Monthly Archives: March 2022

By Margaret Stafford Associated Press

LIBERTY, Mo. (AP) A man who runs a little-known, low-budget radio station in suburban Kansas City says he is standing up for free speech and alternative viewpoints when he airs Russian state-sponsored programming in the midst of the Ukrainian war.

Radio Sputnik, funded by the Russian government, pays broadcast companies in the U.S. to air its programs. Only two do so: One is Peter Schartels company in Liberty, and one is in Washington, D.C.

Schartel started airing the Russian programming in January 2020, but criticism intensified after Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Schartel said people accuse him and his wife of being traitors to the U.S. and occasionally issue threats. Some critics say he is promoting propaganda and misinformation, but Schartel maintains most people who call to complain havent listened to the program.

Some will talk to me, but others will still call me a piece of whatever, he said. What I am thankful for is we are still living in a country where they can call me up. Even if they arent thinking about free speech theyre exercising that right.

Radio Sputnik is produced by the U.S.-based branch of Rossiya Segodnya, a media group operated by the Russian government. Its content prompted the National Association of Broadcasters to issue an unusual statement on March 1 calling on broadcasters to stop carrying state-sponsored programming with ties to Russia or its agents.

The statement from NAB President and CEO Curtis LeGeyt said the organization is a fierce defender of free speech but that given Russias unprovoked attack on Ukraine, we believe that our nation must stand fully united against misinformation and for freedom and democracy across the globe.

During one recent broadcast of The Critical Hour that aired on Schartels KCXL, the hosts and their guests echoed false and unsupported claims about Ukraines government. They repeated Russian state media lies about the Russian militarys attacks on civilian targets and its destruction of entire neighborhoods, as well as Russian President Vladimir Putins baseless claim that his enemies in Ukraine are Nazis.

Schartel acknowledged that he initially accepted the Radio Sputnik contract because he was struggling to keep KCXL afloat. The station operates out of a dilapidated, cluttered building. He said he stopped taking a salary months ago, though he does nearly all the work.

Schartels Alpine Broadcasting Corp. is paid $5,000 a month to air Radio Sputnik in two three-hour blocks each day, according to a U.S. Justice Department Foreign Agent Registration Act filing in December 2021.

KCXLs other programming includes shows that are heavily religious, offer opinions across the political spectrum and promote conspiracy theories. One program, TruNews, has been criticized by the Anti-Defamation League for spreading antisemitic, Islamaphobic and anti-LGBTQ messages.

Schartel said he airs programs that are not commercially viable and dont depend on advertising, which he contends influences news reporting. He said he is promoting free speech by providing a platform for people who otherwise arent heard.

Roy Gutterman, director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University, said all radio station owners in the U.S. have a right to air whatever content they want.

If this station thinks its going to make a mark in Missouri by playing Radio Sputnik, they have the right to do so, Gutterman said.

The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates licensing of radio and television broadcasts, does not censor content unless it intentionally endangers public safety or is found to be obscene, indecent or profane.

Radio Sputnik listeners hear discussions not only about Russia but also current issues in the U.S. and other countries. The theme throughout the broadcast is that U.S. policies intentionally damage the U.S. and other countries while benefiting other corrupt governments, the rich and big business.

The deal that brought Radio Sputnik to the small Missouri station was brokered by RM Broadcasting, based in Florida, which is run by Anthony Ferolito. He signed a similar deal in 2017 with Way Broadcasting, which agreed to lease WZHF-AMs airtime in Washington, D.C., to RM Broadcasting.

Because of his contracts with Rossiya Segodnya, the Justice Department required Ferolito to register as a foreign government agent in 2018, citing a 1938 law for people lobbying for or acting on behalf of a foreign government. Ferolito lost a lawsuit over the registration.

Ferolito did not return messages from The Associated Press, but RM Broadcasting said in a statement that the company stands with Ukraine and all victims of oppression and aggression. It said RM Broadcasting is dedicated to freedom of speech.

The public is explicitly notified throughout the broadcast day of the source of the material, so that people can make an informed decision on whether to listen or turn the dial and that freedom of choice is the ultimate underpinning of our republic, the statement said.

Schartel doesnt think the uproar over the Radio Sputnik broadcasts will last.

Russian state-controlled RT America, the television counterpart to Radio Sputnik, closed its U.S. branch this month and laid off most of its staff. Schartel said that likely means his contract wont be renewed when it ends in December.

See more here:

Area radio station airing Russian state programming The Examiner - Examiner

Wearing crisp, olive-green robes and a towering, white head covering embroidered with the somber face of Jesus, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, addressed the faithful from an ornate 10,000-seat cathedral in Moscow.

For weeks, religious leaders around the globe had been begging the bearded patriarch to speak out against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But in weekly sermons that air live on Russian TV, Kirill, 75, has done just the opposite, painting the war as an apocalyptic battle against evil forces that have sought to destroy the God-given unity of Holy Russia.

The day before Russians marched on Ukraine, he congratulated Russian soldiers as defenders of the fatherland and said they cannot have any doubt that they have chosen a very correct path in their lives. Less than two weeks after the invasion began, he described the conflict as having metaphysical significance and warned his flock that the price of admission to the happy world of Western consumption and freedom was as simple as it was terrible: to agree to hold gay pride parades.

We are talking about something different and much more important than politics, he said. We are talking about human salvation.

Last week, the patriarch said it was Gods truth that the people of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus share a common spiritual and national heritage and should be united as one people a direct echo of Russian President Vladimir Putins defense of the war.

Someone must pray for our united people, Kirill said, holding a gilded staff symbolizing his role as spiritual shepherd of the more than 90 million members of his church. Someone must defend Gods truth that we are really one people.

The same day, Ukrainian authorities accused Russian forces of bombing an art school where more than 400 people had sought shelter.

In a country where more than 71% of people identify as Russian Orthodox, Kirill is a powerful religious and political figure who has consistently refused to acknowledge the destruction, dislocation and growing death toll of the war in his frequent public statements.

He lives in a parallel universe, said UC Riverside professor Georg Michels, who specializes in Russian and Ukrainian history. He describes the current situation in Ukraine as Russians defending against a foreign invasion, not as Ukrainians fighting for democracy, and their lives, against a Russian autocracy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, congratulates Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill on the 11th anniversary of his enthronement in Moscow in February 2020.

(Alexei Druzhinin / Sputnik)

Experts say Kirill is a complex figure in Russian politics: smart, charismatic and an ambitious operator. He rose in the ranks of the Russian Orthodox Church during the Soviet period when the communist government viewed religion as an archaic relic of oppression and was the first patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church to meet with a Catholic pope in nearly 1,000 years. He is also rumored to have been associated with the KGB, the former Soviet Unions main security apparatus.

To be fair, to become a church leader in the Soviet Union and get anything done at the time, you had to be affiliated with the KGB, Michels said.

Kirill set off a scandal a few years after becoming patriarch when he was photographed wearing a $30,000 watch that was subsequently photoshopped out of an official image put out by the church. (A reflection of the watch remains visible in the picture.)

He and Putin have long been close allies. Kirill once described the first 12 years of Putins rule as a miracle of God. Putin has said that Kirills father, who worked as a priest in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), baptized him in secret in 1952. The two men frequently appear in public together: at Easter services, visiting monasteries and traveling to pilgrimage sites.

In recent years, Putin has increasingly highlighted his own religiosity: wearing a silver cross around his neck, kissing icons and famously immersing himself in the freezing waters of a lake in front of television cameras. The icy dip was a brazen display of manhood and an Orthodox Christian ritual to mark the Feast of the Epiphany.

But whether this represents a true spiritual awakening by Putin, or political theater, is hard to say.

He sees religion as helping to give Russians a proud identity, said John P. Burgess, professor of theology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and author of Holy Rus: The Rebirth of Orthodoxy in the New Russia. When Putin makes pilgrimages to the major Orthodox Russian sites and encourages restoring them, hes saying, This is something we can be proud of; this is beautiful and historic.

Putin and Kirill also share a nationalist ideology that, in their eyes, justifies the war in Ukraine.

As they see it, the origins of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church date to 988. Thats when Vladimir I, the ruler of Kievan Rus, which included parts of current-day Ukraine and Russia, converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

The way this narrative unfolds, there is an organic wholeness between the relation of the Russian and Ukrainian people, and if Ukrainians see it differently, it is only because they have been led astray and corrupted by the West, said Victoria Smolkin, a scholar of communism and the Cold War at Wesleyan University.

Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church takes part in a religious service in Bucharest, Romania, in October 2017.

(Vadim Ghirda / Associated Press)

From this point of view, Russia is not attacking a sovereign nation-state; its restoring the natural relationship between two countries.

What they are after is salvation, Smolkin said. Not just of the Ukrainians, but of themselves. They see it as their mission to establish unity.

The schism between the two countries is not just geopolitical; it has played out in the church as well. For more than 300 years, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was officially tied to the Russian Orthodox Church and overseen by the Moscow patriarch, but that is no longer the case. In 2019, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was authorized by the patriarch of Constantinople to break away from Moscow and become autonomous. With 78% of Ukrainians identifying as Orthodox as of 2015, this reduced Kirills flock by one-third.

That was a big and significant event, Smolkin said.

Kirill refused to accept that Orthodox Christians in Ukraine were behind the split and, in a sermon March 13, blamed the schism on political pressure from outside forces.

It must be remembered that we all belong to the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church the same church as in Moscow and in Kyiv, he said. And God grant that we all preserve unity, regardless of any external pressures and any efforts alien to the church, to destroy the spiritual unity of our peoples.

For decades, Russian church leaders have cooperated with the government in order to advance the interests of the church, said Stephen Batalden, professor emeritus of history at Arizona State University. But now, this tacit quid quo pro is being tested in new ways as the Russian state engages in what the U.S. has declared to be war crimes committed by Putin against Ukraine.

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Kirill has failed disastrously to defend the integrity of the Russian Orthodox Church, and that has all kinds of ramifications for the splintering of the church, Batalden said.

In the days after the invasion, some Orthodox parishes in Ukraine stopped commemorating the Moscow patriarch in their prayers during public worship, in open defiance of his authority. And some Russian Orthodox churches in other countries are denouncing the Moscow patriarchate or breaking ties altogether.

The more churches and religious connections the Moscow patriarchate loses, the weaker its claims in the so-called Russian world, Smolkin said.

However, it is unclear how much agency Kirill has to denounce the war. Nearly 300 Russian Orthodox priests in Russia signed an open letter appealing for peace, but thats a small fraction of the 35,000 priests there.

I think there is every indication that Kirill and Putin have overlapping interests, but its also hard to imagine Kirill taking a different position than the Kremlin, Smolkin said.

The United States and other Western nations have also seen ties between political and religious leaders. During Francisco Francos rule in Spain, the Roman Catholic Church was granted legal status and other financial benefits while colluding with the fascist dictatorship. The evangelist Billy Graham was a friend and advisor to a procession of U.S. presidents. When President Trump was in office, evangelical leaders laid hands on him to pray. But experts say the relationship between Putin and Kirill is different.

In U.S. politics, religious institutions are profoundly important, but they are autonomous actors. They can lobby and negotiate in their own right, Smolkin said. It is hard to see the Russian Orthodox Church as a fully autonomous actor independent of the Russian state.

And yet, scholars say, the U.S. is not immune from the religious and political ideologies that Putin and Kirill are using to justify the war. Both men portray themselves as defenders of traditional Christian values against the excesses of an immoral and decadent West symbolized by gay pride parades, same-sex marriage and feminism, Batalden said.

Right-wing politicians in America that are manipulating these same issues for their advantage are singing from the same choir as Vladimir Putin and Kirill, he said.

See the rest here:

A spiritual defense of the war? Putin's patriarch is trying - Los Angeles Times

Dr. S. Anandhi, a professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies in India, discussed class division for the lowest class, the Dalits and womens rights in a talk titled, The Pandemic of Castes. The event was held on March 25, 2022. Photo courtesy of sociology.uconn.edu

Without the enforcement of laws, there isnt change. The Indian caste system, a system where people are ranked based on their social class, was outlawed in 1950, but the hierarchy still exists culturally in India. S. Anandhi, a professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies in India, spoke about class division for the lowest class, the Dalits and womens rights in a talk titled, The Pandemic of Castes.

All of this tells us very clearly that caste and womens rights practices are something that has always been the backbone of maturing and sustaining the caste system in India, and unless endogamy is broken, it is impossible to break the caste system, Anandhi said.

The caste system was developed from the Manusmriti, an ancient Hindu law book that served as the basis of Hindu law in India, Anandhi explained. The Manusmriti determined that there was a rule of hierarchy, also known as Varna. She added that there are four levels of Varna.

Brahmins are highly educated thinkers; for example, teachers, scholars and priests. Kshatriyas, who are known to be leaders, mostly made of warriors and rulers, are next in the hierarchy. Next, there are the Vaisyas, or merchants, landowners and skilled workers. Following the Vaisyas are the Shudras, who are often servants and farmers. Lastly, in the lowest caste are the Dalits or untouchables. They are often forced to do menial tasks like cleaning and sweeping.

The mobility of castes is very very important, while the caste system may be 2,000 years old and we may say that there have been various ways that there have been intermixing, caste groups have always taken place before the implementation of Manusmriti as a legal text. So only when Manusmriti comes in that there has been a forbidding of intermixing of caste.

Anandhi pointed out that Dalits faced gruesome violence throughout the late 20th century. Examples include the Karamchedu Massacre in 1985 and the 1996 Bathani Tola Massacre where women and children Dalits were killed. Several other massacres against the Dalits also occurred during the 1990s. According to Anandhi, though people tried to demand accountability, culprits did not get punished. From 2020 to 2021, violence against Dalits increased by 9.4%.

During the pandemic, Dalit children have been denied education not because of the very fact they could not access school, but because no state was willing to make provisions for accessing technology, or in the case of even providing the mid-day meal, Anandhi said.

On a daily basis, four Dalits die due to suffocation from cleaning septic tanks. One Dalit is assaulted every hour and many others are subject to other violence, according to Anandhi. Despite the 2013 Rehabilitation Act which banned hiring people to remove unsafe human waste, the law has not been effective and employers were not punished.

Therefore, we say that caste is pervasive in some sense, Anandhi said. Which is not only among Hindu, its not just an ideology practiced by the Hinduism per se. The division of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, even Buddhists does exist but the level at which they come into conflict is something that is probably not studied very well. Except for Tamil Nadu where one could see that the converted do have caste tensions, Christians have caste tensions, Sikhs have caste tensions.

Specifically, Dalit women are often denied public wealth and resources. The disregard for Dalit womens rights contributes to the caste patriarchy, according to Anandhi. She added that the caste system plays a crucial factor in gender oppression in India.

This one particular movement I want to talk about is the Beijing international conference. It is during this international conference that Dalit women in large numbers, right at the international forum, very clearly said that our interests do not coincide with upper-caste womens interests in contesting inequality because our experiences in inequality are embedded in caste relations.

According to Anandhi, during the 1970s, Dalit womens reproductive rights were limited because the government wanted to control the population of the lower caste. However, they were seen as valuable when people found out that they can be used to create a market for surrogacy pregnancies.

As of now, education for Dalit has meant improving the social status, not economic status, Anandhi, said. Many of them have been able to contest the caste hierarchy in the rural area with some education. The younger generation of Dalits asserts themselves against caste oppression through means of education. Education is the source to contest social status.

More:

The reinforcement of gender norms in the caste system - UConn Daily Campus

For more than four decades, Kokor Mekranotire has watched with dismay as outsiders have laid waste to ever-larger swaths of his Kayap homeland. Loggers, gold miners, farmers, and land grabbers have streamed illegally into and around the Indigenous territory, a 40,000-square-mile expanse of forest the size of South Korea. The patch of forest where Mekranotire used to collect Brazil nuts a dense canopy of deep golden-brown trees standing almost 100 feet tall was stripped. Stands of cumaru trees, a Brazilian teak, were felled to make decks, cabinetry, and flooring. Loggers have repeatedly entered Kayap land, removed what was in their way, and taken the rest to make a profit.

Those trees never should have been touched, says Mekranotire, now 49 and working for the Kabu Institute, a nonprofit that helps protect Kayap land and develop sustainable businesses among its people, including Brazil nut cultivation. We had to fight to hold onto our land and let more trees grow.

Outsiders started arriving in droves in the 1970s with the opening of the federal BR-163 highway, which stretches 1,320 miles from Cuiab in south-central Brazil to Santarm in the heart of the Amazon. BR-163 parallels Kayap land and was fully paved by 2020, spurring a boom in soybean farming, with the highway providing easy access for millions of tons of the commodity crop to reach Brazilian ports.

The paving also provided much easier outside access to two important Kayap reserves, Menkragnoti and Ba, measuring more than 18,000 square miles and 6,000 square miles, respectively. Illegal loggers and miners who used to arrive in a trickle, Mekranotire says, started gushing in. The kuben [white men] already had a lot of experience; they knew exactly what they were doing, he says. But not all of our leaders did. They told us the highway wouldnt affect us. It was a lie.

Now, as Brazils nationalist President Jair Bolsonaro continues his push to legalize a broad range of economic and extractive activities on Indigenous land, plans are underway for a railway to help transport soybeans from the regions burgeoning number of farms. And even though the Kayap are one of the strongest and best-known Indigenous groups in the Brazilian Amazon they have led the fight for Indigenous rights for 40 years Bolsonaros anti-Indigenous policies are posing a significant threat.

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Were fighting a war, says Doto Takakire, who also works at the Kabu Institute. A war against politicians who want to destroy us and our land.

Located on a plateau in central Brazil, far south of the Amazon River and in the states of Mato Grosso and Par, Kayap land is the largest tract of Indigenous territory in Brazil and the largest swath of relatively pristine forest in the Amazons southeast, a region known as the arc of deforestation. Despite continuing incursions the Kayap lost 3 million acres of land on their eastern border to logging, mining, and other development in the 1980s and 1990s the groups territory retains remarkable biodiversity, with jaguars, giant otters, harpy eagles, abundant fish populations, and vast forest areas.

Kokor Mekranotire of the Menkragnoti Velho village on the Menkragnoti reserve.

Numbering only 9,400 people, the Kayap live in villages on the Xingu River and its tributaries. The men fish and hunt animals such as tapir, capuchin monkeys, peccary, and deer. Women raise children, tend extensive gardens, and make trips into the forest to collect Brazil nuts, cumaru, aa berries, and other fruits.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Kayap made international headlines as they moved to obtain legal rights to their traditional lands. Led by Chief Raoni Metuktire, who would eventually be nominated for the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize, they were joined by musician Sting in their fight to protect the Amazon rainforest, spawning nonprofits like the Rainforest Fund. Other groups, such as Conservation International, have helped the Kayap defend their territories, providing boats, radios, and aerial surveillance data so the Kayap can patrol their 1,250 miles of border.

If there were no more Kayap territory, then there would definitely be no more forest at all, says Renata Pinheiro, senior manager for Indigenous people and social policies at Conservation International Brasil. Theyre on the agricultural frontier.

The Kayaps fight has been part of a larger movement to demand Indigenous land rights in Brazil following centuries of oppression. The implementation of Brazils Constitution in 1988, including article 231, which outlines those rights as well as the federal governments responsibility to demarcate and protect the land, gave them recourse. It didnt, however, mean that those theoretical protections would always work in practice.

Left: Kayap women carry bundles of leaves to a village ceremony. Right: Kayap men in a traditional ceremony.

In the decades to come, all Indigenous land Brazil has 305 Indigenous groups would continue to come under threat, whether or not the groups had already completed the slow process of demarcation and official government recognition. Illegal mining, logging, fishing, and land theft, as well as the construction of highways, railways, and hydroelectric dams, have continued to impinge upon Indigenous territories.

The Yanomami, who live in the Amazon rainforest bordering Venezuela, are still in a longstanding fight to remove more than 20,000 illegal miners from their land, which is rich in gold. In Mato Grosso do Sul a state that encompasses the tropical savanna known as the Cerrado and the worlds largest tropical wetland, called the Pantanal the Guarani Kaiow are trying to take back land lost to ever-advancing farming, facing violent attacks and the burning of their prayer houses. And the Kambiw, Patax, and Patax H-H-He in the state of Minas Gerais, who lost their land in the 2019 Brumadinho dam disaster, continue to confront land grabbers trying to take over their new territory.

The construction of the BR-163 highway was part of the National Integration Plan implemented by Brazils military dictatorship a project designed to bring Indigenous groups under government control, occupy the Amazon, and take over the land. Anything and anyone in the way would be removed.

Kayap land ravaged by illegal gold mining.

By the time the highway opened in 1976, many Kayap had succumbed to outbreaks of disease brought to the region by outsiders, and just 20 percent of the Kayap living on what would become the Ba reserve survived. They no longer had access to the Jamanxim River and lost 1,158 square miles of land to wildcat miners, loggers, and squatters, which they agreed to give up in exchange for what would be an empty promise to put an end to invasions of their territory.

With their land placed under federal protection the Ba reserve in 2008 and the Menkragnoti reserve in 1993 the Kayap thought the threats would subside. But they havent. Deforestation has continued to threaten both reserves, as more and more trees are felled closer to their borders. According to the Kabu Institute, the deforestation on non-Indigenous land surrounding the Menkragnoti and Ba reserves almost tripled in 18 years, jumping from 4,450 square miles in 2000 to more than 12,580 square miles in 2018.

Land grabbers: The growing assault on Brazils Indigenous areas. Read more.

And deforestation on Indigenous land itself illegal in Brazil under federal law hasnt stopped. A recent study from the research institute, Imazon, showed that almost 67,000 acres of forest in the state of Par were lost to unauthorized logging between August 2019 and July 2020. Of that total, 390 acres were on the Ba reserve. According to Dalton Cardoso, an Imazon researcher, the south of Par, where Kayap land is located, contains abundant old-growth wood, prized by illegal loggers. The regions ever-expanding network of highways, he says, has also given loggers access to areas that were previously unreachable.

It has emboldened them, too. Doto Takakire is from the Ba reserve. Because of his work with the Kabu Institute, he often travels back and forth between his home in the forest and Novo Progresso, a nearby town that sits on the BR-163. Infamous for being at the center of August 2019s Fire Day when a group of farmers and ranchers got together to set a series of coordinated fires in the forest in support of Bolsonaro and his promise to open the Amazon to more development the town is a staging point for men working in extractive industries.

It is also where some of them put pressure on the Kayap.

Last year, Takakire says he was approached several times by loggers in town. Because of his ability to speak to Indigenous people living in Ba and Menkragnoti, the loggers thought he could convince the Kayap to give them permission to work on their land. Knowing it was rich in prized ip wood, or Brazilian walnut, they offered Takakire $10,000 Brazilian reais ($2,000) for his trouble. When he said no, they upped it to $20,000 Brazilian reais ($4,000). Again, he refused.

I defend my peoples interests, Takakire says. If we stop, who will fight for us? Nobody.

In August 2020, the Kayap set up a blockade across the section of the BR-163 that runs through Novo Progresso. Wearing headdresses and painted faces, they demanded improvements in health care, the removal of illegal miners from their territories, and, most of all, to be consulted about plans to build a railway next to their land.

Doto Takakire at his desk at the Kabu Institute in Novo Progresso.

Known as the Ferrogro, the railway would run 580 miles between Sinop, in Mato Grosso state, and Itaituba, in Par, an important port city for the flow of agricultural commodities in the Amazon. The railroads main objective: to transport soy.

Soy production in Brazil is soaring, reaching an estimated 134 million tons last year and making the country the worlds third-largest soy producer. A study published last year noted that soy was responsible for 10 percent of deforestation across South America in the last 20 years, and that the most rapid expansion occurred in the Brazilian Amazon, where soybean area increased more than tenfold.

The Kayap living on the Ba and Menkragnoti reserves dont need to see these numbers to know that soy is taking over the region. The constant flow of trucks carrying soybeans on highway BR-163 makes it obvious, as do the farms that line the road. Bepdjo Mekragnotire, chief of the Ba village, located on the Kayaps Ba reserve, knows that the proposed railroad will bring more soy farmers close to Kayap land.

On the Pixax and other rivers that are key arteries through Kayap territory, warriors have recently been confronting gold miners illegally entering Indigenous land on makeshift rafts. The widespread, ad-hoc mining, which uses mercury to separate gold from other minerals, has already contaminated numerous rivers, like the Curu, where the Kayap once fished, collected drinking water, and bathed. According to a 2018 federal investigation into illegal mining, fish samples collected in the Curu and Ba rivers showed levels of mercury well above what is recommended by the World Health Organization and the Brazilian health regulatory agency, ANVISA.

Left: An illegal mining raft that entered the Pixax River before being ejected by Kayap warriors. Right: Fish caught in the Ba river. A federal investigation found that fish from the Ba contained high levels of mercury, which is used in mining.

No epidemiological studies of mercury have been done among the Kayap people, but their concerns increased when a study by the scientific institution Fiocruz and WWF Brazil showed that 100 percent of the members of the neighboring Munduruku Indigenous group were contaminated with mercury, 60 percent at levels above what is considered safe. Contamination among riverside villagers jumped to 90 percent.

Weve had some babies born with developmental problems, says Bepdjo Mekragnotire. We wonder if its the mercury, but we just dont know yet.

Mining is illegal on Kayap territory, but legal on adjacent land, with the requirement that the Kayap are consulted regarding possible environmental and health effects. Nevertheless, mining is rampant where the Kayap live, occasionally with the involvement of some Kayap. Rich in gold, the entire region has attracted everything from the smallest wildcat operations to some of the biggest mining giants, including Serabi Gold, a company headquartered in the UK that owns and operates two gold mining complexes in the region, including one next to Kayap land.

Bekwyitexo Kayap, chief of Pukany village, holds a basket of beaded bracelets that she and other Kayap women make and sell.

Ever since Jair Bolsonaro campaigned for president in 2018, vowing to open up Indigenous land to mining and end federal recognition of Indigenous territories, the Kayap have been feeling the pressure. Since then, the president has repeated his promises several times, saying two months after his election, I will not demarcate one more square centimeter of Indigenous land.

In 2020, he pushed a bill to regulate the exploitation of resources on Indigenous reserves legislation widely seen as further opening Indigenous territories to development. Brazils lower house of Congress voted this month to flag the bill as urgent, and it is expected to go to a vote in April. In February, Bolsonaro, who is up for reelection this year, signed a decree meant to encourage small-scale and artisanal mining. The government has denied this includes illegal mining, but environmentalists are concerned it could spur more unlawful mining in the Amazon.

An Amazon defender stands up for her land and her people. Read more.

When I was young, I feared that the white men who came to our village were there to kill us and to take what was valuable from our land, says Bekwyitexo Kayap, chief of the Pukany village on the Menkragnoti reserve. Now, I know that theyve come to kill us in a different way. Now, I fear theyll do it by taking our land.

See the rest here:

For the Kayap, a Long Battle to Save Their Amazon Homeland - Yale Environment 360

Almost every day offers more evidence of how American fascism is becoming a reality. We now know for certain that Donald Trump and his coup cabal attempted to overthrow American democracy on Jan. 6, 2021. The coup continues as Republicans and their agents are attacking America's multiracial democracy in dozens of states, seeking to make it impossible for Black and brown Americans and other Democratic Party constituents to have their votes counted fairly.

Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, a former Trump ally, said last week that, well after the events of Jan. 6, 2021, Trump continued his seditious attempts to pressure members of Congress to overturn the results of the 2020 election.Trump himself, along with acolytes such as Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon, continue to threaten and incite political violence against those deemed to be the enemy.At arally last Saturday in Georgia, for instance, Trump continued to threaten violence against members of the media, calling them "animals."

As Salon's Igor Derysh reported last week, Trump's followers have been allegedly been going door-to-door in Black and brown communities in Colorado, engaging in acts of voter intimidation and harassment that echo the Jim Crow era of white supremacist terror and violence.

RELATED:MAGA purge: Jan. 6 organizer labels former ally Rep. Mo Brooks as "LOSER" and "piece of crap"

As shown by the vile attacks on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory has made major inroads into the so-called mainstream of the Republican Party. Federal and local law enforcement agencies continue to disrupt right-wing terror plots across the United States.

The rising neofascist tide is global: Some white supremacists and other right-wing extremists see the war in Ukraine as an opportunity to gain combat experience they can later use in their battle against multiracial democracy and pluralistic society in the U.S. and other Western nations. Experts on political violence, fascism and other forms of political extremism continue to sound the alarm about the perilous moment now facing the United States, where democracy is teetering on the edge of collapse. Their warnings have been largely ignored by the country's political elites and the public more generally.

Barbara Walter is a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the world's leading experts on civil wars, political violence and terrorism. She is also a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has consulted for the State Department, the Department of Defense, the UN and the World Bank. Her essays and other commentaries have been featured at CNN, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Walter's new book is "How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them."

In this conversation, Walter warns that the American people and their leaders have been blinded by a type of "status quo bias" that prevents them from responding properly to the democracy crisis and the danger of widespread political violence. She argues that privilege and a lack of historical experience with oppression have combined to create a state of willful myopia and denial for most white Americans about the existential peril the country now faces.

Walter draws upon some of the darkest moments in human history, such as the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust, to explain why so many (white) Americans will likely remain in denial about the country's descent into civil war and other massive violence, even as the carnage is imminent or already happening around them. She warns that many people will comply, or perhaps collaborate, with the right-wing extremists who are committing worsening acts of terror and political violence.

Walter does hold out some hope, however, and offers potential solutions to help mitigate this crisis, including new restrictions on the way social media platforms circulate and amplify politically extreme content.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Donald Trump continues to threaten political violence against his "enemies" if he is punished for his crimes. Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon and other right-wing propagandists are also threatening political violence on a near-daily basis across the right-wing media echo chamber. The FBI and law enforcement continue to uncover potential right-wing terrorist plots. Why are so few people taking these dangers of right-wing violence seriously?

I believe it is human nature for people to not want to believe that they and their fellow citizens are capable of such things. Many people want to live in a world of wishful thinking where life is going to continue to go on in the same way that it always has.

If it is sunny today and you go to work and afterwards you have drinks with friends and then there is the weekend when you get to watch football and it's like that today, your bias is that it's always going to be that way.

People are status-quo biased. They truly believe that the way things are today is the way that things are going to be forever. As a result, many people do not see the warning signs. What is so amazing is that throughout history, violent extremists are often very public about their intentions, what their goals are and what strategy they're going to pursue to achieve those goals. Hitler is perhaps the best example. He wrote and published "Mein Kampf," laying out exactly what he intended to do. If you look at neo-Nazis and other white supremacists here in the United States and elsewhere, they have a book called "The Siege" which details exactly what their plans and intentions are.

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The bible of the alt-right is a book called "The Turner Diaries." It lays out exactly how they intend to start a second civil war in the United States. "The Turner Diaries" includes an attack on the U.S. Capitol, and in that book a working gallows is erected outside the Capitol where they're going to bring "traitors" out for trial and then kill them. They're not hiding what they intend to do, and yet throughout history, the people who are at risk have not taken those messages, warnings and manifestos seriously.

In societies at risk for widespread political violence, is it common for the public and its leaders to be in a state of denial? For people to just ignore the obvious threats or say it is all just hyperbole?

As a social scientist, the example I would start with would be the Jews across Europe prior to the Holocaust because there is a very interesting variation in how Jews responded by country. There is also a noteworthy variation in terms of how Jews responded to the perceived threat of persecution and how communists and socialists responded.

In terms of the Jews in Europe, it was German Jews who had their heads in the sand the most and refused to see the disaster that was about to hit them. They actually could read "Mein Kampf." Many Polish Jews and Romanian Jews saw what was coming and tried to take action by fleeing Europe. The German Jews, less so. Why was this?

The German Jews were highly educated. They were cosmopolitan, they were the most assimilated. They were the most vested in the status quo. They were not living in ghettos, and they had not experienced pogroms until more recently. Therefore, many German Jews believed that they were going to be relatively untouched or that they had a vested interest in the society.

The German Jews were more likely to be caught by surprise, whereas if you are a Jewish person living in Poland, you've been ghettoized your whole existence, you've been the target of violence, you already know what the state is capable of. You know what your fellow citizens are capable of. You've seen the evidence of that. Such violence does not take you by surprise.

I think a similar dynamic is happening here in the United States. The American people as a whole have not witnessed the horrible things that human beings can do to each other because they have not been the target of such violence except, of course, for African-Americans and other people of color who do see the approaching violence and disaster. Many white Americans do not want to see it. They do not want to hear the metaphorical train that is coming at them because they have not been targets of such violence as a group.

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White Americans as a group tend not to believe the warnings by Black and brown people and others who see what is happening. Because they haven't had the direct experience, the hard evidence, of such things being true. I also believe that's because white Americans have a vested interest in the system. They really want to believe that the system is OK, and if they just keep their heads down and just weather this storm, everything's going to be OK.

How do people reconcile their wishes and dreams, or their delusions, with the obvious facts?

Trump and Flynn are preaching violence. You can quote them on it. If you read what they are saying, it is shocking. Yet few people seem to know about it. If I were to show what Trump and Flynn are saying, their actual words, to the average American, they would say, "You're making that up, it can't be true." Thus we have a situation where these things are happening, but the information is not being shared with the general public, or if they are hearing what is happening then it is being distorted or not fully represented in a way that leaves most Americans ignorant of what is really going on.

Historically, the side that wants to do these horrible things and put themselves in a position of power, to lead a dictatorship or start a "race war" or commit acts of genocide for example, to kill all the Jews in Europe will spend a lot of time investing in propaganda because they understand that if they can control the narrative they can control the average citizen. That is exactly what is happening now in the United States. Experts and other people like us see the warning signs because we're paying attention and we're reading widely. Most Americans are not.

At one of Trump's recent rallies, he told his followers to be ready to die to defeat "critical race theory." Michael Flynn recently told his audience he wanted them to "charge machine gun nests" in service to their cause. How do you fit these examples within your model of a second civil war or other massive violence in the United States?

One of the challenges that violent extremists have is how to expand their base of support. If they don't expand their support base, they just remain fringe movements forever. One way is to provoke a harsh government response. Let's say that there are peaceful protests, but then there are provocateurs there who try to get the police to open fire or to bash a few heads. Violence entrepreneurs will use those actions as evidence that the police or the government or the opposition are evil and intent on crushing them.

That tactic is often successful in radicalizing at least some portion of average citizens. It pushes them towards the extremists. Donald Trump is what I would describe as an "ethnic entrepreneur." He and his loyalists want to regain power. He is an autocrat. Trump has no interest in ruling democratically. But Trump is not going to get that power back without the support of the average white American. This means that Donald Trump has to convince them somehow that his is a worthy cause to defend.

How many people, in terms of a whole population, does such a movement need to take over society and impose its will on the public?

There is not much data on that question. Research suggests that perhaps 3% of the population is necessary to challenge whatever leader or group is in power. That is a quite small percentage, but if there is 3% of the American population out in the streets in a sustained way, it is actually enormous. You do not need a lot of people to start a civil war that's going to be incredibly costly to the country as a whole. All they would need are a few militia groups who are effective at targeting infrastructure and shutting down the economy.

What has the response been to your book and its warnings about a second civil war or right-wing insurgency in America?

To my great surprise, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. People are reading the book. I didn't think that was going to happen. I didn't think Americans would want to read about the possibility of a civil war or read a book that is terrifying. And they did, in large numbers. But the second response has really been that 90% of the emails I get are people thanking me. They're grateful. They have been worried about what they're seeing and feeling in the country. The most grateful emails I get are from people who live in rural areas, who thank me for shedding light on this problem.

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There are people who say I am being an alarmist and that somehow I am making a second American civil war more likely by talking about it. The reality is that we know that violent extremists on the far right have been growing significantly, especially since 2008. You can read what their plans are. You can see that many of them are stockpiling weapons and going through maneuvers and training for war. These right-wing groups were sending some of their members to Ukraine, prior to the Russian invasion, to gain combat experience. We know that these right-wing extremists are actively recruiting from former members of the military because they want individuals with combat experience.

What these right-wing extremists want more than anything else is for the rest of the American people to ignore them, because that way they can grow their numbers, get more training, and when they're ready to act they'll have the element of surprise on their side. These right-wing extremists are a relatively small, weak group. Any militias in the United States are going to be small relative to the U.S. military. They need the element of surprise. I wish that it were true that if we did not talk about this threat, it would go away. That is simply not the case.

I see a situation where the right wing is already engaging in acts of lethal violence and is mobilizing for widespread violence. It is a one-way battle at this point. Liberals, progressives and other pro-democracy Americans are doing little, if anything, to defend their country against the threat. I fear that once they realize what the neofascists and right-wing extremists are preparing to do, it will be too late.

In the CIA's manual on insurgencies there are three stages. The United States is in the second stage. The CIA calls it the "incipient conflict stage," and it is marked by discrete acts of violence. Timothy McVeigh's attack in Oklahoma City was probably the very earliest instance. Here is what the CIA manual says, almost verbatim: "The insurgents' goal is to broadcast their mission to the world, build support and provoke a government overreaction to their violence so that more moderate citizens become radicalized and join the movement."

The second stage is when the government becomes aware of the groups behind these attacks, but according to the CIA, the violence is often dismissed as the work of bandits, criminals or terrorists. What is so dangerous about the second stage is that citizens, politicians and law enforcement usually miss it. They don't connect the dots, they don't see that the movement is growing and that this is a precursor to open insurgency. Instead, these attacks are dismissed as idiosyncratic or the result of crazy people who have no connection to a larger movement. That's exactly where we are today.

When you and other experts use the term "civil war," how is it defined?

Experts use it as a type of umbrella term. Underneath that umbrella are all sorts of different forms of violence that can happen within a country. Civil wars mean violence that's fought by a domestic group within a country that targets the government for political purposes. It becomes a civil war or a major civil war if it kills a thousand people during the course of the war.

Civil war can take different forms. There are social revolutions, such as the Russian Revolution or Mao's revolution in China. Social revolution is the most destructive type of civil war. It's a civil war where the rebels want complete political, economic and social change.There can also be a violent coup that kills a thousand people and is contained to a capital city. There is everything in between.

What we tend to see frequently in countries with powerful militaries are insurgencies. These tend to be more decentralized and usually fought by multiple militias and paramilitary groups. These militias have political goals, but their methods are very different. They don't want to engage the military directly for the most part, don't want to target soldiers, because if they engage the U.S. military, for example, they're going to lose. They instead use unconventional methods, like guerrilla warfare, hit-and-run attacks, domestic terrorism, where they're targeting the soft underbelly of a society, such as civilian infrastructure. In the United States we are not going to see a civil war like we saw in the 1860s.

What do we know about the public mood and emotion in a society that is about to experience a civil war or other mass violence?

The groups that tend to start these civil wars and insurgencies are driven by resentment. As such, the groups who decide that violence is a justifiable means to try to create political and social change are those that are losing status and have a deep sense of resentment towards other groups who are perceived as rising or doing better. These are the "sons of the soil" groups.

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It is that resentment that motivates their leaders. Average citizens are motivated by a different emotion to follow such leaders. That emotion is fear, which is an incredible motivator for average citizens to pick up a gun and start fighting.Ethnic entrepreneurs, violence entrepreneurs those individuals who want to start a civil war to catapult themselves to power understand the power of fear. What they do is create propaganda and circulate it among average citizens. They tell them that their lives are under threat.

In a given society, and most certainly here in the United States, most members of the general public, white Americans and privileged people in particular, are fence-sitters. They may know that something is deeply wrong in the country, but they will do nothing about it. What does that oft-discussed "silent majority" actually do when a society starts to fall apart and people are killing each other?

Such people are going to hold on to hope as long as they can. They're going to plug their ears and cover their eyes and engage in wishful thinking as long as they can. And then, when something happens and they're forced to choose sides, their base instinct is to survive and to do whatever they need to do to survive.

If there is a paramilitary group that is putting up roadblocks on their street, if there's a group of people wearing all black with no insignias controlling a roadblock in a neighborhood with machine guns, the average person is going to do whatever those people want them to do. Survival drives behavior. Those fence-sitters are going to hope they're not going to become the targets of the violence.

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Not all the far-right groups are white supremacists, but many of them are.What they want is for the United States to become a white "ethnostate," or at the very least for certain states like Michigan to become white ethnostates. These white supremacists understand that if they don't shoot at white people, then many white people are probably just going to keep their heads down and not do anything. It's exactly what happened in places like Germany, where if you see that the Germans are targeting Jews, you do everything possible to make sure that you aren't identified as a Jew. I believe that the average human who is trying to survive will do a whole lot of ugly things to keep themselves alive.

How do we prepare the American people for this civil war or insurgency or other such right-wing violence? Will it be a series of escalating events? Isolated acts of violence? Something spectacular, like 9/11?

Their ideal scenario is to coordinate, so that on a given day there would be multiple attacks. As I see it, it would almost feel like 9/11, where you wake up in the morning and you're watching TV and you know that something has happened and everything seems chaotic. You're not really sure who's in charge or what type of threat this is and what you should do about it.

I see a scenario where there are bombings in multiple state capitals, or a series of assassinations, or maybe both at the same time. Suddenly the federal government is facing a leaderless resistance. The country's leaders are trying to figure out how to respond. In the meantime, the American people are watching this all happen and wondering: What the hell's going on, who's in charge, and what should we do?

Some of these right-wing militias are going to want to capture territory in certain parts of the country and hold it. Some of them are going to pursue their own agendas. For example, I could imagine militias in Michigan saying, "We're never going to gain control of the federal government, but Michigan could be a white state we just have to convince all the nonwhites to leave. We do that by bombing their churches and targeting their stores with attacks. Eventually, the nonwhites will be forced to move south and we'll ultimately get what we want."

If the right-wing extremists are not able to coordinate their attacks, then we are just going to see a series of consistent attacks every few weeks. There will be a feeling that the country is under siege. Northern Ireland is a great example of this. The British military, as strong as it was, could not get rid of the IRA. The IRA continued to operate until the British government eventually negotiated with them.

If you had 15 minutes to brief President Biden or Attorney General Garland, what would you highlight as the first steps they should take to contain this threat?

Regulate social media. It's the easiest thing that the U.S. government can do. The five biggest tech companies are all American companies. Don't engage in censorship. Let people put whatever they want on social media, but regulate what tech companies are allowed to do in terms of their recommendation engines. Don't allow them to take the most incendiary material and push it out to the widest possible audience, because that is causing a range of really negative societal effects. These include helping to accelerate the decline of democracy, helping to grow the rise of ethnic nationalism and hate crimes and helping to make it easier to organize militias. Regulating social media would be the quickest and easiest way to reverse these negative effects.

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A new civil war? Maybe so but it won't look anything like the first one - Salon