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Why Dana Schutz painted Emmett Till
Dana Schutz’s studio, in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn, may not be as catastrophically messy as Francis Bacon’s used to be, but there are days when it comes close. Last July, she was making paintings for a solo show, in the fall, at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, and for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, in New York. Large and medium-sized canvases in varying stages of completion covered most of the wall space in the studio, a long, windowless room that was once an auto-body shop, and the floor was a palimpsest of rags, used paper palettes, brushes, metal tubs filled with defunct tubes of Old Holland oil paint, colored pencils and broken charcoal sticks, cans of solvent, spavined art books, pages torn from magazines, bundled work clothes stiff with paint, paper towels, a prelapsarian boom box, empty Roach Motel cartons, and other debris.
Schutz’s paintings, in which abstract and figurative images combine to tell enigmatic stories, sometimes carry veiled references to what’s going on in the world. “Men’s Retreat,” made in 2005, shows blindfolded members of George W. Bush’s Cabinet pursuing strange outdoor rites; “Poisoned Man,” painted the same year, is an imagined portrait of the former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, who barely survived an assassination attempt, in 2004. Schutz, thirty-nine at the time, with untamable hair and a radiant smile, said that she had been up until very late the night before, watching the Republican National Convention on television. “I remember the second Bush nomination in 2003 and feeling so angry, but this was depressing,” she said. “It was like a disaster you can’t look away from.” When I asked if the rise of Donald Trump might invade her new work, she thought for a moment, and said, “I want to make a painting about shame. Public shaming has become an element in contemporary life. You can take a picture of someone and post it online, and thousands of people see it. We’re so ashamed, about so many things, and I think for a candidate to be without shame, like Trump, is really powerful. His lack of shame becomes our shame.”
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Vietnam war’s lost marines
Tap, tap tap. Scott Standfast knocked on the door again. He’d been at it for several minutes, standing in front of a one-story brick house in Niceville, Florida, on a warm, dry day in November 2015. The then-59-year-old former Marine and his wife had driven more than 11 hours to get here, hoping to answer a question that’s haunted him for 40 years. He knocked again. This time, harder. Boom, boom, boom! Still no answer.
About four decades ago, Standfast fought in the last battle of the Vietnam War, and his memory of it is sharp—from the location of enemy positions to the smothering jungle foliage. But it’s not what he remembers that troubles him; it’s what he can’t recall about that traumatic day. He’s tried everything. In 2015, he even joined a group of veterans for a trip back to the battlefield where they met their former enemies. Some shook hands, trying to forgive and move on. The experience helped but not enough. “It’s blocked out,” he tells me on the phone, choking up. “I’m sorry.”
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YouTube: $35 internet TV service
After years of boasting that it’s bigger than TV, YouTube has joined the TV business
The Google-owned video giant has launched YouTube TV, a live TV service that seeks to compete with other internet-based TV services such as Dish Network’s Sling TV, AT&T’s DirecTV Now and Hulu’s upcoming service — as well as the broader pay-TV ecosystem. For $35 per month, YouTube gets you more than 40 channels including all of the major broadcast networks as well as popular cable networks such as ESPN, FX and Fox News. Soon, the lineup will add 10 more channels, including AMC, IFC and BBC, at no additional cost. At launch, the service is available in five cities including New York and Los Angeles.
Fundamentally, YouTube TV isn’t all that different from Sling TV or DirecTV Now, which also offer bundles of TV channels at an affordable price. It’s also a business worth jumping into, as Sling TV and DirecTV Now have attracted 1 million and 200,000 subscribers at a time when cord-cutting is on the rise.
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The internet warriors
Why do so many people use the internet to harass and threaten people, and stretch the freedom of speech to its limits? Director Kyrre Lien meets a group of strongly opinionated individuals all across the world, who spend their time debating online on the subjects they care most strongly about. They feel like warriors for their own personal causes, often feeling left behind by offline society, feeling like they are the ones who have all the right answers. Online platforms are their favourite tools to express the opinions that others might find objectionable in language that often offends. Do they behave in the same way when they come offline?
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Cairo Novelist in prison for Obscenity
On a scorching Saturday morning in July, Ahmed Naji stood in the crowded cage of a Cairo courtroom. The 31-year-old author had been convicted six months earlier of “violating public morality” for publishing a piece of literature. In his novel, Using Life, an irreverent portrayal of youth culture on the cusp of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the protagonist performs cunnilingus, rolls hash joints and gulps from bottles of vodka. Censors had approved the book, which is also sometimes translated as The Use of Life, but when an excerpt appeared in Cairo’s premier literary review, Akhbar Al-Adab, an absurd series of events eventually led Naji to prison. Though he was released in December thanks to a high-powered team of Egyptian lawyers and campaigns from international arts communities, he lives in fear that anything he says or writes could land him back in Egypt’s most notorious prison. He described to Rolling Stone how self-censorship has entered into his considerations at the keyboard. “When you are writing, you are thinking… someone will read something or this could affect the case and so on,” says Naji. “It’s hard to move on and write.”
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Stories From Inside Solitary Confinement
It is brutal. It is torture by definition. It destroys the mind, body, and soul, making rehabilitation next to impossible. It is also outrageously expensive, and it doesn’t work. Yet at the end of the Obama era, and the dawn of Trump’s, isolation is as widely used as ever in the American penal system. And this is what it feels like.
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What writers really do when they write
Many years ago, during a visit to Washington DC, my wife’s cousin pointed out to us a crypt on a hill and mentioned that, in 1862, while Abraham Lincoln was president, his beloved son, Willie, died, and was temporarily interred in that crypt, and that the grief-stricken Lincoln had, according to the newspapers of the day, entered the crypt “on several occasions” to hold the boy’s body. An image spontaneously leapt into my mind – a melding of the Lincoln Memorial and the Pietà. I carried that image around for the next 20-odd years, too scared to try something that seemed so profound, and then finally, in 2012, noticing that I wasn’t getting any younger, not wanting to be the guy whose own gravestone would read “Afraid to Embark on Scary Artistic Project He Desperately Longed to Attempt”, decided to take a run at it, in exploratory fashion, no commitments. My novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, is the result of that attempt, and now I find myself in the familiar writerly fix of trying to talk about that process as if I were in control of it.
We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he “wanted to express”, and then he just, you know … expressed it. We buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same.
The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.
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Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds
In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.
Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances.
As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine—they’d been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office—the scores were fictitious. The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.
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Can .art boost art business online?
London’s Institute of Contemporary Art adopted the new .Art suffix last week, a sign that the art and culture business may at last be starting to come to terms with its future in the digital realm. The hip arts organisation ditched its fusty ica.org.uk web domain for the more streamlined and descriptive ica.art. The move may soon be followed at other prestigious art institutions around the world, the ICA says, including the Tate in London, Guggenheim in New York, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and Lacma in Los Angeles.
The ICA director, Stefan Kalmár, said the change of web address was not only logical but underlined the ICA’s position as an institution “that has always thought globally and opposes the current re-emerging of nationalism in the UK and elsewhere”.
Five years ago, the body in charge of names on the internet, ICANN, swept away regulations and opened up a new world of additional web address suffixes, or top-level domains, including .art.
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Lahiri Finds Freedom In Italian Memoir
In 1999, Jhumpa Lahiri won a Pulitzer Prize for her very first book, Interpreter of Maladies. Her 2003 novel, Namesake, was turned into a movie, and she went on to publish Unaccustomed Earth and The Lowland.
But Lahiri wasn’t satisfied. “I’ve always been searching to arrive at a certain voice that will probably elude me forever,” she tells NPR’s Ari Shapiro. So Lahiri is trying something new — very new.
She wrote her new memoir, In Other Words, in Italian. “One week after moving to Rome I started writing in my diary in Italian. That was the first step I took on this road, and I haven’t really stopped yet,” she says.
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Radio-Free Syria
The overhead light in the blue Mazda 626 wasn’t working. Raed Fares, a Syrian activist whose video protests skewer ISIS and President Bashar al-Assad alike, reached up to fiddle with the light bulb before squeezing himself out of the driver’s side door. The street was in darkness. In the last few years, the Assad government cut most of the electricity (along with running water and mobile-phone service) to Kafranbel, the town in northwestern Syria where Fares lives. The only light came from an LED strip in his neighbor’s front doorway that was hooked up to a car battery. It was 12:45 a.m. on Jan. 29, 2014, and Fares, who often works until 4 a.m., had left the office early. As he fumbled to fit his key into the car’s lock, he heard the slap-slap of feed running toward him.
Here they come, he thought.
The feet stopped just in front of his car. The Czech pistol he usually carries was in his house, 15 feet away. In the watery glow of the light behind him, Fares could make out two ISIS soldiers. One, clad in a woolen mask, ammunition vest, windbreaker and unlaced boots, opened fire, spraying the car, the mud wall and Fares with bullets. Fares felt their heat seat through his canvas jacket and jean skirt and into the right side of his chest and shoulder. When he collapsed to the ground, a childhood nightmare returned: three black dogs, chasing him.
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Two Women, One Cause
They make an unusual team. Amal Clooney is an Oxford-educated human-rights lawyer married to a film star. Nadia Murad was born in a poor Iraqi village and once aspired to become a teacher. Clooney is tall, dazzling and so recognisable that people walk up to her in the street and tell her they love her. Murad is small, shy and avoids eye contact. Yet among her people, the Yazidis, Murad is better known and more admired than any other woman on Earth. Murad is a symbol of survival for a minority threatened with extermination. She was once a slave of Islamic State (IS). And, almost alone among former prisoners of IS, she is willing to testify publicly and repeatedly about the terrible things the jihadists did to her.
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Clooney is Murad’s lawyer, and the two women are working to bring the leaders of IS before an international court for inflicting genocide on the Yazidis. The story of their campaign is an extraordinary one: a tale of pious savagery pitted against truth, law and the soft power of celebrity.
It begins in August 2014, when Murad was a 21-year-old student. That month, IS fighters arrived in her village, Kocho, on the Nineveh plain. They were a terrifying mob, all of them heavily armed and many speaking languages that no one in Kocho understood.
The jihadists saw Nadia and her neighbours as the worst sort of infidels. The Yazidi faith has no holy book, but draws on a mix of Mesopotamian traditions. Yazidis revere a peacock angel that temporarily fell from God’s grace; many Muslims regard this as devil-worship. -
The Muslim Brotherhood Today
Islamist parties have been rocked by the dramatic political upheavals in the Arab world during the past five years. After a decade of patient political participation, outreach to the West, and careful positioning against al-Qaeda, several Islamist parties—all part of the broader Muslim Brotherhood movement—rapidly took over positions of political power in the wake of the 2010–2011 Arab uprisings. These parties won electoral victories in Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia, and they played key roles in Western-backed political coalitions in Syria and Yemen.
However, these openings were just as quickly reversed. Tunisia’s Ennahdha Party stepped down from power in January 2014 in the midst of political turmoil, and Libya’s Islamists fared poorly when legislative elections were held in late June 2014. Most strikingly, the Egyptian military coup of July 3, 2013, overthrew Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood figure who had been elected president in 2012, and triggered an intense crackdown against the organization across the region.
These reversals not only undermined short-term political gains by Islamist political parties, but they also disrupted carefully cultivated gradualist political strategies, discredited long-held ideological and strategic convictions, and reshaped the terrain of Islamist politics. Prior to the Arab uprisings, most Islamist parties presented fairly stable and predictable political strategies, organizational structures, and ideological positions. Both the political openings of 2011 and the harsh reversals in subsequent years placed new demands on these movements. Hasty, erratic political maneuvering replaced cautious long-term political strategies as Islamists struggled to grasp new opportunities and respond to new threats. Today, most Islamist parties find themselves navigating in uncharted waters as they struggle with new forms of state repression, social polarization, organizational distress, regional rivalries, international hostility, and intra-Islamist competition.
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The children of Islamic State
A couple of questions had taken me to that cold austere corner of war with its concrete, mesh and bars. The broken man seated before me had been a child recruit of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Under Islamic State he had grown old, though it seemed somehow as if the shadow of a boy still loitered somewhere in the room.
“Did you ever, on any occasion before, during or after killing, have cause to regret or doubt your actions?” I wanted to ask him. “Did you ever have any suspicion that what you were doing might be wrong?”
If I knew the answer to those questions, if I knew whether at some point – when as a teenager he had cut the heads from five prisoners who were lying face down, side by side, shoulder to shoulder – he had felt a sense of doubt or wrongdoing or remorse or regret, then perhaps I could better understand what might happen to the children of the caliphate the day Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s edifice finally crumbles to dust.
Could they be somehow retrieved and rescued, or would they be for ever lost to the darkness of unquestioning, murderous intent?
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Beyond Homelessness
The Chronicle has joined with more than 80 other news organizations to focus attention on the seemingly intractable problem of homelessness in the Bay Area. As part of the SF Homeless Project, The Chronicle’s Beyond Homelessness series explores possible solutions that might ease, if not end, the suffering of thousands of people living on our streets, and improve the quality of life for all residents. To date, the SF Homeless Project has been emulated in several U.S. cities where homelessness remains a humanitarian crisis.
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To my doomed colleagues in US media
Congratulations, US media! You’ve just covered your first press conference of an authoritarian leader with a massive ego and a deep disdain for your trade and everything you hold dear. We in Russia have been doing it for 12 years now — with a short hiatus when our leader wasn’t technically our leader — so quite a few things during Donald Trump’s press conference rang a bell. Not just mine, in fact — read this excellent round-up in The Moscow Times.
Vladimir Putin’s annual pressers are supposed to be the media event of the year. They are normally held in late December, around Western Christmas time (we Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas two weeks later and it’s not a big deal, unlike New Year’s Eve). Which probably explains why Putin’s pressers don’t get much coverage outside of Russia, except in a relatively narrow niche of Russia-watchers. Putin’s pressers are televised live across all Russian TV channels, attended by all kinds of media — federal news agencies, small local publications and foreign reporters based in Moscow — and are supposed to overshadow every other event in Russia or abroad.
These things are carefully choreographed, typically last no less than four hours, and Putin always comes off as an omniscient and benevolent leader tending to a flock of unruly but adoring children. Given that Putin is probably a role model for Trump, it’s no surprise that he’s apparently taking a page from Putin’s playbook. I have some observations to share with my American colleagues. You’re in this for at least another four years, and you’ll be dealing with things Russian journalists have endured for almost two decades now. I’m talking about Putin here, but see if you can apply any of the below to your own leader.
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When John Berger Looked at Death
To live in linear time, the critic and novelist John Berger suggested, is to content oneself with a kind of continuous grieving. “The body ages. The body is preparing to die,” he writes in his slim book from 1984, “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos.” “Death and time were always in alliance.”
Berger, who died on Monday, at the age of ninety, initially trained as a visual artist, a practice he never fully left behind. Though his best-known work is from the nineteen-seventies—his BBC documentary “Ways of Seeing,” which polemically surveys art history, and his novel “G,” which won the Booker Prize, both appeared in 1972—he was enormously prolific throughout his life, producing dozens of volumes, from studies of individual artists to plays to experimental fictions. His activity sometimes seemed like proof of concept for his ideas: an astute art critic, he was also a theorist of art’s practical purchase, fascinated by its capacity to transform the physical stuff of the world.
He was attentive to the materiality of other forces as well. In “Brief as Photos,” an elegant fusion of philosophy, memoir, and poetry, he calls himself a storyteller—and storytellers, he says, are “Death’s Secretaries.” It’s an apt phrase, suggesting someone who is at once in the thrall of and subordinate to our mortality. In one section of the book, Berger thinks of a cremated friend while walking through an orchard where villagers are burning leaves. Breathing the ashes in, he realizes that little separates this carbon—“the prerequisite for any form of life”—from that of his friend’s body. “Ashes are ashes,” he writes. “Physically his body, simplified by burning to the element of carbon, re-enters the physical process of the world.”
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How Writers Revise
“Writing is rewriting,” says everyone all the time. But what they don’t say, necessarily, is how. Yesterday, Tor pointed me in the direction of this old blog post from Patrick Rothfuss—whose Kingkiller Chronicle is soon to be adapted for film and television by Lin-Manuel Miranda, in case you hadn’t heard—in which he describes, step-by-step, his revision process over a single night. Out of many, one assumes. It’s illuminating, and I wound up digging around on the Internet for more personal stories of editing strategies, investigating the revision processes of a number of celebrated contemporary writers of fantasy, realism, and young adult fiction. So in the interest of stealing from those who have succeeded, read on.
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A Video Game Help Preserve Inuit Culture?
For more than three thousand years, the Iñupiat people of Alaska have passed on stories to their children. Like all enduring fiction, the stories deliver truths that transcend cultural shifts. They act as seeds of moral instruction and help to define and preserve the community’s identity. The story of Kunuuksaayuka, for example, is a simple tale of how our actions affect others: a boy named Kunuuksaayuka goes on a journey to identify the source of a savage blizzard. In the calm eye of the storm, he finds a man heaving shovelfuls of snow into the air, oblivious that they gather and grow into the squalls battering Kunuuksaayuka’s home downstream.
The Iñupiat’s oral tradition, however, is at risk. Over the past few decades, advances in technology and communication have opened up the community to a flood of other stories delivered in new ways. “As is common for indigenous peoples who are also part of a modern nation, it’s been increasingly difficult to maintain our traditions and cultural heritage,” Amy Fredeen, the C.F.O. of E-Line Media, a publisher of educational video games, and of the Cook Inlet Tribal Council (C.I.T.C.), a nonprofit group that serves the Iñupiat and other Alaska Natives, said. “Our people have passed down knowledge and wisdom through stories for thousands of years—almost all of this orally—and storytellers are incredibly respected members of society. But as our society modernizes it’s become harder to keep these traditions alive.”
For the C.I.T.C., the challenge was to find a way to preserve the community’s stories in a way that could withstand modernity. As the team pondered the problem over lunch a few years ago, the council’s C.E.O., Gloria O’Neill, suggested a video game. O’Neill had been looking at examples of indigenous communities expressing their heritage through modern forms—such as the film “Whale Rider,” which explores gender roles in Maori culture—and was considering whether the medium could help to preserve the Iñupiat’s cultural heritage. “We all agreed that, if done well, a video game had the best chance of connecting Native youth with their cultural heritage,” Fredeen said.
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Deepening Our Cultural Echo Chambers?
When “One Day at a Time” started its run on CBS in December 1975, it became an instant hit and remained so for almost a decade.
In its first year, “One Day at a Time,” a sitcom about working-class families produced by the TV impresario Norman Lear, regularly attracted 17 million viewers every week, according to Nielsen. Mr. Lear’s other comedies were even bigger hits: One out of every three households with a television watched “All in the Family,” for instance.
Last week, a new version of “One Day at a Time” started on Netflix. Critics praised the remake for its explorations of single parenthood and class struggle, a theme that has faded from TV since Mr. Lear’s heyday.
Yet, well intentioned and charming as the new streaming version may be, there’s a crucial aspect of the old “One Day at a Time” that it will almost certainly fail to replicate: broad cultural reach.
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A Tale of Two Syrian Cities
DAMASCUS and ALEPPO, Syria — In the upscale Damascene neighborhood of Mezze, Fadl al-Muhammad greeted customers enthusiastically. It was Nov. 7, the opening day of Yummy Falafel, his chic new restaurant, and glossy pictures of colorful spices and ripe carrots pulled from the earth covered the green walls. “Regardless of what you hear in the media, life has to continue,” the 43-year old management consultant said. “By opening this restaurant and two others, I’m trying to show that the crisis isn’t affecting us. That we are investing in our country.”
At the Tche Tche café just 200 miles north in Aleppo, work was far from Ali Shwahni’s thoughts. He and his friends were smoking water pipes in a gray, cloud-filled room with three television monitors screening a British soccer game no one was watching. Rebels seized his family-owned textile factory, which he has not seen in almost three years, leaving him unemployed. “Our family has suffered, just like everyone else’s,” the 30-year-old said.
Regional rivalry among Syria’s four major cities has historically plagued the country, inhibiting the growth of a sense of national identity in the country. But it is the competition between Damascus and Aleppo, both of which have staked a claim to be Syria’s leading city, that has been most contentious. Though Damascus is the capital, Aleppo was Syria’s largest city before the war and its commercial hub. Before the Baath Party ended parliamentary democracy in 1963, each city had its own political party; rivalries between the Muslim Brotherhood’s Aleppo and Damascus factions, meanwhile, sparked an internecine conflict in the 1960s and 1970s that decimated the organization. According to a Catholic archbishop cited in U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, Damascus’s Sunnis even refused to accept the country’s most senior Muslim cleric because he hails from Aleppo.
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4.1 Miles
When I returned home to Greece last fall to make a film about the refugee crisis, I discovered a situation I had never imagined possible. The turquoise sea that surrounds the beautiful Greek island of Lesbos, just 4.1 miles from the Turkish coast, is these days a deadly gantlet, choked with terrified adults and small children on flimsy, dangerous boats. I had never seen people escaping war before, and neither had the island’s residents. I couldn’t believe there was no support for these families to safely escape whatever conflict had caused them to flee. The scene was haunting.
Regardless of the hardship Greeks have endured from the financial crisis, for a long time my home country has by and large been a peaceful, safe and easy place to live. But now Greece is facing a new crisis, one that threatens to undo years of stability, as we struggle to absorb the thousands of desperate migrants who pour across our borders every day. A peak of nearly 5,0000 entered Greece each day last year, mainly fleeing conflicts in the Middle East.
The Greek Coast Guard, especially when I was there, has been completely unprepared to deal with the constant flow of rescues necessary to save refugees from drowning as they attempt to cross to Europe from Turkey. When I was there filming, Lesbos had about 40 local coast guard officers, who before the refugee crisis generally spent their time conducting routine border patrols. Most didn’t have CPR training. Their vessels didn’t have thermal cameras or any equipment necessary for tremendous emergencies.
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The Chatbot Will See You Now
In March of 2016, a twenty-seven-year-old Syrian refugee named Rakan Ghebar began discussing his mental health with a counsellor. Ghebar, who has lived in Beirut since 2014, lost a number of family members to the civil war in Syria and struggles with persistent nervous anxiety. Before he fled his native country, he studied English literature at Damascus University; now, in Lebanon, he works as the vice-principal at a school for displaced Syrian children, many of whom suffer from the same difficulties as he does. When Ghebar asked the counsellor for advice, he was told to try to focus intently on the present. By devoting all of his energy to whatever he was doing, the counsellor said, no matter how trivial, he could learn to direct his attention away from his fears and worries. Although Ghebar sometimes found the instruction hard to follow, it helped him, and he shared it with his students.
The counsellor that advised Ghebar was called Karim—a psychotherapy chatbot designed by X2AI, an artificial-intelligence startup in Silicon Valley. The company was launched in 2014 by Michiel Rauws and Eugene Bann, an idealistic pair of young immigrant programmers who met in a San Francisco hacker house—a kind of co-op for aspiring tech entrepreneurs—and found that they shared an interest in improving access to mental-health services. For Rauws, in particular, the mission is somewhat personal. He suffers from several chronic health issues, and manages them by trying to keep his stress levels in check. After seeing a therapist for a few months, Rauws noticed that the conversations he was having were often formulaic: they followed a limited number of templates and paths. This suggested the possibility of automation. Bann, whose background is in computer science, was already writing emotion-recognition algorithms when he met Rauws. They soon joined forces to start X2AI.
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The Silencing of Writers in Turkey
The Hungarian-British writer Arthur Koestler, born in Budapest at the turn of the last century, became, over the course of his life, intimately familiar with the dangers of authoritarianism. It was the corroding effects of such rule on the human soul that preoccupied him as much as the unbridled concentration of power. “If power corrupts,” he wrote, “the reverse is also true: persecution corrupts the victim, though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.”
If Koestler is correct, and authoritarian regimes end up corrupting, along with themselves, their critics, then the Turkish literati have yet another reason to worry. For years, we have been journeying through a dark, narrowing tunnel of “illiberal democracy.” The ruling élite of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s party, the A.K.P., has refused to acknowledge that free elections are not enough to sustain a democracy. There are other necessary constituents: separation of powers, rule of law, freedom of speech, women’s rights and minority rights, and a diverse, independent media. Without these bulwarks, the ballot box alone only paves the way for “majoritarianism” at best and authoritarianism at worst.
The attempted coup in July, which left more than two hundred people dead, was shocking and wrong; it made everything worse. But it is one of the endless ironies of Turkey that the liberals and democrats who were among the first to oppose the putschists’ sinister attempts to overthrow the A.K.P. government would also become the first to be punished and silenced by that very same government. More than a hundred and forty journalists are in prison in Turkey today, making the country the world’s leading jailer of journalists—surpassing even China. Friends and colleagues have been exiled, blacklisted, arrested, imprisoned. The esteemed linguist Necmiye Alpay, who celebrated her seventieth birthday behind bars; the novelist Aslı Erdoğan; the novelist Ahmet Altan; the scholar Mehmet Altan; the liberal columnist Şahin Alpay; the editor-in-chief of the secularist Cumhuriyet newspaper, Murat Sabuncu, and his literary editor, Turhan Günay—the list of imprisoned writers and journalists is daunting, and we all know, deep down, that it could get even longer any day.
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Kremlin, Inc.
Saturday, October 7th, was a marathon of disheartening tasks for Anna Politkovskaya. Two weeks earlier, her father, a retired diplomat, had died of a heart attack as he emerged from the Moscow Metro while on his way to visit Politkovskaya’s mother, Raisa Mazepa, in the hospital. She had just been diagnosed with cancer and was too weak even to attend her husband’s funeral. “Your father will forgive me, because he knows that I have always loved him,” she told Anna and her sister, Elena Kudimova, the day he was buried. A week later, she underwent surgery, and since then Anna and Elena had been taking turns helping her cope with her grief.
Politkovskaya was supposed to spend the day at the hospital, but her twenty-six-year-old daughter, who was pregnant, had just moved into Politkovskaya’s apartment, on Lesnaya Street, while her own place was being prepared for the baby. “Anna had so much on her mind,’’ Elena Kudimova told me when we met in London, before Christmas. “And she was trying to finish her article.’’ Politkovskaya was a special correspondent for the small liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and, like most of her work, the piece focussed on the terror that pervades the southern republic of Chechnya. This time, she had been trying to document repeated acts of torture carried out by squads loyal to the pro-Russian Prime Minister, Ramzan Kadyrov. In the past seven years, Politkovskaya had written dozens of accounts of life during wartime; many had been collected in her book “A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya.” Politkovskaya was far more likely to spend time in a hospital than on a battlefield, and her writing bore frequent witness to robbery, rape, and the unbridled cruelty of life in a place that few other Russians—and almost no other reporters—cared to think about. One day at the Ninth Municipal Hospital, in Grozny, Politkovskaya encountered a sixty-two-year-old woman named Aishat Suleimanova, whose eyes expressed “complete indifference to the world,’’ she wrote in a typical piece. “And it is beyond one’s strength to look at her naked body. She’s been disembowelled like a chicken. The surgeons have cut into her from above her chest to her groin.’’ Two weeks earlier, a “young fellow in a Russian serviceman’s uniform put Aishat on a bed in her own house and shot five 5.45-mm. bullets into her. These bullets, weighted at the edges, have been forbidden by all international conventions as inhumane.’’
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