A lição dos chineses sobre como protestar em tempos autoritários

Prestes a completar 30 anos do massacre da Praça da Paz Celestial, que ocorreu em 4 de maio de 1989 em Beijing, a China confirma ter um das mais antigas e robustas tradições de protesto no mundo – como disse a professora de Harvard, Elizabeth Perry. Se hoje observamos uma linha ascendente no avanço da legislação trabalhista chinesa, isso se deve, em grande medida, à excepcional mobilização dos trabalhadores.

A primeira vez que entrei em uma fábrica na China para fazer trabalho de campo, em 2006, encontrei todos os estereótipos sobre precariedade: crianças trabalhando em regime intensivo, instalações imundas, pessoas exauridas na linha de montagem de bugigangas baratas para ganhar um salário que equivalia a US$ 100 dólares mensais. Junto aos trabalhadores, comi alimento estragado e dormi em camas sem colchão em dormitórios cheios de baratas (uma delas carinhosamente apelidada de Meimei, que significa irmã mais nova).

O que eu observava em campo era apenas uma amostra minúscula de uma imensidão de abusos trabalhistas que ajudavam a criar o imbatível preço chinês, o qual foi responsável pelo boom econômico da China na virada do milênio, especialmente na região do Delta do Rio das Pérolas na Província de Guangdong.

Os números dos abusos contra os 270 milhões de imigrantes internos, os liudong renkou –a maioria sem licença de moradia (hukou) e, portanto, trabalhadores ilegais no próprio país – são sempre escandalosos. Como apontei em meu livro, Counterfeit Itineraries in the Global South, de 1989 a 2004, 2,5 milhões de pessoas foram registradas com pneumonia de respirar poeira tóxica somente em Guangdong (sendo que a maioria dos adoecidos não registram ocorrência porque não tem hukou). Em 2007, 40 mil dedos foram perdidos em linhas de produção. Somente em 2013, 46.653 incêndios ocorreram em fábricas, matando 400 pessoas. De 2017 até o presente momento, o mapa do China Labor Bulletin (CLB) já registrou 1.107 acidentes de trabalho, muitos deles com dezenas de mortes.

Hoje, no coração fabril da China, o salário mínimo já é maior do que no Brasil.

Os setores mais vulneráveis são as mulheres e as crianças. Como mostrou o livro da socióloga Ngai Pun, Made in China, as trabalhadoras fabris chamadas de dagongmei vão para a cidade ainda muito jovens para escapar do casamento forçado por suas famílias. O resultado é a superexploração físicas dessas meninas que são abusadas sexualmente por seus patrões.

Mas as coisas estão mudando. No início dos anos 2000, os empresários que eu entrevistava, por exemplo, já mencionavam que precisavam melhorar as condições de trabalho e, com o tempo, fui conhecendo fábricas mais modernas, com instalações melhores e opções de lazer e entretenimento. Hoje, no coração fabril da China, o salário mínimo em Shenzhen é de RMB 2,130, aproximadamente R$ 1.243 –mais do que o salário mínimo brasileiro, hoje em R$ 998. A situação ainda está longe de ser ideal, mas há um avanço no cumprimento da legislação trabalhista.

É evidente que os planos de governo, estipulados em diversas metas, como o Made in China 2025 e Inteligência Artificial 2030, tiveram um papel decisivo nas melhorias das condições de trabalho dos últimos anos e na tão almejada transição para a inovação tecnológica. Mas, sem dúvida, a pressão exercida pelo ativismo trabalhista tem sido crucial para essa melhora.

Resistência e novo ativismo

Ao contrário da imagem de um povo passivo que aceita o que vem de cima, os trabalhadores precarizados chineses são conscientes de seus direitos, estão organizados e são responsáveis por uma “revolução legal” no mundo do trabalho nas últimas décadas, garantindo o direito a uma jornada de 40 horas semanais, por exemplo. Para a socióloga Anita Chan, os trabalhadores não são mais dóceis como no passado e estão emergindo como uma força ativa que cada vez mais deseja confrontar os empregadores.

O direito à greve foi removido da constituição de 1982 sob o governo de modernização de Deng Xiaoping, mas isso não implica intimidação, nem para os ativistas presos por desordem pública diariamente. O mapa das greves do CLB contabilizou que, de 2015 até o presente momento, ocorerram 8.862 greves trabalhistas (grande parte do que ocorre está fora do radar). O Ministério da Segurança Pública calcula que, na China, há de 80 a 100 mil atos de desobediência civil por ano (número que vem crescendo exponencialmente), os quais são caracterizados como “incidentes de massa” pelo governo. Por causa da repressão estatal e má caracterização dos protestos, é impossível precisar este dado, mas ao menos temos uma ideia da escala do caldeirão ativista do país.

Em seu livro Against the Law, Chiang Lee mostra que, ao contrário dos trabalhadores do norte decadente (em função da des-coletivização das fábricas da era maoísta) cuja identidade de classe é comunista, o novo precariado do sul do país é marcado pela emergência de jovens trabalhadoras que saem do campo para melhorar suas vidas, sonham em estudar e empreender. As dangongmei querem deixar a fome para trás e, ainda que exploradas, fazem parte de uma onda de aspiração e mobilidade social. Essas trabalhadoras estão cada vez mais organizadas em paralisações, greves de fome, boicotes, motins e demais táticas de ação direta.

Para burlar a repressão, a criatividade marca os protestos on e offline.

Os mais recentes trabalhos sobre ação coletiva na China, como os de Ya-Wen Lei, Mary Gallagher e Diana Fu, sugerem que há uma vibrante esfera pública emergente no país. Para Fu, o ativismo atual é formado por uma malha gigantesca, resultado da soma de muitas pequenas associações grassroots que atuam na escala microscópica no empoderamentos milhões de trabalhadores migrantes.

Quando uma trabalhadora explorada esgota todas as esferas de negociação com seus patrões e com as autoridades, elas procuram o aconselhamento dessas associações que, teclando nos chats das redes sociais, dão respaldo jurídico às mulheres, dizendo-lhes quais termos empregar na disputa. Tem funcionado.

Para burlar a repressão, a criatividade marca os protestos on e offline. Um dos tipos mais conhecidos são os protestos relâmpagos, que servem para evitar a repressão policial, tirar fotos e postar nas redes sociais chinesas como o Weibo e o WeChat. As redes chinesas são extremamente controladas, mas ainda sim possuem um papel importantíssimo para uma população que está cada vez mais acostumada a burlar a censura. Os ativistas mudam palavras para não cair na malha da vigilância e, quando detectados, são resilientes: fazem novos perfis e novas postagens. Em 2017, como reação a um incidente que ocorreu em uma fábrica em Guangdong, por exemplo, 800 grupos de protestos foram formados no WeChat.

Em relação à questão trabalhista, é via arbitragem (tentativa de acordo na justiça, sem processo, entre patrão e empregado) que o cenário do “ativismo legal” se transforma na China. Trata-se de um mecanismo legal que procura colocar em prática a legislação trabalhista. Se a nova linguagem política do autoritário governo chinês é a do fazhi (estado de direito), os trabalhadores se apropriam dessa linguagem para pleitear melhores condições.

É notório que a questão da corrupção entre empresários e autoridades locais é o fator que impede o acesso a melhores condições de trabalho na China. Mas o que é revelador é que há poucos indícios de ameaça ou questionamento da autoridade do governo central, repetindo um padrão histórico milenar da China, já apontado pelo trabalho de Elizabeth Perry: não se mexe nos de cima, só nos de baixo. A corrupção, portanto, não é vagamente dirigida ao PCC, mas a funcionários específicos que são denunciados. A base social desse precariado quer melhorar sua forma de vida, adentrar no mundo do consumo, que lhes é novo, e melhorar o sistema.

Sempre houve esse consenso na literatura acadêmica de que essa onda de insurgência não era antissistêmica, tampouco procurava desestabilizar o Partido Comunista, que incentiva uma economia de mercado no país. Hoje, os novos livros de Diana Fu e Teresa Wright já lançam algumas dúvidas sobre essa certeza. Além disso, no início de 2019, ameaça de paralisação dos taxistas, caminhoneiros e operários da construção civil gerou tensão no governo, causando maior repressão e detenção dos ativistas.

Como argumentei recentemente, a teoria política milenar chinesa nos diz que a autoridade central não é questionada desde que haja confiança nos rumos – e que não haja tirania. O presidente Xi Jinping avança no “sonho chinês”, mas a escalada autoritária de seu governo contra ativistas nos deixa muitas questões em aberto acerca da estabilidade da sua gestão.

A memória de 1989 está aí para lembrar de que nada é fixo e que tudo pode mudar a qualquer momento. Nós, brasileiros, aprendemos a duras penas que estabilidade é algo jamais garantido. A situação da China não deve ser encarada com romantismo. Não tratei aqui dos muitos problemas e contradições que existem na classe precarizada na China. Mas creio que o saldo é positivo. Em tempos de cruzada contra os direitos trabalhistas no Brasil, é a China que tem muito a nos ensinar sobre como protestar em tempos de autoritarismo.

The post A lição dos chineses sobre como protestar em tempos autoritários appeared first on The Intercept.

India’s Supreme Court Is Veering on the Edge

NEW DELHI—India has seen an autocratic ruler once before.

In 1973, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi passed over three senior judges to appoint a pliant contender as the chief justice of India’s Supreme Court. Two years later, after a high court barred her from holding office because of election irregularities, she declared a national emergency. Civil liberties were suspended, and her political opposition jailed. When her decrees came before the Supreme Court, a bench of five justices, led by her appointee, sided with her. The emergency lasted for 21 months.

That period has a newfound resonance in India these days. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is running for reelection in ongoing polls, has spent his first term centralizing power while debasing the institutions that were supposed to curb such impulses. The autonomy of educational, legislative, economic, and investigative bodies—not very lofty to begin with—has gone into a downward spiral. Like great clouds, questions have gathered over the autonomy of the Supreme Court, and the office of the chief justice is going through its darkest hour since India’s independence.

For international readers, this may seem incongruous with how the country’s Supreme Court is often characterized. India’s top judges have won accolades for progressive judgments—declaring privacy a fundamental right, for instance, or striking down a colonial-era law that criminalized homosexuality. Yet here in India, concerns have been growing over the Supreme Court’s independence, with a long-running saga over judicial corruption only being amplified by worries over Modi’s authoritarian tendencies. There are worries the court is veering on the point of no return.

[Read: Narendra Modi’s election challenge: Create jobs. Lots of them.]

Modi had sought to refashion the judiciary almost from the outset of his premiership. A remodeling of the structure of the courts was included in his Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto in the run-up to the 2014 general election. Yet even with the sweeping mandate with which Modi came to power—his party was the first in 30 years to secure a parliamentary majority on its own—this was not going to be easy.

The principal barrier was the Supreme Court itself. Having been a willing party to Gandhi’s subversion of democratic institutions, the court had an image to rebuild. It did so gradually, expanding the purview of the judiciary in the legislative sphere and minimizing the role of the executive in the process of judicial appointments. Then, in 1993, it ruled that only sitting judges would be able to appoint new members of the judiciary. It was a coup of sorts. India’s founding fathers were cautious not to entrust senior judicial appointments with just one branch of the government. The constitution required the judiciary and the executive to work in consultation while appointing judges. But by the 1990s, the stain of corruption and other criminality had attached itself to politicians of all hues, and the idea of removing their influence from the judicial domain didn’t seem half bad.

The first significant legislation Modi’s government passed was a constitutional amendment to set up a body, including the federal law minister, that would oversee all appointments to the top ranks of the judiciary. In less than a year, the amendment was passed in both houses of Parliament, ratified by the requisite 17 state legislatures, and signed by the president to become law.

The backlash was swift: A clutch of petitions were filed in the Supreme Court challenging the amendment, and in October 2015, the court declared that the new rules were unconstitutional and void. The judgment seemed to show that the court had learned its lesson from its interactions with Gandhi, and was prepared to tame the tendencies of a majoritarian government.

But then those efforts began to unravel. In early 2017, a suicide note allegedly written by a former chief minister of the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh was circulated on WhatsApp. It claimed that the sons of two sitting Supreme Court judges, Chief Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar and Justice Dipak Misra, were seeking bribes to predetermine cases their fathers presided over. Though there was no corroborating evidence, the damage was done. When the matter came to the Supreme Court, a lawyer pressing for a full investigation alleged that a retired judge claiming to speak on Khehar’s behalf had approached him outside the court.

More claims followed against Misra, who would succeed Khehar as chief justice. The Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s top policing authority, arrested a retired judge from the high court where Misra had worked, alleging the retiree had tried to fix cases Misra was hearing in the Supreme Court. A colleague of Misra’s from his days as a lawyer detailed his long history of financial misdemeanors in an article I reported for The Caravan. Opposition parties proposed an impeachment motion against Misra, but the government refused to entertain it, and neither Khehar nor Misra recused himself from cases the Supreme Court was hearing in which the two were implicated. Soon after, ties between the government and the court would be brought into question.

One morning in January 2018, four Supreme Court justices called a press conference. It is hard to overstate what an astonishing sight this was: Over the course of seven decades since independence, the highest level of India’s judiciary had cordoned itself off from the public eye, battling any oversight into its affairs, including from the media. Now, sitting before a beehive of cameras, the justices looked distressed.

“All four of us are convinced,” Justice Jasti Chelameswar said, “that unless this institution is preserved and it maintains its equanimity, democracy will not survive in this country.”

“For some time, the administration of the Supreme Court is not in order,” he continued, adding that there were “many things which are less than desirable which have happened in the last few months.”

[Read: Misinformation is endangering India’s election]

It was ominous and alarming, but the judges did not spell out what exactly was endangering the Supreme Court. They seemed to be blaming Misra, but their only specific argument was that he had been allocating cases to specific benches arbitrarily. Soon after, Prashant Bhushan, a senior lawyer and judicial activist, alleged that the government was blackmailing Misra. “Politically sensitive cases are being assigned to handpicked benches, with no senior judge on them, so that the desired outcomes are achieved,” Bhushan said. “The chief justice is clearly working under the government’s pressure.”

The claims garnered little media coverage, and the government refused to respond to them. Few were shocked—sitting and retired judges, as well as members of the bar, had been saying the same thing in hushed voices for a while.

Before we assign guilt or apportion blame, a critical question must be considered: How did the Indian judiciary, after locking politicians out of its domain for 25 years, find itself in such a position at all?

While the court was scrambling to consolidate its hold over judicial appointments in the 1990s, there were other, more insidious problems: of corruption within its ranks, and the unwillingness of the legal community to grapple with it.

In 1990, K. K. Venugopal, then a senior lawyer who is now India’s attorney general, told a journalist, “The subject of judicial corruption is taboo, and like the proverbial Chinese monkeys, one shall not see, hear, or speak of this evil.” At the time, the first-ever impeachment proceedings against a Supreme Court justice, on financial-misdemeanor charges, were already under way.

The 1993 ruling that safeguarded the court from outsiders, however, ensured opacity for the Supreme Court. The politics of the time did not allow for a constitutional amendment to neutralize that judgment. Successive coalition governments were consumed with keeping themselves together, and while charges of judicial corruption kept surfacing, they never gathered momentum. The media, cowed by contempt laws, did not press for more information. Journalists offer judges in India even more deference than they do politicians and business leaders, and few newspapers have printed even cursory reports about judicial corruption over the past two decades. Senior lawyers, continuing the tradition so succinctly described by Venugopal, are still not willing to see, hear, or speak of the evil.

Over the years, the scale of the problem has become staggering. In 2010, Bhushan’s father, Shanti—who, as the law minister in the government that dethroned Indira Gandhi in 1977, had been a key force in repealing many of her draconian decrees—submitted to the Supreme Court, in a sealed document, the names of eight chief justices who he claimed were “definitely corrupt.” His efforts went no further, though he now faces a contempt case of his own.

Misra was succeeded as chief justice in October by Ranjan Gogoi, who was among the four judges to have appeared at last year’s press conference. But Gogoi, too, has thus far failed to bring the transparency that was expected of him in deciding cases of political import, and last month, a former Supreme Court justice made allegations of corruption against Gogoi’s relatives. (Last week, a former court employee wrote, in a sworn affidavit, that she had been sexually harassed by Gogoi and that her family was facing persecution for her having refused his advances.) Major media outlets did not even print, let alone pursue, the corruption charges. No inquiry has been opened into judicial corruption or independence, and the government has not been pressed on any links it has had to the courts.

In the five years of Modi’s rule, almost every single Indian institution has been shaken to its core. The fissures are showing, most worryingly, in the judicial edifice. Even if Modi is voted out in these elections, the vulnerabilities he has exposed will remain for his successors to exploit.

Spanish Socialists Running for Re-election Sunday on a “Green New Deal de España”

The idea of a Green New Deal first sprouted in the U.S. — which is only fair, since we did the first New Deal, after all. Depending on the results of this weekend’s elections, though, Spain might be the first country to actually put one into place.

The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, or PSOE, took over at the national level last summer following a corruption scandal that hobbled longtime Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and his right-wing Popular Party, the PP. PSOE struck a tenuous bargain with the country’s regional nationalist parties, allowing party leader Pedro Sánchez to become prime minister. That agreement fell apart over budget negotiations earlier this spring, forcing Sánchez to call for a snap election that will take place on Sunday. PSOE is ahead in the polls and could potentially form a government with the left populist party Podemos, formed in 2014 out of Spain’s Occupy Wall Street-esque 15-M movement. Should PSOE remain in power, Spain — Europe’s fifth-largest economy — could become a testing ground for rolling out a Green New Deal nationwide.

Sánchez came out in support of the U.S. Green New Deal — sometimes translated as “El New Deal Verde” or “El Green New Deal de España”  — in January and has campaigned on it throughout the election. Teresa Ribera, Spain’s minister for ecological transition, told me by phone earlier this month that a Green New Deal “accepts that we are in an emergency moment where we need to transform,” calling it an “opportunity to update our economy and our industry.” She sees it, too, as an opportunity to draw vital connections between income and wealth inequality and the degradation of the environment, “transforming that into a positive agenda.”

While acknowledging that she faces a learning curve in figuring out how to put policies in place, Ribera praised Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s leadership on the Green New Deal. “One of the main elements of her speeches that we fully share,” Ribera said, is that “we cannot have sectoral environmental and social agendas. Climate justice and the recognition of climate injustice is very important.”

Ribera was secretary of state for climate change the last time PSOE was in power, from 2008 to 2011. In the midst of a global financial crisis that hit Spain especially hard, making progress on any progressive policy front became tremendously difficult. “The ways out of the crisis mean another view of the macroeconomic figures and forgetting about the people,” she told me. “The consequence is that the new economy and the social agenda get lost.”

With the economy now on a stronger footing, PSOE hopes that this time can be different, especially on climate. They’ve already made some inroads. Soon after taking office last June, Ribera moved to repeal the “sun tax” — an anti-solar levy put in place by the PP that stymied renewables development — and pledged to bring more renewables online. She worked as well with trade unions to set up a just transition for coal workers, as Spain shudders its last mines. The crux of PSOE’s climate plans is embodied in a sweeping new climate law the party proposed before this election was called, and which shares plenty in common with Green New Deal plans here in the U.S.: reducing emissions by 90 percent below 1990 levels by mid-century and generating all of the country’s power from renewables along the same timeline; 74 percent of power would come from renewables by 2030. The bill would ban fracking nationwide, eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and government investments in fossil fuels, and phase out fossil-fueled vehicles, with the aim of banning the registration and sale of carbon-emitting vehicles by 2040. As outlined in the party’s recently released 110-point manifesto, the overall goal of Spain’s Green New Deal is an economy-wide mobilization involving participation from local communities, civil society, unions, and businesses, with an industrial policy that treats decarbonization as an engine of job creation. The manifesto further outlines building out sustainable public transit and a zero-waste strategy.

PSOE’s plan, Ribera said, “connects to all the fundamentals of modern society. We cannot get as big a transformation as we need without big dose of just transition and solidarity policies. Otherwise there will be many people who are left behind.”

Her Ministry for Ecological Transition, a new office that merges the previously separate energy and environment ministries, is about more than just overcoming some of the intra-governmental bureaucratic hurdles that stymied climate action in the past. As Ribera tells me, her office is also meant to be a “facilitator” of the country’s climate agenda across agencies so that it becomes an “increasingly coherent” part of overall government policy.

Podemos has come out strongly in support of a Green New Deal, as well. “We recognize that if the climate were a bank, it would have already been bailed out,” Podemos says in a recent video on the subject, calling for “an economic and social transformation that puts the breaks on climate change.” As part of that agenda, Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias is pushing to form a nationwide, renewables-based public electric utility that can compete with the country’s biggest power providers — an idea rolled out at the local level last summer in Barcelona by the city’s Podemos-affiliated government, led by housing organizer turned mayor Ada Colau. Both Podemos and organizations like Greenpeace are pushing for PSOE’s climate plans to be stronger still, integrating more ambitious targets for decarbonization and fossil fuel phase-outs.

According to a recent survey from the European Investment Bank, 87 percent of Spaniards are worried about climate change, and 70 percent believe that it represents a threat to humanity. In general, the study found that southern European countries were more likely to be concerned about global warming than their counterparts in the rest of the continent. Like much of the Mediterranean, Spain faces enormous risks from climate change. Worst-case scenarios could see temperatures rise 5 degrees Celsius by 2100, a future that would turn southern Spain into a desert. Higher temperatures would threaten agriculture and sap the verdant region’s ecosystem of its biodiversity.

Among the climate impacts Spain is already dealing with is an influx of refugees, many fleeing a civil war in Syria that climate-fueled draught helped spark. Migration has become a sticking point this election season, where the openly xenophobic Vox party is newly competitive, joining a rash of far-right parties on the rise throughout the continent, with support from the likes of former White House adviser Steve Bannon. “The question is to what extent we try to solve this issue on the grounds of cooperation, or make walls and barriers,” Ribera says. “And we need to consider the relevant drivers. We cannot be serious on migration policy if we are not serious on climate policy. We need to ensure the planet is a place where we all can live and face the magnitude of the challenge. If we want to avoid masses of people moving from their homes, we need to invest in a safer world.”

There are only so many parallels that can be drawn between Spanish and U.S. politics. But calls for a Green New Deal have gained steam elsewhere too. Britain’s Labour Party hopes to implement ambitious, Green New Deal-style industrial policy should it take office. The Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, headed up by former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, is pushing for a European Green New Deal ahead of European parliament elections next month. As Democratic primary contenders in the U.S. vie to embrace a Green New Deal — and pose a credible threat to Republicans’ outright racism and xenophobia — they aren’t alone in either fight.

The post Spanish Socialists Running for Re-election Sunday on a “Green New Deal de España” appeared first on The Intercept.

Fort Wayne Makes Its Own Luck

Today’s theme: what happens to buildings, after they die.

Today’s locale: a major manufacturing center along Indiana’s I-69 corridor, the industrial stronghold of Fort Wayne.

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The second lives of buildings—or third, or fourth or tenth—after they’ve outlived their original economic or civic purpose, is a topic that has commanded Deb’s and my attention more and more, with each new American venue we spend time in.

1. If a city is unlucky—or shortsighted, which often turns out to be the same thing—it bulldozes its architectural heritage of the past decades or centuries, for whatever is the fad of the moment.
   
   This happened, disastrously, to my small home town of Redlands, in inland Southern California. In the late 1960s, when freeway-based sprawl-malls were just beginning to hollow out downtown retailers, a short-sighted city leadership made a choice that the city has yet fully to recover from. It approved razing about half of the downtown’s historic business structures—shops, civic clubs, a famed 1930s-vintage hotel—to make room for one of that era’s Brutalist/penitentiary-style in-town malls, surrounded by parking lots. Nearly 50 years later, that mall stands abandoned and bankrupt, its only activity a national-chain drugstore that clings to its long-term lease. (For locals: I’m talking about the former State Street west of Orange Street; the structures on State Street east of Orange were spared.)
   
   Meanwhile, the other half of the Redlands downtown, the part that was spared the wrecking ball, went through its 1970s and 1980s of hard commercial times. But the buildings survived; starting 10 or 15 years ago they began attracting new activity; and now they constitute one more of the nation’s vibrant smaller-city downtowns, working around the decayed molar of the mall.
   
   Time and again we’ve seen evidence of cities that made the same mistake. Here’s an easy way to spot them: When you see a break in the downtown architecture of a mid-sized city—when a classic early-20th-century office building, or an Art Deco facade from the 1930s, suddenly gives way to a multi-level downtown parking garage—odds are you’re seeing the physical legacy of civic short-sightedness half a century ago.
     
2. If a city is luckier, or if it was less energetic in the mid-century build-a-mall era, it will have left its original architecture in place. The shops may have been boarded up or concealed beneath aluminum siding. They may be doing duty as pawn shops or worse. They may seem beyond hope. But as long as they exist, they lie waiting and full of potential, like wildflower seeds in the desert waiting for the eventual rain.
   
   The Main Street America project, which is based in Chicago and originated with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, keeps a master list and coordinates downtown renewal efforts. We’ve seen examples from South Dakota to Kentucky to Oregon to Florida, and places in between. (For instance: our previous report, on Angola, Indiana.)
     
3. If a city is willing to make its own luck, and is foresighted, it will begin purposefully refitting its old structures for new roles. This has become a nationwide trend. In the fastest-growing big tech centers, practically any structure that was once a warehouse or a machine shop has returned as a new office space, startup zone, hotel or condo, or brewery or restaurant.
   
   It is happening in smaller places too. Five years ago, our colleague John Tierney wrote about the reincarnation of the old Mack Truck works in Allentown, Pennsylvania, as a research and startup center. Not far from Allentown, in Bethlehem, the spookily beautiful abandoned U.S. Steel works have become a concert center and arts venue. Something similar has already happened in Birmingham, Alabama, with the former steel mill known as the Sloss Furnaces; and is underway in Danville, Virginia, with former tobacco warehouses (on the model of Durham, North Carolina, with the old American Tobacco works); and is envisioned in tiny Eastport, Maine, with what had been the East Coast’s biggest sardine cannery; and on through what could be an endless list.
   
   Former places of worship whose congregations have dwindled are also undergoing this process. Yesterday I mentioned how a former church in Angola, Indiana, has been converted into a new performing arts center. The ambitious Jefferson Educational Society, a civic think-tank in Erie, Pennsylvania, has its headquarters and public events in a former synagogue. The St. Joseph brewery, in Indianapolis, operates (and seats patrons) in what was once the St. Joseph church.  

Fort Wayne is now attempting to make its own luck, with the remains of what had been its grandest industrial site.

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Fort Wayne is the second-largest city in Indiana, after Indianapolis. On the I-69 route along which Deb and I traveled (with our colleagues from New America-Indianapolis and Indiana Humanities), it’s about 40 miles south of Angola, and 120 miles north of Indianapolis. Demographically it is more diverse than its state: African-Americans make up about 15 percent of Fort Wayne’s population, versus under 10 percent for Indiana statewide (and well over 70 percent for Gary, bordering Chicago). Even within a state whose overall economy is manufacturing-based, Fort Wayne has exemplified the major-factory town.

And through Fort Wayne’s modern history, no major factory was more major than GE’s enormous Broadway works.

The former GE Fort Wayne campus, now Electric Works, with the city’s downtown in the background and Broadway running along the right side. (Courtesy of Electric Works.)

The first manufacturing facility on this site opened in 1883, as part of the then-revolutionary technology of electric lights and motors. By the beginning of World War I, GE had established its Fort Wayne Works there, and over the next fifty years it dominated the city’s economy and culture. At the peak of World War II production, some 20,000 people worked for General Electric. A post-War GE promotional booklet said that nearly 40 percent of the city’s workforce was on the GE payroll at the time. The booklet said of GE’s robust payroll, “These millions of dollars represent not only the earnings of General Electric employees in this locality—they are a vital force that helps make vigorous the life of this community.”

The campus covered 39 acres, with well over a million square feet of floor space in more than a dozen buildings. One of these buildings, #26, was the largest structure in all of Fort Wayne when it went up.

You already know what’s coming: fifty years of expansion were followed by fifty years of decline. The manufacturing payroll at the Fort Wayne plant went from nearly 12,000 at the end of World War II, to 7,000 in the early 1970s, to 2,000 in the late 1990s, to no one now.

The site of the abandoned GE plant (Courtesy of Electric Works)

For years, what had been the heart of the city sat, rusted, and fell apart. It wasn’t bulldozed or torn down. But the floors buckled, and the skylights fell in. The interior walls grew mottled with mold, and the exterior ones attracted graffiti. The surrounding neighborhood, that had grown up with the factory, went down with it. Cities are more than physical structures, but we heard several times how the fate of the Fort Wayne Works unavoidably seemed to symbolize travails for the whole town.

That is where a $400+ million project called Electric Works comes in.

---

On a raw, blustery day in March, I put on the requisite hard hat, safety glasses, yellow vest, and similar gear for a tour of the abandoned GE plant, now re-christened Electric Works. Crystal Vann Wallstrom, who came from San Francisco and has become Managing Director of Innovation for the Electric Works project, toured me (carefully) across the uneven floors and up the crumbly stairs and around the project’s construction crews. With me on the tour was Adam Thies, a city-planning specialist who has worked, among other places, in Angola, Indiana (but who has no official connection with Electric Works).

James Fallows / The Atlantic

What she they pointed out to me was, in one sense, very much like structural-renewal projects I’d seen or heard about elsewhere: Vast old work spaces, their original economic purpose gone, being prepared for a new life meeting new needs. You can read the details about the Electric Works ambitions here. In brief, the new campus is intended to have residential lofts; creative office space; medical research labs; a primary-care health facility (in a medically underserved neighborhood); restaurants and a huge new farmer’s market area (in a “food desert” part of town); and more. It aims to have hotel and residential facilities, the restored 1926 gymnasium and 12-lane bowling alley, a climbing gym plus “adventure park,” and … other features you can read about on their site.

Jeff Kingsbury, of the RTM Ventures firm that is the lead private financier of the site, emphasized that it was explicitly drawn from models that have proven successful in other mid-sized industrial towns. “We’ve seen this strategy happening all around the country,” he told me, in a phone call. “You’ve got these mixed-use walkable places that are designed to connect and attract people, and foster innovation. People are aware that the old suburban research-park model no longer makes sense. You want to make your talent want to stay in town, because there are cool and enjoyable things to do.”

I realize that talk of “fostering innovation” and “connecting people” inevitably sounds like platitudes; but Kingsbury gave illustrations, which I’ve seen around the country too, of such an approach paying off. “In terms of having a big, old legacy industrial campus, and trying to repurpose it, what’s happened in Durham is probably most similar.”

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Adam Thies and Crystal Vann Wallstrom, at the basketball court that once hosted GE factory teams. (James Fallows / The Atlantic)

If these and other factors make the Electric Works ambition recognizable from other (successful) projects in other mid-sized towns, what makes it distinctive? Again with the “show your homework” caution that these are first impressions, subject to later revision, here are four that struck me.

1. The Hoosierness of  it all. When I walked in the front door of the main Electric Works office building, I felt as if I were on a set for the old movie Hoosiers. It was a classic old indoor basketball court built in the 1920s, with ranks of folding seats on both sides. It is preserved from the days when GE company teams would play there. A swirly GE logo is painted on the center of the hardwood floor.
   
   “You might have heard that Indiana is basketball-crazy,” said Adam Thies—just before he took off his suit jacket, stepped to around the three-point line, and took a jump shot, which swished in. “Nice one!” I said. “My jump shot is just average,” he replied, aw-shucks style (and also implying: just average—for someone from Indiana.) Later that day I heard a related “fact” that, as it is backed up by Wikipedia, I’ve decided is too good to scrutinize further: of the 10 biggest high school gyms in the United States, for watching basketball, nine are in Indiana. The Fort Wayne Works definitely had a sense of place.
   
   In the same headquarters building is a 1950s-look classic bowling alley, that appears to have been the scene of an alien abduction. Unlaced bowling shoes and score pads sit on locker-room benches, pins and bowling gloves are on the counter. It is as if the GE bowling team vanished all at once, or if someone took the Bowling Alone hypothesis super-literally.

Courtesy of @navigatewstyle

2. The scale of it all, both physically and conceptually. A million square feet of office space looks even bigger than it sounds. When industrial buildings are full of giant metal-working machines and forklift trucks, you can lose sight of their scale. When I was reporting in China, I often wished I had a way to allow readers to see the extent of the factories, the staff dormitories, the shipping docks. Fort Wayne is working on a larger canvas than I had imagined before looking at this site.

   

   Part of the new Electric Works project. (Courtesy of Electric Works.)

3. The complexity and care of civic engagement. The funding of this project is an epitome of “public-private partnership”—a phrase that, as I’ve noted before, is seen in Washington as a euphemism for “payoffs” or ‘log-rolling,” but at the local level appears to be a key ingredient in getting things done. Some of the money is private investment; some is municipal bonds; some is federal and state tax incentives; some comes from a community foundation; some comes from elsewhere. I’m deliberately not giving the numbers because they’re complex, and if you want a precise breakdown, you can go here or here (click on “How is this project being financed?”)
   
   The surprise to me was evidence provided by Electric Works on the breadth of community support—across race, and income level—for the idea of spending public money to revive this site. Last year the polling firm Campos did a study of local attitudes toward this expensive new project. The resulting Journal-Gazette story is here, and the full report is downloadable as a PDF here.
   
   Among the findings were 84 percent of respondents agreeing with the statement, “Electric Works is a good example of the old saying that sometimes you have to take a small risk to secure a big return.” Some 81 percent said they agreed with, “Electric Works will be successful in making Fort Wayne and Allen County a better place to live, just like other public-private partnership investments in our community have.” By the same 81 percent, respondents agreed that “Fort Wayne and Allen County are moving in the right direction. The Electric Works development just moves us farther along the right path.”
   
   “The emotional weight that the industrial complex has on this community can’t be overstated,” Josh Parker, of RTM Ventures, told Claire Ballentine of Bloomberg just this month. “It’s not just what we’re doing on our site, but what that brings to the larger area.”
   
   The project has its critics and controversies (as described in the Journal-Gazette here), and it has not yet nailed down all its funding. But leaf through the poll and compare its results with anything you have heard about national-level politics recently.  

4. “I was a dweller.” Crystal Vann Wallstrom had been working and living in San Francisco for 15 years before she moved to Fort Wayne, where her husband had gotten a job offer.
   
   “Frankly, I was a petrified to move here—I mean, to Fort Wayne, from California,” she told me. “But we have loved it, and being here has made us rethink our perceptions of ‘the Midwest.’” Vann Walstrom said that in San Francisco, she and her husband had been raising their two toddlers in a 325-square-foot rented studio apartment in the Mission district.
   
   “When house prices are in the seven figures, you reconsider your priorities,” she told me. She said that for the same cost as her studio in the Mission, she and her husband are raising their children in “a 2,600 square-foot house, in a historic neighborhood, on an acre of land, eight minutes from downtown. We are homeowners for the first time, in our 40s.”
   
   She made another point, too. “I realized that in San Francisco I was a ‘dweller.’ I was just living there. Now I feel as if I’m helping build a community.”

---

Will this all work, in the way the project’s backers promise and many local residents clearly hope? I don’t know. The point for now is the breadth, density, and boldness of experimentation, largely outside the national view.

Next stop: another site on I-69.   

Quando cristãos são atacados, muçulmanos e a esquerda precisam defendê-los

De Christchurch, na Nova Zelândia, a Xinjiang, na China, existe uma guerra contra os muçulmanos. Muitos de nós passamos anos escrevendo a respeito e condenando isso. Mas vamos ser claros: do Oriente Médio a partes da Ásia e da África, há também uma guerra contra os cristãos.

No domingo, quando a minoritária comunidade cristã do Sri Lanka celebrava a Páscoa, seis atentados suicidas atingiram igrejas e hotéis por todo o país, matando pelo menos 290 pessoas e ferindo mais de 500 outras – o Estado Islâmico reivindicou a autoria do atentado.

Chamar esses atos de violência de cruéis e bárbaros seria um eufemismo. No entanto, eles não foram os primeiros ataques a cristãos relacionados com a Páscoa. No Egito, no Domingo de Ramos de 2017, atentados suicidas do Estado Islâmico mataram 45 pessoas em duas igrejas. No Paquistão, em 2016, um terrorista ligado ao talibã paquistanês explodiu a si mesmo em meio a cristãos celebrando a Páscoa em um parque público, matando 75 pessoas. Na Nigéria, no domingo de Páscoa de 2012, um suicida tido como membro do Boko Haram matou 38 pessoas em um ataque contra cristãos do lado de fora de uma igreja.

Sou muçulmano e me considero de esquerda, mas fico constrangido em admitir que, tanto no círculo muçulmano quanto no da esquerda, a questão da perseguição aos cristãos vem sendo minimizada e até mesmo ignorada por tempo demais.

Para muçulmanos, especialmente aqueles de nós que vivem no Ocidente, simplesmente não é uma questão sobre a qual falamos confortavelmente. Talvez compreensivelmente, não queiramos dar mais um motivo para os islamofóbicos nos atingirem. E a verdade é que muitos dos que levantaram essa questão particular da perseguição dos muçulmanos contra os cristãos na sequência dos ataques mais recentes – como o senador republicano Ted Cruz ou o ex-ministro das relações exteriores britânico, o conservador Boris Johnson – têm um histórico bem documentado de intolerância contra muçulmanos. Na segunda-feira, o Washington Post observou como os ataques no Sri Lanka estão provocando a “raiva da extrema direita no Ocidente”.

Enquanto isso, os progressistas se esforçam para ver o cristianismo, a maior religião do mundo, como frágil ou vulnerável, enquanto proeminentes líderes cristãos no ocidente vêm sendo associados com grandes crimes – como George W. Bush e Tony Blair e a invasão do Iraque. “Eu me pergunto se em algum nível inconsciente o Ocidente secular e amplamente progressista acha que o cristianismo estava pedindo por isso”, escreveu Giles Fraser, o sacerdote e comentarista social britânico, na sequência dos atentados do Sri Lanka no domingo. “Eles associam o cristianismo com papas e seus exércitos, com cruzadas e inquisições, com antissemitismo, imperialismo britânico, apoiadores de Trump e manifestantes de aborto.”

Fraser, no entanto, admitiu que os cristãos ocidentais “não ajudaram” a sua causa ao “descrever como ‘perseguição’ os desentendimentos menores que o cristianismo teve com a lei – em relação a bolos para casais gays ou pregadores de rua, por exemplo”. Nos Estados Unidos, uma pesquisa de 2016 do Public Religion Research Institute descobriu que os evangélicos brancos “são mais propensos a dizer que os cristãos enfrentam muita discriminação do que dizer que os muçulmanos enfrentam muita discriminação” — o que é claramente absurdo.

A situação fora dos EUA, no entanto, é outra questão. De acordo com um estudo recente da Pew, os cristãos de fato constituem a comunidade de fé mais perseguida do mundo. Eles são perseguidos e alvos de ataques em 144 países, contra 142 de muçulmanos e 87 de judeus.

A organização cristã sem fins lucrativos Open Doors publica anualmente uma lista de observação mundial dos 50 principais países onde os cristãos experimentam “altos níveis de perseguição”. Aqui está o que mais me incomoda: embora a Coreia do Norte comunista seja de longe o pior lugar do mundo para se viver como cristão, e embora os ataques anticristãos estejam crescendo rapidamente na Índia de maioria hindu, sete dos 10 países do mundo onde os cristãos enfrentam “extrema perseguição” são os países de maioria muçulmana. Na verdade, de acordo com a Open Doors, “o extremismo islâmico continua sendo o condutor global e dominante da perseguição, responsável por iniciar a opressão e o conflito em 35 dos 50 países da lista”.

Por um lado, é uma difamação sugerir que 1,8 bilhão de muçulmanos são culpados pelo fanatismo assassino de um punhado de grupos jihadistas. Vale notar que membros da comunidade muçulmana minoritária do Sri Lanka dizem que alertaram as forças armadas do Sri Lanka sobre a National Thowheed Jamath há três anos.

Em 22 de abril de 2019, Lalitha, ao centro, chora sobre o caixão com os restos mortais da sobrinha de 12 anos, Sneha Savindi, vítima de um atentado a bomba no domingo de Páscoa na igreja de São Sebastião.

Foto: Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP

Por outro lado, a ameaça imposta aos cristãos vai muito além dos grupos terroristas ou militantes. Em muitos países de maioria muçulmana, tanto os governos quanto os estabelecimentos religiosos têm muito a responder. No Irã, o famoso pastor cristão Youcef Nadarkhani e três membros de sua congregação foram condenados a 10 anos de prisão, em junho de 2018, por “agir contra a segurança nacional”. Em dezembro de 2018, as autoridades prenderam mais de cem cristãos iranianos no período de uma única semana pelo crime de “proselitismo”.

Na Arábia Saudita, igrejas são proibidas, e os cristãos não podem praticar sua fé em público. Em uma entrevista de 2016 para o New York Times, o grão-mufti do país, Abdulaziz al-Sheikh, declarou que o cristianismo “não é uma religião”.

Na Indonésia, o maior país de maioria muçulmana do mundo, onde um em cada 10 integrantes da população é cristão, “centenas de igrejas foram obrigadas a fechar”, relatou o New York Times no domingo, e “o proselitismo está proibido”. Em janeiro, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, o ex-governador cristão de Jacarta, foi libertado após cumprir 20 meses de prisão por acusações forjadas de blasfêmia contra o Islã.

No Paquistão, as famosas leis de blasfêmia do país são usadas para atingir desproporcionalmente cristãos, que constituem menos de 2% da população. Pense em Asia Bibi, uma cristã paquistanesa que foi sentenciada à morte por blasfêmia e passou quase uma década atrás das grades antes de ser absolvida em 2018. Ou Rimsha Masih, a menina cristã paquistanesa de 11 anos com síndrome de Down que também foi acusada de blasfêmia e, apesar de absolvida, foi obrigada a fugir do país. “Não em meu nome”, escrevi na época, referindo-me à perseguição dos cristãos do Paquistão pela maioria muçulmana.

A trágica ironia é que os maus-tratos aos cristãos vão contra tanto os ditames do Alcorão quanto o exemplo de vida do profeta Maomé. Portanto, não apenas não-islâmicos, mas também anti-islâmicos. O Alcorão reverencia Jesus como um grande profeta e louva os cristãos como estando entre os “Povos do Livro” que “terão sua recompensa perto de seu Senhor. E eles não terão medo, nem se afligirão”.

O Profeta Maomé ofereceu aos cristãos proteção contra a perseguição tanto em sua “constituição de Medina” quanto em sua “aliança” com os monges do Monte Sinai. Mais recentemente, a Declaração de Marrakesh, assinada por mais de 250 líderes religiosos, estudiosos e chefes de estado muçulmanos em 2016, declara que é “inconcebível empregar a religião com o propósito de agredir os direitos” de cristãos, judeus e outras comunidades minoritárias em nações de maioria muçulmana.

Mas é um pouco tarde demais? Nas últimas décadas, milhões de cristãos foram expulsos do Oriente Médio – o berço de sua fé. Isso é ao mesmo tempo uma tragédia e um escândalo. Assim como o fato de que, de acordo com a Open Doors, um número “desconcertante” de 11 cristãos é morto todos os dias ao redor do mundo, por conta de sua fé.

Esta não deve ser uma questão de direita x esquerda ou muçulmano x não-muçulmano. Muitos de nós, independentemente da fé ou da política, têm sido justos na denúncia da discriminação e da intolerância contra as comunidades muçulmanas minoritárias em Mianmar e Xinjiang, contra a minoria yazidi no Iraque; contra as comunidades judaicas minoritárias na Europa Oriental e até mesmo nos Estados Unidos. Fora do Ocidente, porém, as comunidades cristãs também estão sob ataque violento e implacável: da Coreia do Norte à China, do Sri Lanka à Índia, do Iraque à Síria. Vamos começar a lhes dar o apoio e a solidariedade que tentamos e dar a todas as outras minorias marginalizadas e perseguidas.

Tradução: Cássia Zanon

The post Quando cristãos são atacados, muçulmanos e a esquerda precisam defendê-los appeared first on The Intercept.

Eleitores – do PSOL ao PSDB – estão conquistando e implodindo grupos de fake news bolsonaristas no WhatsApp

Cansada de brigar por causa de política com o pai, um ferrenho eleitor de Jair Bolsonaro, a estudante Brenda Silva decidiu adotar uma estratégia diferente. Em vez de discutir com ele, passou a agir onde sabia que o pai gastava boa parte do tempo: em grupos de WhatsApp pró-Bolsonaro.

Tudo começou quando Silva foi convidada a entrar nos grupos de que o pai participava. Ela comprou um chip novo, para que não fosse reconhecida pelo número de telefone, e passou a enviar notícias e vídeos – reais – que expunham os problemas do presidente.

‘Eu o vi xingando aquele fake sem saber que era a filha dele.’

A ideia era apenas rebater argumentos, em geral baseados em fake news, que se cansara de ouvir. À época, o principal assunto nos grupos era o atentado à faca contra Bolsonaro. Os integrantes dos grupos diziam, sem provas, que o mandante havia sido o ex-presidente Lula. A estudante rebatia com fatos da investigação. O pai dela ficou possesso, mas Silva não parou até que conseguisse implodir todos os grupos, um a um.

“Eu o vi xingando ‘aquele fake’ sem saber que era a filha dele. Até que minha madrasta reclamou que ele perdia muito tempo brigando nos grupos e ele resolveu sair de todos”, riu a estudante. Mas aí quem não queria parar era ela. “Já tinha tomado gosto pela coisa.”

Silva, que vive em Goiânia, percebeu que invadir o terreno em que bolsonaristas radicais se sentem mais confortáveis – os grupos de WhatsApp – é uma forma efetiva de combater a proliferação de fake news a favor do presidente. A ferramenta de envio de mensagens instantâneas foi essencial para a eleição de Bolsonaro – as evidências indicam que a avalanche de fake news distribuídas no mundo oculto dos grupos de zap beneficiou mais a ele do que a qualquer outro candidato.

Guerrilha digital

A goiana está longe de ser a única “guerrilheira digital” dedicada a combater fake news e intolerância em grupos de mensagens. Em algumas semanas de pesquisa, conheci dezenas de pessoas – eleitoras de Ciro Gomes, Fernando Haddad, Guilherme Boulos, Marina Silva e Geraldo Alckmin – que resolveram se entregar à tarefa.

É estafante: são até oito horas diárias com os olhos fixos no WhatsApp. “Cada um mantém a sanidade como consegue”, ela desabafou.

É o caso dos 20 editores de uma página de esquerda no Facebook. Durante a campanha eleitoral, eles entraram em grupos bolsonaristas para entender o que pensavam os apoiadores do capitão reformado. Passado o pleito, decidiram continuar por ali, na esperança de mudar opiniões.

A tática escolhida é curiosa, mas vem surtindo efeito: fingindo ser eleitores de extrema direita, eles lançam mão de argumentos ainda mais radicais que os que habitualmente circulam nos grupos.

Um dos participantes, um bacharel em filosofia que mora em São Paulo e pediu para não ser identificado para não ser descoberto nos grupos, posta coisas como: “Bolsonaro não é só um político, ele é Melquisedeque, a presença do Senhor na Terra, o patriarca de uma nova geração de governantes”. Ou: “A Amazônia está pronta para receber o povo de Israel, meu pastor disse que aqui será a nova Jerusalém”.

‘Eles não percebem o humor e a caricatura. Mas, se desenvolvem senso crítico, pra mim está bom.’

Ouve, como resposta, habitualmente, que está louco, que Bolsonaro não é Deus e nem poderia entregar a Amazônia a quem quer que fosse. Alguns ficam tão revoltados que saem do grupo. É quando o paulistano se considera vitorioso.

“Eu uso citações da Bíblia, de Handmaid’s Tale, Game of Thrones e outros livros sobre regimes autoritários. Já mandei as máximas do Grande Irmão de [1984, romance clássico de George] Orwell para defender a ditadura militar. Eles não percebem o humor e a caricatura. Mas, se desenvolvem senso crítico, pra mim está bom”, me disse.

Segundo ele, o trabalho do grupo chega a afugentar uma média de 100 pessoas por semana de grupos que espalham fake news pró-Bolsonaro. “Nós vimos que não dá para dialogar com algumas pessoas, então tentamos assustá-las com o próprio radicalismo. É gente a que só conseguimos chegar assim”, prosseguiu.

Os Agentes das Fanfics

Após dinamitar os grupos de que o pai participava, Brenda Silva percebeu que descobrira uma maneira de enfrentar as notícias falsas e postagens intolerantes que infestam os grupos pró-Bolsonaro. E resolveu ir adiante, ao lado de pessoas que encontrou no Twitter para somar esforços.

A equipe que ela reuniu, chamada de Agentes das Fanfics, tem integrantes no Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Paraná e Distrito Federal. Ninguém se conhece pessoalmente, mas todos conversam diariamente em redes sociais. O lema é “resistência e deboche”, me disse a bacharel em Direito Stefany Oliveira, de Juiz de Fora.

A trupe concebeu uma estratégia peculiar, que até aqui tem se mostrado praticamente infalível: ganhar a confiança dos participantes, conquistar o posto de administrador e deletar o grupo. Montei um passo a passo para explicar como ela funciona:

Ao receber o convite para entrar num grupo bolsonarista, um dos integrantes da equipe entra e começa a conversar, de modo amistoso, com os demais participantes.

Com o passar dos dias, pessoa constrói uma imagem confiável no grupo. Segundo Silva, isso requer tempo, dedicação e muito sangue frio para ler notícias falsas ou opiniões radicais, machistas, misóginas etc. Nesse meio tempo, outros integrantes da trupe são chamados a entrar no grupo.

Após algumas semanas, começa a ação combinada. Geralmente, o integrante há mais tempo no grupo é atacado por um colega de equipe. O “veterano” então procura o administrador do grupo para reclamar da bagunça e das brigas constantes e pede poderes de moderador para retirar pessoas “mal intencionadas” da conversa.

Assim que se torna administrador, o infiltrado avisa os companheiros. É a senha para o grupo ser invadido e ter início um bombardeio de figurinhas (stickers) – geralmente depreciativas a Bolsonaro.

Em seguida, o administrador infiltrado deleta todos os integrantes, matando o grupo.

‘Uso as coisas que escuto do meu pai para me passar por minion nos grupos.’

Desde janeiro, quando o trabalho começou, que a trupe de Silva ostenta cerca de 30 grupos desmantelados, a maioria deles com centenas de participantes. Entre eles, estão agrupamentos batizados de Apenas direita, 100% Bolsonaro, Olavo x Mourão, Mulheres Conservadoras, Brasil com Bolsonaro, Avante Capitão, Mulheres de Direita, O Filho Pródigo (em homenagem a Carlos Bolsonaro), Aliança Israel Brasil, Solteiros Cristãos e Direita unida com Bolsonaro.

Enquanto eu escrevia este texto, eles empreendiam a estratégia noutros dois. “Uso as coisas que escuto do meu pai em casa para me passar por ‘minion’ nos grupos e conseguir virar administradora”, me contou Silva.

No começo, os Agentes das Fanfics usavam o emoticon de um cérebro para se reconhecerem em grupos bolsonaristas. O símbolo ficava camuflado em meio a bandeiras de Israel e Estados Unidos, que costumam ser usados por bolsonaristas no nome do perfil.

Hoje, eles dizem que é possível diferenciar quem é infiltrado ou não só pelo jeito que a pessoa fala. Segundo eles, ‘minions’ não costumam debater os assuntos das postagens e têm uma obsessão particular pelo PT. Infiltrados tentam dialogar e preferem falar do governo Bolsonaro.

A trupe elabora as próprias fake news, sempre contra o governo. É infalível sugerir que um integrante do primeiro escalão do presidente “é de esquerda”, o mais grave dos pecados capitais para os bolsonaristas radicais. Com requintes de ironia, os Agentes das Fanfics sugeriram que “esquerdistas” iriam invadir grupos de bolsonaristas para acabar com eles – que era justamente o que eles estavam fazendo.

Requinte de ironia: Agentes das Fanfics sugerem que “esquerdistas” iriam invadir e destruir grupos bolsonaristas – justamente o que eles mesmos estavam fazendo

Reprodução

“Percebemos que muita coisa que inventamos saía dos grupos de que participávamos e voltava depois como mensagem encaminhada. Então, sabíamos que tinham ‘passeado’ por outros grupos”, me contou o auxiliar administrativo Fábio Alexandre, que vive em Brasília.

‘Se pelo menos 10% dos integrantes de cada grupo que implodimos não entrar pra outro, já estou satisfeita.’

“Num dos grupos, eu dei a letra de que só compartilhavam notícias sem fonte e nunca discutiam nada relevante para o país. Claro que muitos me rechaçaram, mas outros tantos concordaram”, comemorou Douglas Godoy, do Rio Grande do Sul, que pediu para não revelar a profissão.

O “resultado”, claro, é muito pequeno se considerado o imenso universo de grupos do WhatsApp. “Mas é um trabalho que alguém precisa fazer. A gente sabe que é enxugar gelo. Mas algumas pessoas já deixaram de ser afetadas pela toxicidade desses grupos”, diz Alexandre. “Se pelo menos 10% dos integrantes de cada grupo que implodimos não entrar pra outro, já estou satisfeita”, falou Oliveira.

A “guerrilha” não se restringe a grupos organizados. Há “lobos solitários” fazendo a mesma coisa, ela me contou. “Tempos atrás eu estava trabalhando em um grupo, e alguém de fora começou a destruí-lo. Até hoje não sei quem era.”

The post Eleitores – do PSOL ao PSDB – estão conquistando e implodindo grupos de fake news bolsonaristas no WhatsApp appeared first on The Intercept.

Betting on Anti-feminism as a Winning Political Strategy

MADRID—On a recent Sunday, a compact huddle of about 100 principally middle-aged men and women slowly advanced onto Puerta del Sol square here in the Spanish capital. A canopy of pale pink and blue balloons swayed above them like a roving baby shower, the theme song from Pirates of the Caribbean blaring from speakers nearby. A man carrying a megaphone led a chant, “Feminism doesn’t represent me.”

The “March for Femininity,” as the demonstration was called, was a counterprotest to an enormous International Women’s Day rally held two days prior, a historic affair that saw hundreds of thousands of women throughout Spain stream down their cities’ major avenues to demand the application and expansion of anti-gender-violence laws. That day, headlines hailed feminism in Spain as a force to be reckoned with. Nearly 65 percent of college-age women here embrace the label and, it follows, form a potent voting bloc for national elections being held this weekend. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have fallen at their feet, trying to lay claim to “real” feminism, whether that has meant touting gender-neutral speech or championing women-friendly economic policies.

The smaller march that followed, however, was decidedly not courting the feminist vote. In a gravelly voice, a small woman introduced as a dissident of gender ideology—the expression is used by the global far right to designate advances in women’s and LGBTQ rights—declared that it was in fact men who were being discriminated against under the law. The crowd responded with thunderous applause. The sexes were being pitted against each other, and the only way to restore the balance, the speaker said, was by voting against feminist legislation.

Only one party in Spain is currently making that argument, and the speaker at the rally, Alicia Rubio, helps run its get-out-the-vote efforts. That party is Vox.

[Read: How Spain misunderstood the Catalan independence movement]

Vox—the word is Latin for “voice”—was founded in 2013 by a handful of conservative politicians who’d grown disenchanted with the People’s Party, the traditional right-wing bloc in Spain, for not adopting more hard-line stances against secessionists and progressive legislation passed under the former Socialist government. But it burst into Spain’s national consciousness only late last year, when it campaigned and won 12 seats in the regional legislature in Andalusia, in southern Spain, the first time any of its candidates had been elected to office. The party’s shocking ascent to power was, at first, ascribed to its stance against separatism in the northern Spanish region of Catalonia—Vox called the country’s dominant parties soft on separatists and campaigned on a “Spain first” ticket.

In many ways, its rise mirrors advances made by populist and far-right parties across Europe. A decade of slow economic growth, dislocations caused by the global financial crisis, and the vast wave of migration that has hit Europe in recent years have fueled disenchantment with traditional political groupings across the region. Spain had, for a time, been a rare exception to that shift. And in a way, that remains the case: Whereas most of the continent’s populist parties want to either gut the EU or leave it altogether, Vox’s focus is different. While blatant anti-feminist rhetoric is often employed by political parties in eastern Europe, such efforts are markedly less frequent in the west of the continent. That was, of course, until Vox announced its first legislative push in Andalusia—to demand that the region’s gender-violence law be scrapped.

According to official figures, 992 women in Spain have been murdered by a partner or former partner since 2003. Though the term femicide—instances of women killed by men on account of their gender—wasn’t included in Spanish dictionaries until 2014, violence against women came into brutal focus with the murder of Ana Orantes in 1997, a woman from Granada who shocked the public, first when she spoke on an evening TV program about the abuse she suffered at her ex-husband’s hands for 40 years, and 13 days later, when her ex set her ablaze. Newspapers began tracking gender-based murders around 2000. In 2003, the government created its own registry, logging the number of women killed by partners or former partners. An independent study that includes femicides committed by men with no prior relationship with their victims estimates that the number is actually closer to 2,000. These figures, and numerous petitions by feminist organizations, prompted the national government to pass a historic anti-gender-violence law in 2004, allocating funds to support victims of abuse and calling for the creation of specific gender-violence courts. In late 2017, Spain’s parliament unanimously passed a series of measures designed to bulk up the original law. Even the People’s Party, which in 2013 threatened to roll back abortion rights, was on board.

Vox is the first party to challenge the consensus, claiming the law allows and emboldens women to falsely accuse men. In a 100-point program unveiled in October, as it was campaigning ahead of Andalusia’s elections, the party called for the repeal of anti-gender-violence laws, to be replaced with legislation providing “equal protection” for men, women, children, and the elderly in cases of domestic violence and the removal of abortion from government-funded health services.

[Read: The new authoritarians are waging war on women]

The party also espouses what Sílvia Claveria, a politics professor at Carlos III University in Madrid, described to me as “modern sexism”: It advocates longer maternity leave and encourages women to be proud mothers, but once women want to separate from or divorce their partners, it shifts positions to take the man’s side. According to Manuela Carmena, the mayor of Madrid and a politician known for her efforts to promote women’s rights, Vox has sought to benefit from “the frustration and confusion of many men who feel displaced by the growing role of women in society.”

That strategy is apparent in remarks from Vox’s leadership. In a televised interview in January, the party’s president, Santiago Abascal, claimed that 87 percent of gender-violence accusations had been dropped because there was no evidence that the accused had committed a crime. (In fact, only 0.01 percent of gender-violence accusations are deemed false, according to data compiled by the office of Spain’s attorney general. The Barcelona-based lawyer Júlia Humet told me that some are indeed withdrawn or dropped, but frequently this is due to the cycle of violence itself: Women often give their abusers another chance out of a sense of love or loyalty, Humet said, or because they’re pressured to do so.) Vox’s leader in Andalusia, Francisco Serrano, a former judge who was suspended from his post in 2011 for changing a child’s custody agreement to benefit the father, has claimed that “a real genocide is under way,” of men attempting or committing suicide over false accusations.

The debate surrounding false accusations in particular has become a focal point in Spain’s culture wars in the wake of a high-profile case in which a woman accused five men of gang-raping her at Pamplona’s world-famous Running of the Bulls festival. When the men were acquitted of rape and found guilty of a lesser crime last spring, women throughout Spain took to the streets in what was considered the country’s #MeToo moment. Last summer, as the movement gained momentum, a self-proclaimed feminist government took office and promised to revise rape laws and make gender equality one of its top priorities.

That soon sparked a backlash, with several thousand men denouncing on social media and the Spanish version of 4Chan, ForoCoches, what they saw as doing away with the presumption of innocence. In February, a purple bus inscribed with the slogan “#StopFeminazis” beneath an image of Hitler wearing pink lipstick could be seen driven around Barcelona. The organization that chartered the bus, Hazte Oír (“Make Yourself Heard”), is calling on Spain’s biggest right-wing parties, including Vox, to repeal the gender-violence law. Vox has tapped into this macho reaction and doubled down on its anti-feminism.

Such platforms are more often seen in eastern Europe than in western Europe, Ruth Wodak, a linguistics professor at Lancaster University and the University of Vienna who focuses on right-wing populist rhetoric, told me. France’s Marine Le Pen, shy of calling herself a feminist, has come out to defend “women’s rights” (though she did so largely to prop up her anti-immigration policies). The Dutch and Scandinavian far right has “more progressive gender politics,” Wodak says. These are mainly manifested in an apparent embrace of LGBTQ rights, though this too is often at the expense of immigrants: In 2015, Sweden’s far-right party staged an unofficial gay-rights parade in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood. In Italy, Matteo Salvini, the country’s interior minister and leader of the League party, has said that abortion and “equal rights between men and women” were not up for debate.

[Read: The politics of a long-dead dictator still haunt Spain]

In that sense, Vox looks more like an eastern European party. Its policies look strikingly similar to those of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who recently announced measures to help mothers by rewarding those who have multiple children with tax cuts and financial subsidies. Wodak attributes the parallels to Spain’s more recent departure from fascism than its Western European neighbors.

Polls peg support for Vox at about 10 percent nationwide. At that level, it could play a kingmaker role and, some worry, be invited into government. According to available polling data, the average Vox voter is a man age 35 to 44, though Vox youth groups are picking up younger supporters too.

In approximately 20 interviews with young Vox affiliates and sympathizers, almost every person I spoke to started out talking about Spanish unity when I asked what had brought them to the party. But the second I asked about Vox’s gender policies, I was told, without fail (by both men and women), that they agreed 100 percent with the party line. At a recent party rally in Barcelona, I spoke to Enrique Lopez, an 18-year-old originally from Málaga, on the southern coast. Lopez, who wore a Spanish flag draped around his shoulders, superhero-cape style, said the party’s gender policies were as important to him as its unionist stance. “Women don’t need their own special law,” he told me. “Violence doesn’t have a gender.”

Why I Made a New Version of ‘What a Wonderful World’

When Louis Armstrong recorded “What a Wonderful World” in 1967, America was in upheaval. The Vietnam War was in full swing, and Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a battle for civil rights. The Summer of Love converged on San Francisco, and artists like Joni Mitchell and The Doors provided the soundtrack to a movement opposing the government, the ongoing war, and the consumerist values of the times. Deep unrest spanning race, class, and political lines was an everyday reality of American life.

In Pops’s time there were clearer boundaries. In fact, at the time that he recorded the song, he was living in a humble house in Corona, Queens, away from the hoopla of show business. It was his zone.

These days, that’s much harder to do. We bring it all home with us in our pocket. We are constantly being presented with lifestyles to adopt, ways to feel, and what to think. It is no longer easy to differentiate the energy we emit from the energy we take in. It takes an act of will to disconnect from it all and trek into the social wilderness.

I have been contemplating the role of music in times of uncertainty, and I’ve come to realize that music can help us to clarify, to ascertain, and to assert our humanity while making genuine connections.

When I was in my early 20s, I joined the late trumpeter Roy Hargrove’s three touring bands for a few years and ventured around the world. Playing side by side with him was a revelation. He brought every facet of himself—from playing in church, to listening to his father’s record collection, to sitting under jazz greats or architecting neo-soul into his music—proving night after night that his humanity transcended all labels. In the tradition of jazz bandleaders like Betty Carter and Art Blakey, you learn from the elders on the bandstand in real time. But it took years, after I had left his bands, to fully appreciate the depth of this truth: Roy could exist exactly as he was—as a southern black male—yet still be appreciated and fiercely celebrated all over the world by people who were supposedly different from him.

Armstrong, Hargrove, and other artists throughout history have affirmed our shared humanity through their work and helped us cope with reality. “Music washes away the dust of everyday life,” Art Blakey said. The soundtrack through our nation’s history—from slave songs to gospel anthems, from negro spirituals to Native American chants, from the songs of early Americans in the coal mines to the Tejano songs that originated near our border—has been the balm that heals our wounds and the time capsule that carries the wisdom of each generation forward, allowing us to know where we come from and plot the course to where we are going.

For ages music has formed these bonds, even connecting us with our divine origin. For example, in Sufism, the whirling dervish is a form of ancient dance meditation meant to detach oneself from the ego in order to connect to God. Music is used as a focal point as you spin in circles, imitating the motion of the solar system, shedding your personal desires while reinforcing the ultimate perspective, reuniting with the Creator. I recall being deeply moved, while on tour in Istanbul, by the meditative, reflective quality of Islam’s call to prayer. The call was reminiscent of the sounds I heard growing up in my church. It reinforced my belief that we are all looking for the same things out of life and music has always been a tool we’ve used to explore it.

That’s why I wanted to make my own version of “What A Wonderful World.” I wanted to elicit deeper meaning from the lyrics, which speak of the cycle of life and nature’s divine rhyme. These words put into perspective how temporary our challenges are when measured up against the infinite expanse of the universe and time. This version is a prayer that encourages us to contemplate and celebrate the beauty and grandeur of the celestial orb on which we live.

We can embody the highest ideals and deepest love of our Creator by slowing down and listening to the voice of reason that lies beyond the noise. Find your zone, just like Pops did.

Close your eyes, take a few minutes of stillness, and listen. And after the song is over, I encourage you to consider a few things: Remember that “this too shall pass.” Everything has a season. Vent and process your emotions. Take a moment to approach things from a purely emotional place, but don’t be too consumed by these emotions either. Don’t stop.

It’s also important  to have gratitude for the people in your life who love and care for you. Call up your soul family and express how much they mean to you. The smallest gesture can go a long way. Lean on one another; it’s okay to feel vulnerable.

Engage in the arts. Go see a play, an art exhibit, a concert. Creative expression taps into a sacred space.

Pray. Seek truth. Truth is not something you just believe in, but a standard by which to live your life. Practice unconditional love. Put more generosity into the world. Go to a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter for five minutes out of your day. Visit someone in the hospital. Or simply tell someone that they matter and that you appreciate them. Listen to someone. Make someone feel your love.

Move your body. Blast your stereo and dance until you feel a little better or maybe until you exhaust yourself. Like the legendary musician and civil-rights activist James Brown once said, “Get up offa that thang.” Get involved in your community. Seek clarity and become informed on your cause, no matter how long it takes. When you’re ready, move forward with a solid plan. Build teams.

Always be listening with an open mind. Attempt to have constructive conversations in person with those who may live or think differently from you, not while hiding on social media. Lastly, remember that in order to bring peace into the world, we must begin with ourselves first. Restore your peace.