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