Four years ago, on Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed the author,
Jonathan Sayles, about his new book, A Moment in the Sun. It's a huge novel
about American history, starting at the time of the beginning of the Spanish
American war. I searched for the book and couldn't find it anywhere. Then,
eventually, Deborah found it for me on Bookshare, but it was just too
difficult to read with a synthetic voice. A few months ago, it appeared on
BARD. So I've started it all over again, all 35 hours of it. There are the
men searching for gold in the Alaskan territory, the con men who gather to
take advantage of them, The Filipinos resisting Spanish rule, the young
American men enlisting in the US Army to fight the enemy, the people
rebeling against the economic control of the railroads, the farmers who've
lost their land, the unemployed former soldiers and farmers trying to march
on Washington to demand that their government provide jobs and economic
relief. There's war propaganda from the mass media which includes statements
about America's right to rule as much of the world as possible on behalf of
American business. Yes, it's a novel, but it's based on history. Sayles
researched it. So many of the themes are identical to those in our country
today. Of course they are. It's the same culture, updated with new
technology and a somewhat more educated populace, now more urban than rural.
But the economic divide, the racism, and the tendency toward empire are the
ssame.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, May 05, 2016 10:05 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: my blog carl jarvis; James Jarvis; Matthew
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Tomgram: Nick Turse, It Can't Happen Here,
Can It?
"It Can't Happen Here, Can It?"
That subject line started me to remembering how totally indoctrinated I had
been as a child. America, insulated from most of the rest of the world by
broad oceans, and dominating those neighbors unfortunate enough to be within
our hemisphere.
"It could never happen here!" they cried. "Our democracy is too strong,
thanks to the great foresight of our Founding Fathers, that we can never
fall to some tyrant, as has so often happened around the world." And I
bought this, hook line and sinker, despite the fact that we had almost split
into two nations back in the 1860's.
Still, FDR had wooed the South, and the Dixicrats found a place within the
protection of the Federal government where they could lick their wounds, and
plot to keep Racism alive. The Great Depression and then, the "Good War"
fought, "Over There", kept us bonded, through the Korean Conflict(War) and
only began to unravel during the late 50's and 60's as the Civil Rights
Movement gathered momentum and our intervention in Vietnam and Cambodia took
our attention away from the simmering unrest within our own borders.
But tensions grew and anger that had been kept somewhat under control, was
fanned by Right Wing Opportunists, led by that Republican Hero, Ronald
Reagan, as he gathered the former Dixicrats to his bosom and told them
bedtime stories about Government being the enemy, and shouts of, "The South
Shall Rise Again!" was merely a tribute to the long Southern Tradition.
But now we have no longer any control over the boiling cauldron, with the
likes of Donald Trump fanning the flames of hatred, one group over the
next...over the next...
And the Shock Jocks from the Far, Crazed Right have inundated the airwaves,
boldly spewing suspicion and fear and hatred.
Can it happen here? The question should be, Can we keep it from happening
here?
Carl Jarvis
On 5/4/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
the world,"
Tomgram: Nick Turse, It Can't Happen Here, Can It?
By Nick Turse
Posted on May 3, 2016, Printed on May 4, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176135/
Every now and then, I teach a class to young would-be journalists and
one of the first things I talk about is why I consider writing an act
of generosity. As they are usually just beginning to stretch their
writerly wings, their task, as I see it, is to enter the world we're
already in (it's generally the only place they can afford to go) and
somehow decode it for us, make us see it in a new way. And who can
deny that doing so is indeed an act of generosity? But for the foreign
correspondent, especially in war zones, the generosity lies in the
very act of entering a world filled with dangers, a world that the
rest of us might not be capable of entering, or for that matter brave
enough to enter, and somehow bringing us along with them.
I thought about this recently when I had in my hands the first copy of
Nick Turse's new Dispatch Book, Next Time They'll Come to Count the
Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan, and flipped it open to its
memorable initial paragraph, one I already new well, and began to read
it all over again:
"Their voices, sharp and angry, shook me from my slumber. I didn't
know the language but I instantly knew the translation. So I groped
for the opening in the mosquito net, shuffled from my downy white bed
to the window, threw back the stained tan curtain, and squinted into
the light of a new day breaking in South Sudan. Below, in front of my
guest house, one man was getting his ass kicked by another. A flurry
of blows connected with his face and suddenly he was on the ground.
Three or four men were watching."
Nick, TomDispatch's managing editor and a superb historian as well as
reporter, spent years in a war-crimes zone of the past to produce his
award-winning book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in
Vietnam. It was a harrowing historical journey for which he traveled
to small villages on the back roads of Vietnam to talk to those who
had experienced horrific crimes decades earlier. In 2015, however, on
his second trip to South Sudan, a country the U.S. helped bring into
existence, he found himself in an almost unimaginable place where the
same kinds of war crimes were being committed right then and there in
a commonplace way, where violence was the coin of the realm, and
horrors of various sorts were almost guaranteed to be around the next
corner. In his new book, he brings us with him into such a world in a
way that is deeply memorable. Ann Jones, author of They Were Soldiers,
calls him "the wandering scribe of war crimes." And she adds, "Reading
Turse will turn your view of war upside down... There's no glory here
in Turse's pages, but the clear voices of people caught up in this
fruitless cruelty, speaking for themselves."
Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead is, I think, the definition
of an act of generosity. Nick has just returned from his latest trip
to South Sudan and today's post gives you a sense of the ongoing
brutalities and incongruities of life there (and here as well). Tom
Donald Trump in South Sudan What Trumps the Horrors of a Hellscape?
The Donald!
By Nick Turse
LEER, South Sudan -- I'm sitting in the dark, sweating. The blinding
white sun has long since set, but it's still in the high 90s, which is
a relief since it was above 110 earlier. Slumped in a blue plastic
chair, I'm thinking back on the day, trying to process everything I
saw, the people I spoke with: the woman whose home was burned down,
the woman whose teenage daughter was shot and killed, the woman with
10 mouths to feed and no money, the glassy-eyed soldier with the
AK-47.
Then there were the scorched ruins: the wrecked houses, the
traditional wattle-and-daub tukuls without roofs, the spectral
footprints of homes set aflame by armed raiders who swept through in
successive waves, the remnants of a town that has ceased to exist.
And, of course, there were the human remains: a field of scattered
skulls and femurs and ribs and pelvises and spinal columns.
And I'm sitting here -- spent, sweaty, stinking -- trying to make
sense of it all about 10 feet from a sandbagged bunker I'm supposed to
jump into if the shooting starts again. "It's one of the worse places in
someone had assured me before I left South Sudan's capital, Juba, forthe press with death.
this hellscape of burnt-out buildings and unburied bones that goes by
the name of Leer.
A lantern on a nearby table casts a dim glow on an approaching aid
worker, an African with a deep knowledge of this place. He's come to
fetch his dinner. I'm hoping to corral him and pick his brain about
the men who torched this town, burned people alive, beat and murdered
civilians, abducted, raped, and enslaved women and children, looted
and pillaged and stole.
Before I can say a word, he beats me to the punch with his own set of
rapid-fire questions: "This man called Trump -- what's going on with him?
Who's voting for him? Are you voting for him?" He then proceeds to
tell me everything he's heard about the Republican frontrunner -- how
Trump is tarnishing America's global image, how he can't believe the
things Trump says about women and immigrants.
Here, where catastrophic food insecurity may tip into starvation at
any time, where armed men still arrive in the night to steal and rape.
("They could come any night. You might even hear them tonight.
You'll hear the women screaming," another aid worker told me earlier
in the day.) Here, where horrors abound, this man wants -- seemingly
needs -- to know if Donald Trump could actually be elected president
of the United States. "I'm really afraid," he says of the prospect
without a hint of irony.
Of Midwifery and Militias
After decades of effort, the United States "helped midwife the birth"
of the Republic of South Sudan, according to then-Senator, now
Secretary of State John Kerry. In reality, for the South Sudanese to
win their independence it took two brutal conflicts with Sudan, the
first of which raged from 1955 to 1972, and the second from 1983 to
2005, leaving millions dead and displaced.
Still, it is true that for more than 20 years, a bipartisan coalition
in Washington and beyond championed the southern rebels, and that, as
the new nation broke away from Sudan, the U.S. poured in billions of
dollars in aid, including hundreds of millions of dollars of military
and security assistance.
The world's youngest nation, South Sudan gained its independence in
2011 and just two and a half years later plunged into civil war.
Since then, an estimated 50,000 to 300,000 people have been killed in
a conflict pitting President Salva Kiir, a member of the country's
largest tribe, the Dinka, against Riek Machar, an ethnic Nuer and the
vice president he sacked in July 2013. That December, a fight between
Dinka and Nuer troops set off the current crisis, which then turned
into a slaughter of Nuers by Kiir's forces in Juba. Reprisals
followed as Machar's men took their revenge on Dinkas and other
non-Nuers in towns like Bor and Bentiu. The conflict soon spread,
splintering into local wars within the larger war and birthing other
violence that even a peace deal signed last August and Machar's recent
return to the government has been unable to halt.
The signature feature of this civil war has been its preferred target:
civilians. It has been marked by massacres, mass rape, sexual
slavery, assaults of every sort, extrajudicial killings, forced
displacement of local populations, disappearances, abductions,
torture, mutilations, the wholesale destruction of villages,
pillaging, looting, and a host of other crimes.
Again and again, armed men have fallen upon towns and villages filled
with noncombatants. That's exactly what happened to Leer in 2015.
Militias allied with the government, in coordination with Kiir's
troops -- the Sudan People's Liberation Army, or SPLA -- attacked the
town and nearby villages again and again. Rebel forces fled in the
face of the government onslaught.
Fearing execution, many men fled as well. Women stayed behind, caring
for children, the sick, and the elderly. There was an assumption that
they would be spared. They weren't. Old men were killed in their
homes that were then set ablaze. Women were gang raped. Others were
taken away as sex slaves. Whole villages were razed. Survivors were
chased into the nearby swamps, tracked down, and executed. Children
drowned in the chaos.
Those who lived through it spent months in those waterlogged swamps,
eating water lily bulbs. When they returned home, they were
confronted yet again by pitiless armed men who, at gunpoint, took what
meager belongings they had left, sometimes the very clothes off
children's backs.
This is a story that ought to be told and told and retold. And yet
here in Leer, like everywhere I went in South Sudan, I couldn't get
away from Donald Trump. So many -- South Sudanese, Americans,
Canadians, Europeans -- seemed to want to talk about him. Even in
this ruined shell of a town, Trump was big news.
The "Endorsement" Heard Round the World Back in Juba, I settle down in
the shade of my hotel's bar on a Saturday morning to read the Daily
Vision. In that newspaper, there's a story about the dire economic
straits the country finds itself in and the violence it's breeding, as
well as one about violations of the 2015 peace pact. And then there's
this gem of a headline: "Nobody Likes Donald Trump. Not Even White
Men."
A fair number of South Sudanese men I ran into, however, did like him.
"He mixes it up," one told me, lauding Trump's business acumen. "At
least he speaks his mind. He's not afraid to say things that people
do not want to hear," said another. I heard such comments in Juba and
beyond. It leaves you with the impression that if his campaign hits
rough shoals in the U.S., Trump might still have a political future in
South Sudan. After all, this is a country currently led by a brash,
cowboy-hat-wearing former guerrilla who mixes it up and is certainly
not afraid to speak his mind even when it comes to threatening members of
Compared to Kiir, who stands accused by the United Nations of warU.S.
crimes, Trump looks tame indeed. The Republican candidate has only
threatened to weaken First Amendment protections in order to make it
easier to sue, not kill, reporters. Still, the two leaders do seem
like-minded on a number of issues. Kiir's government, for example,
is implicated in all manner of atrocities, including torture, which
Trump has shown an eagerness to employ as a punishment in Washington's
war on terror. Trump has also expressed a willingness to target not
only those deemed terrorists, but also their families. Kiir's forces
have done just that, attacking noncombatants suspected of sympathizing
with the rebels, as they did during the sack of Leer.
So it didn't come as a surprise when, in March, the Sudan Tribune -- a
popular Paris-based website covering South Sudan and Sudan -- reported
that Salva Kiir had endorsed Trump. It even provided readers with the
official statement issued by Kiir's office after his phone call with the
presidential candidate: "Donald Trump is a true, hard-working,opportunities."
no-nonsense American who, when he becomes president, will support
South Sudan in its democratic path and stability. South Sudan, the
world newest nations [sic], is also looking forward to Donald Trump's
support and investment in almost all the sectors." Trump, said the
Tribune, "expressed his thanks for the endorsement and said he will
send his top aides to the country to discuss further the investment
It turned out, however, that the Tribune had been taken in by a localvice-president to Kiir.
satirical news site, Saakam -- the Onion of South Sudan -- whose
tagline is "Breaking news like it never happened." That the Tribune
was fooled by the story is not as strange as it might first seem. As
journalist Jason Patinkin observed in Quartz, "Kiir's reputation is
such that many Africa watchers and journalists found the story plausible."
I, for one, hadn't even bothered to read the Tribune article. The
title told me all I needed to know. It sounded like classic Kiir. I
almost wondered what had taken him so long to reach out. But South
Sudan's foreign ministry assured Patinkin, "There is no truth to [the
story] whatsoever."
For now, at least.
Will He Win?
There's a fever-dream, schizophrenic quality to the war in South Sudan.
The
conflict began in an orgy of violence, then ebbed, only to flare again
and again. As the war has ground on, new groups have emerged, and
alliances have formed while others broke down. Commanders switch
sides, militias change allegiances. In 2014, for example, Brigadier
General Lul Ruai Koang, the rebel army's spokesman, called out the
SPLA for "committing crimes against humanity." Kiir, he said, had
lost control of his forces and had become little more than a puppet of
his Ugandan backers. Last year, Lul split from Machar to form the
"South Sudan Resistance Movement/Army" -- an organization that
attracted few followers. This year, he found a new job, as the
spokesman for the military he once cast as criminal. "I promise to
defend SPLA in Media Warfare until the last drop of blood," he wrote
in a Facebook post after being tapped by Kiir. Of course, Machar
himself has just recently returned to Juba to serve as first
In a country like this, enmeshed in a war like this, it's hardlyconflict.
surprising that ceasefires have meant little and violence has ground
on even after a peace deal was signed last August. Leer was just one
of the spots where atrocities continued despite the pact that "ended" the
More recently, the war -- or rather the various sub-conflicts it'sGovernment:
spawned, along with other armed violence -- has spread to previously
peaceful areas of the country. Cattle-raiding, a long-standing
cultural practice, now supercharged by modern weaponry and
military-style tactics, has proven increasingly lethal to communities
nationwide, and has recently even bled across the border into
Ethiopia. A South Sudanese raid into that country's Gambela region
last month killed 208 Ethiopians, and the attackers abducted
108 women and children while stealing more than 2,000 head of cattle.
While in Leer, I do end up talking at length with the Trump-intrigued
aid worker about local cattle-raiding, as well as the killings, the
rapes, and the widespread looting. I was always, however, aware that,
like many other foreign aid workers and locals I meet, what he really
wanted was an American take on the man presently dominating U.S.
politics, an explanation of the larger-than-life and
stranger-than-life figure who, even in South Sudan, has the ability to
suck the air out of any room.
"This Trump. He's a crazy man!" he tells me as we sit together
beneath an obsidian sky now thick with stars. He reminds me that he's
not authorized by his employer to speak on the record. I nod. Then
he adds incredulously, "He says some things and you wonder: Are you
going to be president?
Really?!"
A couple of other people are around us now, eating dinner after a
long, sweltering day. They, too, join in the conversation, looking to
me for answers. I find myself at a loss. Here, in this place of
acute hunger ever-teetering on the brink of famine, here, a short walk
from homes that are little more than hovels, where children go naked,
women wear dresses that are essentially rags, and a mother's dream is
to lay her hands on a sheet of plastic to provide protection from the
coming rains, I do my best to explain seething white male anger in
America over "economic disenfranchisement," "losing out," and being
"left behind," over Donald Trump's channeling of "America's economic
rage." I'm disgusted even articulating these sentiments after
spending the day speaking to people whose suffering is as unfathomable
in America as America's wealth is unimaginable here.
Some of Leer's women fled with their children into the nearby swamps
when armed men swept in. Imagine running blind, in the black of
night, into such a swamp. Imagine tripping, falling, losing your grip
on a small child's hand as shots ring out. Imagine that child
stumbling into water too deep for her to stand. Imagine slapping
frantically at that water, disoriented, spinning in the darkness,
desperate to find a child who can't swim, who's slipped beneath the
surface, who is suddenly gone.
And now imagine me trying to talk about the worries of Trump
supporters "that their kids won't have a chance to get ahead."
I really don't want to say any more. I don't want to try to make
sense of it or try to explain why so many Americans are so enraged at
their lot and so enthralled with Donald Trump.
The aid worker lets me off the hook with another assessment of the
Republican candidate. "Things he says, they are very awkward. When
he says those things, you think: He's crazy. How can he be a
presidential candidate?"
How to respond? I'm at a loss.
"If he wins the election, America will not have the influence it's
had," he says.
Maybe that's not such a bad thing, I counter. Maybe not having such
influence would be good for the world.
It's the truth. It also completely misses the point. Even here, even
as I'm revolted by talking about America's "problems" amid the horrors
of Leer, I'm still looking at things from a distinctly American
vantage point. I'm talking about theoretically diminished U.S. power
and what that might mean for the planet, but come 2017 he's going to
be out in the thick of it, in this or some other desperate place, and
he's obviously worried about what the foreign policy of Donald Trump's
America is going to mean for him, for Africa, for the world.
I go silent. He goes silent. Another aid worker has been listening
in, piping up intermittently between mouthfuls of rice and goat meat.
"So is he going to win?" he asks me.
I look over at him and half-shrug. Everyone, I say, thought Trump was
going to flame out long ago. And I stop there. I'm too spent to talk
Trump anymore. I don't have any answers.
My companion looks back at me and breaks his silence. "It can't
happen, can it?"
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the
Nation Institute. An award-winning investigative journalist, he has
written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Nation,
and is a contributing writer for the Intercept. His latest book is
Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South
Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com. Reporting for this story was
made possible through the generous support of Lannan Foundation.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the
newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy
Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in athe world,"
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Nick Turse
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176135
Tomgram: Nick Turse, It Can't Happen Here, Can It?
By Nick Turse
Posted on May 3, 2016, Printed on May 4, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176135/
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: The newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's
riveting reportorial trip into a war-crimes zone, Next Time They'll
Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan, is now
officially out. I can't tell you how proud I am that we're publishing
such a personal and unsettling work. It's powerful and -- believe me
-- unforgettable. Noam Chomsky writes of it: "A vivid, gripping
account of inhuman cruelty, laced with rays of hope and courage and
dignity amidst the horrors." Adam Hochschild calls it "searing
reporting." I simply call it moving and horrifying. As always, with
Nick's books, for a contribution of $100 or more
($125 if you live outside the U.S.), you can get a signed,
personalized copy and in the process help ensure that more Dispatch
Books appear in the world.
Check our donation page for the details. Above all, I urge every
TomDispatch reader to buy a copy, if not for yourself, then for
someone else (maybe that college student you know who might someday be
the next great investigative reporter). Help make the latest Dispatch
Book a genuine success.
With that in mind, I've asked Haymarket Books, the fantastic publisher
of our imprint, to offer TD readers a discount on it. Here's all you
have to
do: click on this link, which will take you to the Haymarket website.
Then click "add to cart," select the number of books you want, and
click on "checkout." After you've filled out your shipping and billing
information, you will be asked to enter a "coupon code." To purchase
one book, enter
TURSE25 and you'll get 25% off the cover price; for five or more
books, enter TURSE40 and you'll get 40% off. Tom] Every now and then,
I teach a class to young would-be journalists and one of the first
things I talk about is why I consider writing an act of generosity. As
they are usually just beginning to stretch their writerly wings, their
task, as I see it, is to enter the world we're already in (it's
generally the only place they can afford to go) and somehow decode it
for us, make us see it in a new way. And who can deny that doing so is
indeed an act of generosity? But for the foreign correspondent,
especially in war zones, the generosity lies in the very act of
entering a world filled with dangers, a world that the rest of us
might not be capable of entering, or for that matter brave enough to
enter, and somehow bringing us along with them.
I thought about this recently when I had in my hands the first copy of
Nick Turse's new Dispatch Book, Next Time They'll Come to Count the
Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan, and flipped it open to its
memorable initial paragraph, one I already new well, and began to read
it all over again:
"Their voices, sharp and angry, shook me from my slumber. I didn't
know the language but I instantly knew the translation. So I groped
for the opening in the mosquito net, shuffled from my downy white bed
to the window, threw back the stained tan curtain, and squinted into
the light of a new day breaking in South Sudan. Below, in front of my
guest house, one man was getting his ass kicked by another. A flurry
of blows connected with his face and suddenly he was on the ground.
Three or four men were watching."
Nick, TomDispatch's managing editor and a superb historian as well as
reporter, spent years in a war-crimes zone of the past to produce his
award-winning book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in
Vietnam. It was a harrowing historical journey for which he traveled
to small villages on the back roads of Vietnam to talk to those who
had experienced horrific crimes decades earlier. In 2015, however, on
his second trip to South Sudan, a country the U.S. helped bring into
existence, he found himself in an almost unimaginable place where the
same kinds of war crimes were being committed right then and there in
a commonplace way, where violence was the coin of the realm, and
horrors of various sorts were almost guaranteed to be around the next
corner. In his new book, he brings us with him into such a world in a
way that is deeply memorable. Ann Jones, author of They Were Soldiers,
calls him "the wandering scribe of war crimes." And she adds, "Reading
Turse will turn your view of war upside down... There's no glory here
in Turse's pages, but the clear voices of people caught up in this
fruitless cruelty, speaking for themselves."
Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead is, I think, the definition
of an act of generosity. Nick has just returned from his latest trip
to South Sudan and today's post gives you a sense of the ongoing
brutalities and incongruities of life there (and here as well). Tom
Donald Trump in South Sudan What Trumps the Horrors of a Hellscape?
The Donald!
By Nick Turse
LEER, South Sudan -- I'm sitting in the dark, sweating. The blinding
white sun has long since set, but it's still in the high 90s, which is
a relief since it was above 110 earlier. Slumped in a blue plastic
chair, I'm thinking back on the day, trying to process everything I
saw, the people I spoke with: the woman whose home was burned down,
the woman whose teenage daughter was shot and killed, the woman with
10 mouths to feed and no money, the glassy-eyed soldier with the
AK-47.
Then there were the scorched ruins: the wrecked houses, the
traditional wattle-and-daub tukuls without roofs, the spectral
footprints of homes set aflame by armed raiders who swept through in
successive waves, the remnants of a town that has ceased to exist.
And, of course, there were the human remains: a field of scattered
skulls and femurs and ribs and pelvises and spinal columns.
And I'm sitting here -- spent, sweaty, stinking -- trying to make
sense of it all about 10 feet from a sandbagged bunker I'm supposed to
jump into if the shooting starts again. "It's one of the worse places in
someone had assured me before I left South Sudan's capital, Juba, forU.S.
this hellscape of burnt-out buildings and unburied bones that goes by
the name of Leer.
A lantern on a nearby table casts a dim glow on an approaching aid
worker, an African with a deep knowledge of this place. He's come to
fetch his dinner. I'm hoping to corral him and pick his brain about
the men who torched this town, burned people alive, beat and murdered
civilians, abducted, raped, and enslaved women and children, looted
and pillaged and stole.
Before I can say a word, he beats me to the punch with his own set of
rapid-fire questions: "This man called Trump -- what's going on with him?
Who's voting for him? Are you voting for him?" He then proceeds to
tell me everything he's heard about the Republican frontrunner -- how
Trump is tarnishing America's global image, how he can't believe the
things Trump says about women and immigrants.
Here, where catastrophic food insecurity may tip into starvation at
any time, where armed men still arrive in the night to steal and rape.
("They could come any night. You might even hear them tonight. You'll
hear the women screaming," another aid worker told me earlier in the
day.) Here, where horrors abound, this man wants -- seemingly needs --
to know if Donald Trump could actually be elected president of the
United States. "I'm really afraid," he says of the prospect without a
hint of irony.
Of Midwifery and Militias
After decades of effort, the United States "helped midwife the birth"
of the Republic of South Sudan, according to then-Senator, now
Secretary of State John Kerry. In reality, for the South Sudanese to
win their independence it took two brutal conflicts with Sudan, the
first of which raged from 1955 to 1972, and the second from 1983 to
2005, leaving millions dead and displaced.
Still, it is true that for more than 20 years, a bipartisan coalition
in Washington and beyond championed the southern rebels, and that, as
the new nation broke away from Sudan, the U.S. poured in billions of
dollars in aid, including hundreds of millions of dollars of military
and security assistance.
The world's youngest nation, South Sudan gained its independence in
2011 and just two and a half years later plunged into civil war. Since
then, an estimated 50,000 to 300,000 people have been killed in a
conflict pitting President Salva Kiir, a member of the country's
largest tribe, the Dinka, against Riek Machar, an ethnic Nuer and the
vice president he sacked in July 2013. That December, a fight between
Dinka and Nuer troops set off the current crisis, which then turned
into a slaughter of Nuers by Kiir's forces in Juba. Reprisals followed
as Machar's men took their revenge on Dinkas and other non-Nuers in
towns like Bor and Bentiu. The conflict soon spread, splintering into
local wars within the larger war and birthing other violence that even
a peace deal signed last August and Machar's recent return to the
government has been unable to halt.
The signature feature of this civil war has been its preferred target:
civilians. It has been marked by massacres, mass rape, sexual slavery,
assaults of every sort, extrajudicial killings, forced displacement of
local populations, disappearances, abductions, torture, mutilations,
the wholesale destruction of villages, pillaging, looting, and a host
of other crimes.
Again and again, armed men have fallen upon towns and villages filled
with noncombatants. That's exactly what happened to Leer in 2015.
Militias allied with the government, in coordination with Kiir's
troops -- the Sudan People's Liberation Army, or SPLA -- attacked the
town and nearby villages again and again. Rebel forces fled in the
face of the government onslaught.
Fearing execution, many men fled as well. Women stayed behind, caring
for children, the sick, and the elderly. There was an assumption that
they would be spared. They weren't. Old men were killed in their homes
that were then set ablaze. Women were gang raped. Others were taken
away as sex slaves.
Whole villages were razed. Survivors were chased into the nearby
swamps, tracked down, and executed. Children drowned in the chaos.
Those who lived through it spent months in those waterlogged swamps,
eating water lily bulbs. When they returned home, they were confronted
yet again by pitiless armed men who, at gunpoint, took what meager
belongings they had left, sometimes the very clothes off children's
backs.
This is a story that ought to be told and told and retold. And yet
here in Leer, like everywhere I went in South Sudan, I couldn't get
away from Donald Trump. So many -- South Sudanese, Americans,
Canadians, Europeans -- seemed to want to talk about him. Even in this
ruined shell of a town, Trump was big news.
The "Endorsement" Heard Round the World Back in Juba, I settle down in
the shade of my hotel's bar on a Saturday morning to read the Daily
Vision. In that newspaper, there's a story about the dire economic
straits the country finds itself in and the violence it's breeding, as
well as one about violations of the 2015 peace pact. And then there's
this gem of a headline: "Nobody Likes Donald Trump. Not Even White
Men."
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608466485/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608466485/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20A ;
fair number of South Sudanese men I ran into, however, did like him.
"He mixes it up," one told me, lauding Trump's business acumen. "At
least he speaks his mind. He's not afraid to say things that people do
not want to hear," said another. I heard such comments in Juba and
beyond. It leaves you with the impression that if his campaign hits
rough shoals in the U.S., Trump might still have a political future in
South Sudan. After all, this is a country currently led by a brash,
cowboy-hat-wearing former guerrilla who mixes it up and is certainly
not afraid to speak his mind even when it comes to threatening members
of the press with death.
Compared to Kiir, who stands accused by the United Nations of war
crimes, Trump looks tame indeed. The Republican candidate has only
threatened to weaken First Amendment protections in order to make it
easier to sue, not kill, reporters. Still, the two leaders do seem
like-minded on a number of issues. Kiir's government, for example, is
implicated in all manner of atrocities, including torture, which Trump
has shown an eagerness to employ as a punishment in Washington's war
on terror. Trump has also expressed a willingness to target not only
those deemed terrorists, but also their families. Kiir's forces have
done just that, attacking noncombatants suspected of sympathizing with
the rebels, as they did during the sack of Leer.
So it didn't come as a surprise when, in March, the Sudan Tribune -- a
popular Paris-based website covering South Sudan and Sudan -- reported
that Salva Kiir had endorsed Trump. It even provided readers with the
official statement issued by Kiir's office after his phone call with the
presidential candidate: "Donald Trump is a true, hard-working,opportunities."
no-nonsense American who, when he becomes president, will support
South Sudan in its democratic path and stability. South Sudan, the
world newest nations [sic], is also looking forward to Donald Trump's
support and investment in almost all the sectors." Trump, said the
Tribune, "expressed his thanks for the endorsement and said he will
send his top aides to the country to discuss further the investment
It turned out, however, that the Tribune had been taken in by a localconflict.
satirical news site, Saakam -- the Onion of South Sudan -- whose
tagline is "Breaking news like it never happened." That the Tribune
was fooled by the story is not as strange as it might first seem. As
journalist Jason Patinkin observed in Quartz, "Kiir's reputation is
such that many Africa watchers and journalists found the story
plausible."
I, for one, hadn't even bothered to read the Tribune article. The
title told me all I needed to know. It sounded like classic Kiir. I
almost wondered what had taken him so long to reach out. But South
Sudan's foreign ministry assured Patinkin, "There is no truth to [the
story] whatsoever."
For now, at least.
Will He Win?
There's a fever-dream, schizophrenic quality to the war in South
Sudan. The conflict began in an orgy of violence, then ebbed, only to
flare again and again. As the war has ground on, new groups have
emerged, and alliances have formed while others broke down. Commanders
switch sides, militias change allegiances. In 2014, for example,
Brigadier General Lul Ruai Koang, the rebel army's spokesman, called
out the SPLA for "committing crimes against humanity." Kiir, he said,
had lost control of his forces and had become little more than a
puppet of his Ugandan backers. Last year, Lul split from Machar to
form the "South Sudan Resistance Movement/Army" -- an organization
that attracted few followers. This year, he found a new job, as the
spokesman for the military he once cast as criminal. "I promise to
defend SPLA in Media Warfare until the last drop of blood," he wrote
in a Facebook post after being tapped by Kiir. Of course, Machar
himself has just recently returned to Juba to serve as first
vice-president to Kiir.
In a country like this, enmeshed in a war like this, it's hardly
surprising that ceasefires have meant little and violence has ground
on even after a peace deal was signed last August. Leer was just one
of the spots where atrocities continued despite the pact that "ended" the
More recently, the war -- or rather the various sub-conflicts it'sGovernment:
spawned, along with other armed violence -- has spread to previously
peaceful areas of the country. Cattle-raiding, a long-standing
cultural practice, now supercharged by modern weaponry and
military-style tactics, has proven increasingly lethal to communities
nationwide, and has recently even bled across the border into
Ethiopia. A South Sudanese raid into that country's Gambela region
last month killed 208 Ethiopians, and the attackers abducted
108 women and children while stealing more than 2,000 head of cattle.
While in Leer, I do end up talking at length with the Trump-intrigued
aid worker about local cattle-raiding, as well as the killings, the
rapes, and the widespread looting. I was always, however, aware that,
like many other foreign aid workers and locals I meet, what he really
wanted was an American take on the man presently dominating U.S.
politics, an explanation of the larger-than-life and
stranger-than-life figure who, even in South Sudan, has the ability to
suck the air out of any room.
"This Trump. He's a crazy man!" he tells me as we sit together beneath
an obsidian sky now thick with stars. He reminds me that he's not
authorized by his employer to speak on the record. I nod. Then he adds
incredulously, "He says some things and you wonder: Are you going to
be president? Really?!"
A couple of other people are around us now, eating dinner after a
long, sweltering day. They, too, join in the conversation, looking to
me for answers. I find myself at a loss. Here, in this place of acute
hunger ever-teetering on the brink of famine, here, a short walk from
homes that are little more than hovels, where children go naked, women
wear dresses that are essentially rags, and a mother's dream is to lay
her hands on a sheet of plastic to provide protection from the coming
rains, I do my best to explain seething white male anger in America
over "economic disenfranchisement," "losing out," and being "left
behind," over Donald Trump's channeling of "America's economic rage."
I'm disgusted even articulating these sentiments after spending the
day speaking to people whose suffering is as unfathomable in America
as America's wealth is unimaginable here.
Some of Leer's women fled with their children into the nearby swamps
when armed men swept in. Imagine running blind, in the black of night,
into such a swamp. Imagine tripping, falling, losing your grip on a
small child's hand as shots ring out. Imagine that child stumbling
into water too deep for her to stand. Imagine slapping frantically at
that water, disoriented, spinning in the darkness, desperate to find a
child who can't swim, who's slipped beneath the surface, who is
suddenly gone.
And now imagine me trying to talk about the worries of Trump
supporters "that their kids won't have a chance to get ahead."
I really don't want to say any more. I don't want to try to make sense
of it or try to explain why so many Americans are so enraged at their
lot and so enthralled with Donald Trump.
The aid worker lets me off the hook with another assessment of the
Republican candidate. "Things he says, they are very awkward. When he
says those things, you think: He's crazy. How can he be a presidential
candidate?"
How to respond? I'm at a loss.
"If he wins the election, America will not have the influence it's
had," he says.
Maybe that's not such a bad thing, I counter. Maybe not having such
influence would be good for the world.
It's the truth. It also completely misses the point. Even here, even
as I'm revolted by talking about America's "problems" amid the horrors
of Leer, I'm still looking at things from a distinctly American
vantage point. I'm talking about theoretically diminished U.S. power
and what that might mean for the planet, but come 2017 he's going to
be out in the thick of it, in this or some other desperate place, and
he's obviously worried about what the foreign policy of Donald Trump's
America is going to mean for him, for Africa, for the world.
I go silent. He goes silent. Another aid worker has been listening in,
piping up intermittently between mouthfuls of rice and goat meat. "So
is he going to win?" he asks me.
I look over at him and half-shrug. Everyone, I say, thought Trump was
going to flame out long ago. And I stop there. I'm too spent to talk
Trump anymore. I don't have any answers.
My companion looks back at me and breaks his silence. "It can't
happen, can it?"
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the
Nation Institute. An award-winning investigative journalist, he has
written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Nation,
and is a contributing writer for the Intercept. His latest book is
Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South
Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com.
Reporting for this story was made possible through the generous
support of Lannan Foundation.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the
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Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Nick Turse
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
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