that for a brief window of time, some Chinese journalists were able to get inside Covid wards.
Wu worked with journalists who gained access to four Wuhan hospitals in the early days of its lockdown. At the time, things were incredibly chaotic, and the central government in Beijing hadn’t yet issued guidelines for media access, Wu told The Intercept. Individual hospitals could decide on their own whether to let journalists inside, though this would change later on as Beijing took more control. At the lockdown’s outset, the journalists who collaborated with Wu were able to work with relative freedom, and their footage included a terrifying scene in which sick people banged on a hospital’s locked door to get inside for treatment. Wu turned the footage into the Emmy Award-winning “76 Days,” a reference to the length of Wuhan’s lockdown.
This is one of the most stunning facets of the pandemic’s opening stages: America’s hospital industry may have been even more effective in censoring the media than China’s government. A one-party state that detained and imprisoned citizen journalists for criticizing the government’s handling of the pandemic, China nonetheless had a brief window when its journalists could carve out more freedom to work inside hospitals than their American counterparts.
A Long Island Exception
What did it take to maneuver around the roadblocks in America?
Matthew Heineman is one of the most prominent documentarians in the U.S., and when the pandemic broke out, he wanted to get inside a hospital. His 2015 film about the drug trade, “Cartel Land,” had won a slew of awards. In 2017, he directed another award-winning documentary, “City of Ghosts,” about citizen journalists in Raqqa, Syria. But it was an earlier and lesser-known film, “Escape Fire,” that gave him the key he needed to get where he wanted to go.
“Escape Fire” was about the American health care system, and one of the authorities it featured was Dr. Donald Berwick, who headed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the Obama administration. As the Covid-19 pandemic began, Berwick vouched for Heineman with Michael Dowling, the chief executive of Northwell Health, the largest health care provider in New York state. Dowling supported Heineman’s effort to make a Covid-19 documentary and connected him with Michael Goldberg, the executive director of one of Northwell’s flagship hospitals, Long Island Jewish Medical Center.
With the backing of Northwell’s top administrators, Heineman got to work — but he still had a ways to go. The initial agreement was that he would not film any patients. This is one of the barriers that journalists who have been fortunate enough to get inside a U.S. hospital usually run into. Because of the federal privacy law known as HIPAA, hospitals are concerned about fines from the government or lawsuits from patients if journalists disclose the identities of patients without approval. However, there have been just two cases in the past decade in which media organizations were found by the government to have breached patient privacy — and each case, in 2011 and 2014, involved reality TV teams, not journalists.
“Wherever you are in the world, it’s important to get buy-in from the top, and then generally once that happens, it smooths the path below,” Heineman told The Intercept. “We gained access with the leadership team [of Northwell Health], and then the individual leadership team at Long Island Jewish, and then the doctors and patients.”
About 18 months later, the result of Heineman’s efforts is a 93-minute documentary that is being released on November 19 and is truly breathtaking, with emotional scenes not just of doctors and nurses performing their front-line work but also the patients they were trying to save — and those they were unable to save. “The First Wave” contains some of the most explicit scenes that have been filmed in U.S. hospitals: There are shots of patients being intubated, of others dying as staff administer CPR, and of bodies being zipped into bags. The film also has an expertly layered narrative that is already being hailed, in advance reviews, as a masterpiece.
Heineman feels that on a certain level, his film might be too little, too late. While he was inside the hospital, he was in touch with colleagues who were also trying to document the pandemic but were not able to get access to other medical centers. “I think one of the greatest tragedies of Covid is the fact that the general public did not see what was happening,” he said. “An already divided nation was further divided by misinformation and lack of clarity and real visual images.”
It’s impossible to know whether more reporting in the early days would have made a significant difference; that is the realm of the counterfactual. Fink isn’t sure it would have mattered. “I was very motivated early on by the thought that this could help people to understand the reality, help inform their decision-making, keep them safe, and contribute to saving lives,” she said. “But I don’t know. As I reported on surge after surge in hospitals overwhelmed in various places, I started to wonder whether or not I was right about the impact.”
She doesn’t doubt the importance of what journalists were doing and would have liked to see more of it, but after 18 months and the accumulation of a considerable amount of information on the virus, there are still lots of people who refuse to be swayed by evidence. “There are literally people who are in hospitals now with Covid or who have family members in hospital with Covid who still feel exactly as they did about not trusting vaccines, not believing in the utility of masks,” Fink said. “So people have the data, and they are making different choices. They have different beliefs. I am not sure that more images of hospitals, more reporting out of hospitals, would change that.”
Heineman has a different view. “Stats and headlines can only do so much,” he said. “If people truly saw what was happening, the overall narrative and dialogue about this pandemic would have been different. Everyone was clapping at 7 o’clock, but they didn’t really know what they were clapping for.”
Industrial Censorship
Censorship operates in ways that are far more complicated than a government getting between journalists and a story, though that’s one element of what happened in America.
As The Intercept previously reported, the Trump administration contributed to the suppression of Covid journalism by tightening HIPAA guidelines on media access to health care facilities. In May 2020, the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees HIPAA, reinforced a set of restrictions on hospitals letting journalists inside. However, the fact that some journalists got access to United Memorial and other facilities shows that a willing hospital could open its doors.
In other words, the White House’s instructions were not ironclad. This was less a matter of state censorship and more a matter of industrial censorship. When you step back, it’s truly remarkable that in an era of hypersurveillance, with cameras in everyone’s phones, with billions of images and videos created and shared every day, there was so little to be seen of the virus’s victims in the first months of the pandemic. In many ways, it is easier to find pictures of Americans suffering from the 1918 flu pandemic than from Covid a century later.
United Memorial’s defiance of the tide is explained by a single, illuminating factor. It is a small hospital and was pretty much ruled by one person last year — Varon. He was the chief of staff, chief of critical care, and chair of its board (though he recently stepped down from those positions and is now chief of Covid-19 and critical care). Varon is a confidence-filled maverick who does not mind the attention of the media or the disapproval of his peers. This year, for instance, he took another unconventional path by prescribing the human version of the drug ivermectin to some of his patients, in concert with treatments the Food and Drug Administration has approved for Covid-19. Last year, when he began bringing journalists inside the hospital, United Memorial’s general counsel “wasn’t too happy,” Varon recalled, but he bulldozed ahead.
Varon has spent a lifetime making diagnoses, and he has one for his profession in an era of pandemics. “The problem is that big hospitals are run by lawyers,” he said. “They are not run by doctors.”
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Antonella Crescimbeni)
ALSO SEE: We Could Be Looking at a
Historic Healthcare Industry Strike
In a letter to Kaiser Permanente CEO Greg Adams, the senators expressed support for the company’s nurses and other health care workers threatening to walk out for better wages, calling them “heroes and heroines” for fighting on the front lines of the pandemic.
“Instead of treating these workers with the dignity and respect they deserve you have demanded that they accept just a 2 percent wage increase and a two-tier system that allows you to pay new workers lower wages,” the senators wrote. “Considering your recent profit margins, we find this offer to be demeaning and unacceptable.”
Kaiser Permanente employees in California, Washington, Oregon and Hawaii are set to strike Monday after rejecting a contract offer that they said did not provide sufficient pay increases or address severe burnout in the workforce.
Unions representing the workers have noted that Kaiser Permanente reported $2.2 billion in profits last year and is sitting on $44.5 billion in cash reserves, a point that the senators emphasized in their letter.
“Let’s be clear. Those company profits did not occur by accident. They occurred because your employees were on the job, working tirelessly in the midst of a life-threatening pandemic,” the senators wrote.
Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) joined Sanders in the letter to Kaiser Permanente.
The strike could upend health care coverage on the West Coast amid a deadly pandemic, a situation both sides have said they want to avoid. Kaiser Permanente has pledged to continue offering services and is attempting to hire part-time nurses in the event of a strike.
In a statement Friday, Kaiser Permanente said that the company believes it is "on a path to reaching an agreement."
"We believe we can reach an agreement that meets our shared interests and avoid unnecessary and harmful disruptions to care," Kaiser Permanente said. "We also absolutely believe that as we conclude bargaining this cycle, and get through the disastrous pandemic, we will emerge stronger and more united than ever before.”
Workers in various industries across the nation are threatening to strike for better wages and working conditions. Their efforts are bolstered by a tight labor market that is making it difficult for companies to find workers. More than 10,000 John Deere workers have been on strike for over a month as they hold out for a better contract.
Bolivian soldiers conduct anti-cocaine operations with U.S. support, July 26, 1986. (photo: Rafael Wollmann/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images)
It’s been two years since the right-wing coup against Evo Morales’s socialist government. One of his former ministers tells Jacobin about how the US war on drugs helped create a Bolivian military free from popular control.
Over the months that followed the coup, right-wing forces backed by paramilitaries formed a new regime under transitional leader Jeanine Áñez, seeking to undo Morales’s legacy. While today celebrated by the EU Parliament as a champion of human rights, Áñez’s regime in fact massacred dozens of anti-coup protesters while also driving Morales and many of his colleagues into exile. Yet this was not enough to cow popular resistance, and after massive rallies and strikes demanding that repeat elections go ahead, MAS candidate Luis Arce won a huge mandate in the October 2020 contest.
Juan Ramón Quintana was minister of the presidency in each of Morales’s three governments. A former high-ranking career soldier and a learned sociologist, philosopher, and political scientist, Quintana is considered Bolivia’s most important anti-imperialist intellectual. This August, he published La contraofensiva imperial (Imperial counteroffensive) under the pseudonym Ernesto Eterno, a work whose subtitle promises to examine the coup through the “anatomy of violence and looting” in Bolivia.
Quintana spoke to Anton Flaig about imperial interests in Bolivia, the role of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in politicizing the Bolivian military, and the challenges for MAS after its return to power.
AF: What was your experience of Áñez’s regime?
JRQ: I spent almost a year in the Mexican embassy, a very difficult time. I was without my family, which was relentlessly persecuted. Meanwhile, the coup regime took action against our comrades and carried out the massacres in Senkata and Sacaba.
At the embassy, we were besieged by snipers, the telephones were tapped, and the hills around the building were occupied by police. The aim was to intimidate us and break our will. Practically all international norms were broken. The ambassador, the administrative staff, and the service staff were themselves persecuted. The coup regime showed all its cruelty. Almost all of us were denied safe travel to Mexico. A few comrades were still able to get out, including Luis Arce, who went to Mexico, then to Brazil, and later from there back to Bolivia. My strategy was to approach the situation rationally, stay calm, and focus on my writing.
AF: You were a high-ranking officer, trained in the School of the Americas. But years later, as a minister under Evo Morales, you became the most powerful voice of anti-imperialism in Bolivia. How did you become a convinced anti-imperialist?
JRQ: The decision to adopt an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist position was not easy. From a young age I read a lot about my country’s history, including foreign authors who had a different view of Latin America’s history. Slowly I began to understand that the life of the peoples of the “Third World,” the poor, is shaped by the hegemonic centers of capitalism.
I read a lot about military nationalism in Bolivia. That’s how I found out about presidents who opposed the mining oligarchy, fought for an independent, developed Bolivia, and were murdered. The military socialism of the 1930s; the military nationalism of the 1940s, which later became the national revolution, but was then swallowed up by US imperialism; and then the 1970s resurgence of this earlier military nationalism — they were all defeated. I learned that to build the Bolivian nation, you must oppose the financial system and imperialist rule.
Later I left the army and dedicated myself to studying the armed forces, the police, and relations between the United States and Bolivia.
When I entered Evo’s cabinet as a minister, I had a clear idea of the enormous challenges our government faced. For fourteen years, we managed to resist imperialist interventions, with great effort. That is why the media, which are part of imperialist rule, acted ruthlessly against us. That is why right-wing politicians who are puppets of US imperialism, and the US government itself, attacked us.
AF: In the 1990s you proposed a reform of the military. What was this about?
JRQ: The aim was to cut the armed forces’ prerogatives and privileges to limit the political autonomy they’d gained since the fight against drug trafficking. The “war on drugs” doctrine came from Washington. The enforcement of US security policy in Latin America required the armed forces to be able to suppress the population and exercise power over politicians, the judiciary, and all society. Under all neoliberal governments there were massacres, assassinations, forcible disappearances, and torture.
During the government of Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga (2001–2002), a mercenary force called the Expedition Group was created — like the paramilitaries in Colombia today. It was created to fight the coca farmers in Bolivia. But the legislature did nothing to control the loss of state sovereignty and rule of law. Political actors gave up their responsibility. What democracy can you speak of when the armed forces have political supremacy over the government and its structure, the national parliament, and the judicial authorities?
I suggested that parliament should exercise more power over the armed forces, so that they’d be accountable for their corruption, their links to drug trafficking, their human rights violations, and the ill-treatment within the army. But mainly because of their dependence on the US Southern Command, our armed forces looked more like colonial forces intervening in a colonized area. The rule of law can’t exist if generals are substituted for politicians and the US military is ruling much of the country. So, unlike the reforms that we would propose today, the reforms back then had to take a different course.
AF: What reforms would you propose today?
JRQ: There are three basic problems with the army. The first has to do with the political authorities’ weakness in controlling the armed forces. There has been a seditious, conspiratorial culture in the armed forces since the nineteenth century. Bolivia is the Latin American country that has had the most coups. The armed forces believe they are meant to stand above public authority.
But there is also a weakness in society. The population pays its taxes to support the military but has absolutely no knowledge of the military, its doctrine, its weapons, its mentality, and its history. In our fourteen years in office, we [MAS] failed to fill political offices with defense personnel who would democratize knowledge of the armed forces. This left the armed forces exempt from accountability to society.
Second, there is a colonial culture in Bolivia. This has to do with the consequences of more than a hundred years of military service. Rural farming communities assume that their sons have to pay a blood toll to become citizens. Abolishing compulsory military service is unthinkable, because, as a society, we have not created any alternative spaces for exercising citizenship.
The army believes that it has a license to be the “guardian” of society. How come? Its contact with society is contact with the indigenous, rural world. There is no contact with the middle class, with the sons of the oligarchy, because the sons of the oligarchy do not go into the barracks. Those who do go are the indios, the peasants, the workers. The armed forces’ contact with marginalized layers gives them a feeling of cultural superiority. Still today, they have not understood the concept of the plurinational state. So it is necessary to work on decolonizing the armed forces. They must understand that ours is a state that recognizes diversity among nations, coexisting in a complementary way.
The third problem is foreign interference. For seventy years, Bolivia’s armed forces were ideologically ruled by the United States. The appearance of their uniforms, their weapons, their doctrine, their training, their trips to the United States made the armed forces lose its identity as an institution dependent on the Bolivian state. You are proud to be an ally of the most powerful army in the world, even though the relations between you are colonial. According to the colonial armed forces, local criollos are an invincible power.
Today, they realize that the US armed forces can be defeated. The US empire is in decline — and suffering historic defeats. It left Afghanistan in worse conditions than it left Saigon in 1975. So the idea is starting to arise in the armed forces that they don’t automatically have to be aligned with the world’s greatest military power.
What war will you win with an army that has a colonial mentality? The only battle it has won in the last seventy years is the war against the Bolivian people. The armed forces’ doctrine stems from US anti-communist ideology: the people are the enemy, we cannot be a modern country because most Bolivians are miserable, ignorant, indigenous people, and so on. In this idea of modernity, indigenous peoples can only achieve social value if they meet the conditions for living in a civilized society: They have to speak Spanish. They have to have Western urban customs. They have to mimic the US way of life.
That’s why we have to change this nineteenth-century defense model to a twenty-first-century one.
AF: What would a twenty-first-century model be like?
JRQ: The doctrine of having a professional armed body, plus the military service of part of the people, is a model from the last century. A twenty-first-century model would be the doctrine of the people in arms. In the face of all threats to state security, such as institutional and democratic collapse, it is the people in arms who defend democracy, territory, and sovereignty.
Ultimately, this is what makes the state invulnerable. That is the model that they developed in Vietnam. That is the model that the Taliban have in Afghanistan, the Chinese with Mao Zedong, the Cubans have it, and large parts of Venezuela have it too. Giving arms to the people guarantees national integrity and the defense of sovereignty. The relationship of spiritual, intellectual, and cultural dependence on the United States has to be broken, and the armed forces brought under the state’s control.
Today much of the armed forces around the world have become practically private services. Logistics, food, clothing, and weapons are provided by military companies. There is also a trend toward privatization in the military field itself. The soldiers who have gone to Afghanistan and Iraq are largely mercenaries hired in other countries. They simply respond to the interests of the large corporations that are waging war to loot oil, gas, and minerals. Even US soldiers are not necessarily professional soldiers — it’s cheaper to hire mercenaries.
AF: When Morales proposed that militias should be formed like in Venezuela, the press reacted very negatively, and he immediately had to withdraw his proposal. So there are certain concerns — even among parts of the population that voted for MAS. How could the people in arms be controlled?
JRQ: In this model, an armed people with a [sufficient] educational level and political awareness takes on the military defense of the territory, but also of the nation itself.
The media condemn Morales for this proposal — but why? I remember that from 1960 to 1964 the constitution recognized the army, the air force, the navy, but also the militias. The national revolution from 1952 to 1964 coexisted with armed militias, workers’ militias, peasant militias, and armed women. But now this is supposedly a scandal.
The United States is the most armed society in the world and its civilian population is the most armed population in the world. But now it turns out that it is a scandal to think that there can be militias.
That is a conception for the revolutions of the twenty-first century. It is not just a matter of suppressing coup threats. For sure, there is no coup against a people in arms. But the concept does not stop there — it is a wider concept of self-defense. Today the empire, the United States, is being defeated, and defeated by an armed people [in Afghanistan], the poorest in the Middle East. This is the greatest military defeat for the Western powers in the twenty-first century — and will make the United States and NATO think twice.
AF: You mentioned imperialist doctrines like the fight against communism. What’s behind these doctrines?
JRQ: The US has fought three wars in Latin America over the past seventy years: the war against communism, the war on drugs, and the war on terror. These imperial wars serve as a pretext for geopolitical rule over Latin America — and other parts of the world, too, but I’ll focus on Latin America.
The war against communism was a farce. It was about US expansion around the world under the pretext of curbing the advance of communism. With McCarthyism, they created the Red Scare in American society. They used this to criminalize communism, but only to maintain the internal cohesion of the US people.
This was a pretext for building the power of the military, which came to Latin America with anti-communism. There were sixty communists in Bolivia and [the anti-communists] had an army of thirty thousand men. The Communist Party in Bolivia was a peaceful party and never declared civil war. It took part in democratic election campaigns. But the armed forces in Bolivia were set up according to anti-communist doctrine. Because the United States said that the workers, peasants, indigenous women, miners, etc. were communists, the army fought the miners, workers, peasants, etc.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the anti-communist war was replaced by the war on drugs. They said that drug trafficking corrupts and destroys society. But for what? To create the DEA and have it interfering in Bolivia’s domestic affairs.
But let’s look at two cases. In 2001, when the United States invaded Afghanistan, there was twenty times less opium production than today. What fight against drugs are we talking about? There are seven US bases in Colombia and a large part of the US Southern Command. Colombia is a US-occupied country and the largest net producer of cocaine. Where is the fight against drug trafficking there? Where are the DEA and the US soldiers?
Today they have the war on terror. They called us seditious and terrorists, a narco-government, etc. But where are the terrorists?
AF: While the DEA was expelled from Bolivia in 2008, according to various reports, drug trafficking activities increased with DEA support. What do you think about that?
JRQ: Historically in Bolivia, the DEA was part of the drug trafficking problem and never part of the solution. I’ll give you three clear examples.
The DEA was involved in exporting drugs from the Serranía de Caparuch to feed the financial system and purchase weapons for the civil wars in Central America under the command of Oliver North. In both cases, the CIA was involved in the export of cocaine. Here in Bolivia, there are two cases in which the DEA was involved in the export of four tons of cocaine that left from El Alto and was then detained in Peru.
In addition, you have other cases of DEA agents being involved in drug trafficking. It’s not just me saying it. There are books by former DEA agents who confess that the DEA was involved in the protection of drug trafficking, in the production of cocaine, in the protection of international cocaine routes. Michael Levine wrote about it. He is an ex-DEA agent who worked in Bolivia and Argentina. He reported that Luis García Meza’s military coup in 1980 was financed with the support of the CIA and drug trafficking.
Who believes today that the war on drug trafficking is achieving victories? Quite the opposite. It’s been a resounding failure.
AF: It’s interesting that in Evo Morales’s cabinets there were union leaders, academics, ex-guerrillas along with you, a high-ranking former soldier. Why did Morales create such a diverse government, including certain tensions?
JRQ: Previous governments didn’t reflect society. Evo pursued the indigenous Andean logic of weaving together relationships. For Evo, power is not the predominance of one man’s decision but knowing how to weave things together. In the cabinet, there were miners, workers, indigenous women, artisans, ex-soldiers, and middle-class intellectuals.
On any political decision, you had the possibility of hearing an opinion from any of these different social actors. There were always discrepancies, there was always debate. But the political decision was enriched by the plural combination of everyone’s thinking.
AF: There were strong criticisms when you said, a few days before the coup in 2019, “We are going to be the second Vietnam for the United States.” Why did you say that?
JRQ: The right wing will use anything the government says for their own political ends. If we say that [my speech] contributed to a climate of social tension, that was due to the Right’s manipulation of my simple statement that “My greatest wish is that Bolivia will be a Vietnam against the empire.”
But what revolutionary doesn’t want his homeland to be another Vietnam? If not, what is the point of being anti-imperialist?
Today the greatest threat to humanity is Western European and US imperialism, allied in NATO. This is the imperialism that has destroyed Afghanistan, which is destroying Iraq, which is destroying Yemen, which is destroying the Middle East, which is destabilizing the region.
It is also an imperialism in crisis, unable to stand on its own two feet. Imperialism sustains itself by exploiting society, looting natural resources, exploiting the labor force, concentrating wealth in a few hands. We have 1 percent of society ruling 50 percent of the world’s wealth. Do you think this is rational?
This armed imperialism is the expression of a global capitalist system — as Vladimir Lenin said, in the higher phase of capitalism. It can only survive through war. Our proposal is the defeat of the logic of the war industry, the system based on war.
To say that Bolivia can become another Vietnam — well, politically, I believe that this is what any progressive, humanist, solidaristic citizen of the Left aspires toward. It’s the minimum we should be proposing. When you think of Vietnam, you think of a nation in arms, a poor and battered people invaded by the greatest power in the world, which showed it could defeat the empire.
Obviously, this is going to generate a lot of controversy on the Right, which defends the empire. The media in Bolivia are transmission belts for the project of imperial domination. They are defending the destruction of humanity, whereas we defend humanity and Mother Earth. That is why we are anti-imperialists. Because we want peace. Because we don’t want supremacy but equality and justice. So what I said was not a militaristic position but political opposition to imperial militarism.
Some people didn’t believe that a coup would take place in Bolivia. But when you have a political project of emancipation, of independence from the empire, a coup is inevitable. Because the United States cannot accept any country in Latin America not obeying its strategic and geopolitical interests. All the countries that have opposed the United States in the last hundred years have suffered imperial punishment or military invasion, coups, assassinations, or the destruction of the government.
AF: You are a controversial but also popular figure, and recently you published your new book. What do you see as your future role in Bolivia’s “change process”?
JRQ: I am trying to make young people aware of their responsibility toward humanity. I want to see them have an ethical, political, and moral conduct that is anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and anti-fascist. So my work will focus on political education.
Capitalism is an exhausted project. So we need to think about an alternative. To think about this philosophy of living well (vivir bien), an anti-imperial thought that also has a global projection. I see myself as a humble teacher of this generation of young people, to try to make them understand our history.
We need to push back against the history we’ve been taught for 180 years. The nineteenth century saw the indigenous movement fight to preserve their lands against the siege of big mining and the big landowners trying to expropriate them. If you expropriate the lands of a community, you are also destroying their culture, their language, their customs, their ancestral memory.
That history has always been hidden from us to deny the leading role of the worker, the farmer, the peasant woman. My greatest wish is to teach this hidden history. If I can have that job in MAS, then I will be truly happy.
AF: If you could give advice to any member of the government, what would it be?
JRQ: I don’t usually give advice, but I’ll make a simple recommendation, for MAS and the government especially. If power is not understood in the right way, we are doomed to defeat.
The Right wants power and is willing for people to be massacred — as in Senkata and Sacaba — so it can have it. This power has no morals or scruples in imposing dominion over others.
But our power is not the Western concept of power, a concentration of privileges. Rather, it is a tool for liberation. Power is not a means to usurp what others have. It is doing everything possible so that others can live well. Power is not about command from the heights of public office but obedience to the collective will — guaranteeing collective interests.
Dontae Sharpe reacts outside the Pitt County Courthouse after a judge determined he could be set free. (photo: Deborah Griffin/The Daily Reflector/AP)
Cooper's pardon of innocence allows Dontae Sharpe to apply for compensation up to $750,000 for his wrongful conviction.
"Mr. Sharpe and others who have been wrongly convicted deserve to have that injustice fully and publicly acknowledged," the governor said in a statement announcing he had pardoned the man after a careful review of the case.
In 1995, Sharpe was given a life sentence at age 19 for the first-degree murder of 33-year-old George Radcliffe, whom he was accused of killing a year earlier during a drug deal. Sharpe had maintained his innocence throughout and said in a 2019 interview that his faith and knowledge he was innocent guided his refusal to accept offers of a lighter sentence in exchange for a guilty plea.
At a virtual news conference Friday just an hour after Cooper's announcement, Sharpe said he was in disbelief when his lawyer called him with the news. He said he was still processing it and also was thinking of those who had taken to the streets and held vigils on his behalf.
"I'm still in a haze kind of," Sharpe said. "When you're dealing with us human beings, it can go any way, yes and no. I didn't know what to expect. I was believing for a pardon."
The government's case against Sharpe relied in part on testimony from a 15-year-old girl at the time who claimed she saw Sharpe kill Radcliffe but later recanted and said she wasn't present at the time of the shooting. She later said her claims were made up, based on what investigators told her.
Sharpe was unsuccessful in his repeated efforts for a new trial until a former state medical examiner testified that the state's theory of the shooting was not medically or scientifically possible. A judge subsequently ordered more evidence to be heard. Sharpe was released from prison in August 2019 after the prosecutor said the state wouldn't pursue a retrial.
The NAACP had long pushed for Sharpe's release over the years and urged Cooper to issue a pardon of innocence. In recent months, racial justice groups have demanded the governor grant Sharpe the clemency needed in order to apply for compensation for his wrongful conviction. They held vigils in front of Cooper's state residence in downtown Raleigh for several weeks.
The Rev. Anthony Spearman, a longtime North Carolina NAACP leader who was among those who participated in a vigil outside the Governor's Mansion pushing for a pardon, said, "This should have happened a long time ago."
Sharpe thanked Cooper but called out a criminal justice system he considers "corrupt." He said he planned to celebrate Friday evening with his family and will continue to press for other inmates to receive justice.
"My freedom is still incomplete as long as there's still people going to prison wrongfully, if there's still people in prison wrongfully and there's still people that are waiting on pardons," he said.
A man holding a child reacts as the members of the Kurdish family from Dohuk in Iraq wait for the border guard patrol, near Narewka, Poland. (photo: Wojtek Radwanski/AFP/Getty Images)
VICE World News speaks with people trapped between Belarus and Poland, many of whom paid travel agents thousand of dollars for the chance of reaching the European Union.
So how then, did he end up being violently pushed back by Polish soldiers in the freezing cold, on a heavily-fortified forested border on the edge of Europe that migrants have come to call “the jungle”?
Zana, an Iraqi Kurd who asked to only be identified by his first name only fearing reprisal from authorities in Belarus, has unsuccessfully attempted to cross from Belarus into Poland – and the European Union – six times in the last month since arriving from Minsk via Damascus.
With no hope of making it quietly through the woods on the border, the 26-year-old joined hundreds of fellow migrants who organised themselves over Telegram in an attempt to make it over en masse. This attempt failed, too.
“I came here with hopes that it would be safer than crossing the Aegean sea and other routes through Turkey. For months I was hearing stories about how easy it was through Belarus, and I borrowed money to pay for the trip, but with freezing temperatures of the winter here it turned out that it isn’t that easy from here too,” Zana told VICE World News in a video call from the border.
“I’m a mathematics teacher by training, but it has been three years since I graduated from university, and I haven’t been able to find a suitable job that would secure a good future. I worked in a bakery, supermarket, and even construction, but the economy is getting worse every day, and I decided to leave after hearing about the Belarus route.”
In Iraq, due to a widespread absence of credit cards or online banking, and difficulties in obtaining proper paperwork for visa applications, travel insurance, and hotel reservations, there is still a massive market for travel agents who provide services for clients wishing to travel, such as Zana.
Despite enjoying relative progress and stability compared to the rest of Iraq, a western ally, the oil-rich Kurdistan region in the north of the country has high unemployment rates, particularly among young people. Mired in corruption, nepotism, and mismanagement, the region of 5 million is under the de facto rule of two powerful families – the Barzanis and Talabanis – who have run the area between them under the banner of two political parties since a popular uprising against Saddam Hussein in 1991.
Belarus has emerged as a major route for people trying to reach Europe since relations between the EU and Alexander Lukashenko – Belarus’ autocratic president who has been in power since 1994 and has been dubbed the “last dictator of Europe” – went into a deep freeze after the disputed election results of 2020. The arrest of exiled journalist Roman Protasevich by diverting a plane led to new sanctions, further souring relations.
The EU has accused Belarus of retaliating with a new form of hybrid warfare, by loosening border controls and simplifying the visa process for a few Middle Eastern countries. Soon, people looking for a safe path to reach Europe headed towards the Polish border, with the Polish Border Guard reporting hundreds of attempts at illegal border crossings on a daily basis since August. In October alone, they say that they stopped about 4,300 attempts and over 30,000 attempts since the beginning of 2021.
“It all appeared normal with a direct flight between Baghdad and Minsk operating, but soon, the demand for tickets to Minsk was surging, and it was clear that something dodgy was going on, with new flights scheduled from other cities of Iraq to Belarus and it appeared that people were using the route to reach Europe,” an Iraqi travel agent familiar with the process, and who didn't want to reveal his name and agency fearing repercussions from local authorities, told VICE World News over the phone.
“I had clients who went for a cheap weeklong holiday in Belarus back in the summer, there was a form, travel insurance and hotel reservations which were enough to get a visa on arrival,” he continued.
“Then Iraqi government decided to stop direct flights, and people couldn’t get visas on arrival anymore, but the scheme continued through embassies of Belarus in the neighbouring countries, with an invitation letter from someone in Belarus and the applications and passports were processed for a fee that reaches around $1,300 to $1,500 only for the visa.”
Travel packages offered by a few travel agent offices for “$3,600 to $4,000” for a person to travel to Minsk include a ride from the airport and a few nights in a hotel.
The UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, has called on Poland to fulfil the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and provide medical assistance to the people on the border. Still, Warsaw has refused to comply and says that Minsk is responsible for the people who have travelled to Belarus.
While the EU accuses Lukashenko of “weaponising” migrants by facilitating their entry into the EU through Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, in response, the Belarusian government has blamed Poland and the EU for demonstrating an “inhumane attitude” toward asylum seekers.
As the situation on the border has worsened, Turkish Airlines has announced that it will restrict ticket sales to Iraqis, Syrian, and Yemeni nationals, while the Iraqi government reported organising repatriation flights from Minsk for the people trapped in Belarus.
But for now, thousands of people are stuck in Belarus, with nowhere to go: Belarus security forces are pushing them towards the border, while Polish soldiers just push them back.
“We are stuck here between Polish and Belarus soldiers, without water and food. We can’t go back to Minsk because the Belarusians surrounded the area, and we have to take permission from them to go to the loo nearby,” one Iraqi migrant who spoke on condition of anonymity fearing repercussions from Belarusian authorities said.
“We either cross into Poland, or we die. There is no way the Belarusians will let us back to Minsk.”
A firefighter monitors the Dixie fire near Janesville, California, which burned more than 800,000 acres and destroyed over 1,000 structures. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
How? Soot, or black carbon, from wildfires can enter the atmosphere and travel long distances, reaching the Arctic where it can encourage ice melt, Insider explained. Now, new research published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Thursday found that wildfires may be putting three times more black carbon into the Arctic atmosphere than climate models indicated.
"[B]lack carbon may also accelerate the rapid increase in temperature, there are very large uncertainties," study co-author and University of Tokyo Earth and Planetary physics associate professor Makoto Koike told Insider.
Black carbon is a potential problem for the Arctic because it can land on ice and darken it, making it more likely to absorb sunlight and melt. The new research compared measurements of black carbon in the Arctic atmosphere in 2018, 2015, 2010 and 2008. It found that the differences could not be explained by the locations where the measurements were taken, but instead seemed to correspond with wildfires burning in mid-latitudes in western and eastern Eurasia.
"These results suggest that the year-to-year variation of biomass burning activities likely affected BC amounts in the Arctic troposphere in spring, at least in the years examined in this study," the study authors wrote.
Koike said it wasn't possible to know if soot from 2021 California wildfires was reaching the Arctic, but that it very well might be.
"But we need to realize that that may happen, even though we don't know," he told Insider.
The new findings are an example of how the impacts of the climate crisis build on each other. There is already an association between increased wildfires and warmer global temperatures.
"As global warming accelerates, the number and the scale of the biomass burning are increasing," study co-author and University of Nagoya, Japan associate professor of environmental research Sho Ohata told Insider.
At the same time, the Arctic is already warming three times faster than the rest of the planet through a process known as "Arctic amplification." Climate Signals explains what this means and what's at stake:
As sea ice declines, it becomes younger and thinner, and therefore more vulnerable to further melting. When the ice melts entirely, darker land or ocean surfaces can absorb more energy from the Sun, causing additional heating. Arctic amplification is driving ice sheet melt, sea level rise, more intense Arctic fire seasons, and permafrost melt. A growing body of research also shows that rapid Arctic warming is contributing to changes in mid-latitude climate and weather.
Previous research had already indicated that soot from wildfires could reach the Arctic. Satellite data from the EU's Copernicus Earth observation system found that soot from wildfires in Russia reached all the way to Greenland and Canada this summer, as the Financial Times reported.
This may be bad news for Arctic ice, but there is still some debate about the role of black carbon in the atmosphere itself. Fires can sometimes emit sulfur along with black carbon, which can have a cooling effect. But black carbon can also be coated with other chemicals that make it more absorbent and cause it to release more heat.
"Depending on the origin of the black carbon and the different proportions, then that can be a cooling effect and warming effect," Mikael Hildén, a professor researching environmental policy at the Finnish Environment Institute who was not involved with the study, told Insider. "The current consensus seems to be leaning towards saying that there's a net warming effect."
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