Archive | August 2022

The New Kibbutz

Aug24
The New Kibbutz

MATTI FRIEDMAN

Kishorit, a self-described neurodiverse kibbutz, is redefining Israeli communal living at a time when these communities are on the decline.

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KISHORIT VIA FACEBOOK

The kibbutz, one of the greatest ideas ever put into practice, has fallen on hard times. Having pioneered a new country and wrought a revolution in Jewish history, most of these communes no longer subscribe to radical Zionist egalitarianism and have resigned themselves to life as suburbs, leaving a hole at the center of the country’s consciousness that we haven’t managed to fill with anything better. I’m always happy to hear a pulse—like the few kibbutzim that have prospered and stayed socialist, or like the scrappy guerilla activists of the “urban kibbutz” movement, who pool resources and work for the common good but live in cities. For the past few years, I’ve been hearing about one unique evolution of the idea on a hill of grapevines near the border with Lebanon. Last week I drove up to visit.

Kishorit was founded 25 years ago, just as the kibbutz movement finished its remarkable 90-year run. By that year, 1997, the Israeli free market was conclusively on the rise, and by 2000, Palestinian suicide bombers had blown the old Labor Zionist peace dream into oblivion. The next year, the last kibbutznik prime minister, Ehud Barak, was voted out of office, and the movement largely faded to the margins of Israeli society. This community was founded on the site of an abandoned kibbutz, Kishor, which had dissolved itself after years of failure.

I passed the goat-milk operation, the country’s third-largest, and the winery, which produces 50,000 bottles a year. There were the usual bomb shelters, a reminder that the Hezbollah missile crews were just a few miles to the north and were unlikely to make an exception for the people here. In the members’ meeting room near the communal dining hall, a man named Oren asked me if I’d like to sit down and discuss a book. The greenhouses here looked like the ones you’d see at any other kibbutz, with rough tables and hanging tools and sweaty workers in cargo pants. I noticed signs of cognitive disability only when two of the workers walked over to say hi and see how I was doing; one of the differences between Kishorit and a typical kibbutz is that the people here are much friendlier. Not far from the goat sheds, a man in a red T-shirt stood in the shade of a terebinth, jerking his arms as he carried on a forceful discussion with himself.

Kishorit thinks of itself as a kind of neurodiverse kibbutz—that term, “neurodiverse,” being the one preferred here to older ones like “mentally disabled” or “special needs.” Many communal decisions here are taken in a plenum by democratic vote, in the kibbutz style, including both the 186 neurodiverse members and the 45 member families who are “neurotypical,” the term for what most people might call “normal.” Some members can work full days, others can barely work at all—the place runs on the old kibbutz precept that you give what you can and get what you need. In the winery, for example, I met Yaron Biran, 50, who was born in Emek Hefer on the coastal plain. He was hauling a crate of bottles and stopped to chat. His job changes with the seasons, he said—pruning, picking, packing. He was busy, and had to go. In the kibbutz grocery, an elderly worker named Haya encouraged me to try the cherry tomatoes. Another member is an adherent of Chabad, and has decided that his job is to help other members perform religious commandments like putting on tefillin. That’s OK too.

Yael Shilo, one of the two founders of Kishorit, was born in 1948, the same year as Israel, at Kibbutz Kfar Szold in the Galilee panhandle. The idea for a neurodiverse kibbutz came to her after she married a man whose son fit that description, and she has dedicated the rest of her life to making it work. Shilo’s parents, like the other founders of her own kibbutz, had escaped places like Germany and Poland for lives of physical hardship in the Land of Israel. They spent a full decade hauling basalt rocks just to clear fields so they could start farming. “They worked themselves into the ground,” Shilo said. Her father was from Vienna, her mother from Krakow. Back in Europe, most of the founders’ families had been removed from physical labor, but that world was gone, and the kibbutz and the nation needed a generation that was muscular and hardy. There wasn’t going to be much room for the weak or disabled. That was Shilo’s world as a child.

The capable body was always a preoccupation of the kibbutz and of the Zionist movement: the bronzed pioneer of the Jewish National Fund posters, or the old newsreels with hundreds of brash New Jews performing calisthenics in unison under the blue-and-white flag. “Your first glance when you meet a young native-born man will reveal a flourishing, muscular, tall body,” wrote the pioneer Yaakov Cohen in 1933. “The hunched back and the bent gait that many scholars have identified as almost racial trademarks seem to have vanished, and the anxiety and fear of the ‘gentiles’ and the feeling of inadequacy and inferiority that were the lot of the young Jew in the Diaspora seem to have been pulled out by the roots.”

Just as the sabra, the prickly pear adopted as a symbol for the native-born Jews of Israel, grew wild here, wrote the historian Oz Almog in his book The Sabra, “so were the native-born Israelis growing, so it was said, naturally, ‘without complexes,’ in their true homeland.” My own first kibbutz memory was at a swimming pool at Kibbutz Kfar Blum in the late 1980s, when I was 11 years old, visiting Israel with my family from our home in Toronto. I was standing on the blistering stone floor by the pool when my attention was diverted by the sudden arrival of a raucous horde of boys and girls—it was kibbutz gym class. They hit the water like a dolphin pod and churned it like beautiful torpedoes, another lap and another. They were all foam, tan, and muscle, and to my Canadian eyes, they seemed like another species. It was like being a house cat wandering into a zoo and happening upon the cheetah pen.

Shilo remembers the kibbutz as a wonderful place, even if the community was never as equal as it strove to be. “In our kibbutz, like anywhere, there were strong and weak. The idea of equality is a dream—in reality, there are people who are charismatic and strong, the leaders, and people who are more marginal, and it’s naive to think that everyone was equal and loved each other.” But the kibbutz was nonetheless a great thing: davar gadol, as she put it several times in our conversation. You were never alone, and you always had someone to help you. So what if a new kind of kibbutz could be created, one that would revolve around people who hadn’t been magically cured of “complexes” and who’d never be invited to star in those glorious calisthenic films, one that would harness the power of community but put it at the disposal of people who’d ordinarily be out of the frame?

The idea crystallized when she met her stepson’s social worker, Shuki Levinger, at Kfar Tikva. This was a village for special-needs Israelis that was cutting-edge when founded in 1964 by an irascible nonconformist, the German-born educator and agronomist Dr. Siegfried Hirsch, on the site of a failed kibbutz near Haifa. The young state already had institutions for Israelis suffering from mental disabilities, but they resembled hospitals, with people’s conditions medicalized and their lives regimented in almost every way. Ignoring much of the common wisdom, the German doctor declared Kfar Tikva to be a village not for charity or babysitting, but for professional training, like the agricultural villages where he’d taught in the past. According to Levinger, the doctor used to joke that he founded the village mainly to get his neurodiverse stepdaughter, Yehudit, out of the house; except he didn’t say “neurodiverse,” of course, he called her “retarded,” in the style of those times. “He seemed crazy on the surface,” Levinger recalled, “but that concealed a deep understanding.”

Levinger and Shilo developed the idea together and spent a few years wrangling the Israeli bureaucracy, which had a hard time understanding what they were talking about. But by the end of the summer of 1997 they’d been given the site of what had once been Kibbutz Kishor and the first four members moved in. Today members range in age from 18 to 71. Some have physical disabilities as well. About two dozen couples live together. Members have their own apartments—they get the medical help they need, but live as they wish. There are no visiting hours or unnecessary limitations on anyone’s independence. The village is meant to be a permanent home: A member named Arik Gilad, who’d lived here for 15 years, recently died of a heart attack at 59 and became the first person to be buried at Kishorit. The kibbutz’s agriculture doesn’t turn a profit, although that, too, doesn’t make it much different from a regular kibbutz. Most of the funding comes from Israel’s Welfare Ministry, with smaller sums coming from private donations.

Outside the winery, I met Mark, 34, originally from New Jersey. (He preferred not to give his last name.) He accompanied me on a tour of the bakery, past a half-dozen people kneading around a metal table. Their mental condition wasn’t clear, and didn’t seem to matter. All I could see is that they were covered with flour. Mark has been here for 13 years. In the U.S., he said, his family put him on a waiting list for a home and was told it was likely to be 30 years. “There’s nothing like this in America,” he said. It’s not just the community, he said, or the beauty of the location, but the fact that it’s not run for profit.

I wondered aloud if this place could ever be reproduced in other countries. It would be nice to think the answer is yes, but Israelis have a communal attitude and a talent for improvisation that they often take for granted, but which is unique and hard to imitate. Mark didn’t think so. “A place like this takes so much heart,” Mark said. “You can’t just copy it.”

Kishorit is an innovation of the kind Israelis like to celebrate among themselves and display to outsiders, along with pioneering successes like the rehabilitation village known as Adi Negev, founded a few years later in the southern desert by Doron Almog, an IDF general, father of a son with severe mental disabilities, and, as of last month, the new chairman of the Jewish Agency. But in housing neurodiverse adults, Israel actually lags behind other Western countries. In many European states, particularly in Scandinavia, there are no longer large institutions for people with mental disabilities, and nearly everyone is housed in the community, said Dr. Lital Barlev, an expert at the Jerusalem think tank JDC Brookdale. In Israel, by contrast, of 11,286 mentally disabled Israelis who live outside the home, according to her research, about two-thirds are still in institutions. Even the United States is ahead of us.

“The trend is moving people to regular residences, not to neighborhoods of disabled people or kibbutzim of disabled people, but to life like everyone else,” said Barlev. “You’ll have a regular neighborhood in the city, and every once in a while you’ll have an apartment with people who have disabilities. This is correct not only for people with disabilities, but for everyone else, who need to see these people as part of society.”

But life in the city can mean acute isolation. “If we put people in apartments, then they’re alone in their apartments,” said Levinger, Kishorit’s co-founder, when we spoke on a bench outside the village’s little office. “The kibbutz is one solution for loneliness.” Dalia Peleg, a counselor and resident, moved to Kishorit after her daughter Tal, 50, came to live here 20 years ago. “What these people lack most is company,” Peleg said. “At home people are nice to them. They’ll say hi. But no one will ever invite them over for coffee.”

A short walk away, in the swimming pool, a man with twisted limbs lay on his back in the water, moving with the help of an instructor. A tractor puttered between the rows of vines: The old kibbutz may be gone, but the grapes are growing. At the greenhouses the tools went down. It was time for a coffee break.

Matti Friedman is a Tablet columnist and the author, most recently, of Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.

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News From Israel- August 23, 2022

Aug24
News From Israel- August 23, 2022

LTV Israel News

Washington rejecting claims that the U.S is holding up nuclear agreements with Tehran
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A major blow to both the Israeli service industry – as well as to the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who work within it
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An incredible mansion in the Negev resurfacing for the first time in 1200 years

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ani też webmastera Blogu Reunion’68, chyba ze jest to wyraźnie zaznaczone.
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Oby Ukraińcy nie popełnili tych samych błędów, co my

Aug23
Oby Ukraińcy nie popełnili tych samych błędów, co my

Jan Ołdakowski

Gdy oglądam dziś telewizję, muszę się chwilę zastanowić, co widzę – czy to nasz film „Miasto ruin” o zburzonej Warszawie z 1945 r., czy jednak przelot drona nad Mariupolem, bo te kadry wyglądają łudząco podobnie.Rozmowa z Janem Ołdakowskim, dyrektorem Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego.

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Mariupol, osiedle mieszkaniowe zniszczone przez rosyjski ostrzał, 31 maja 2022 r.Mariupol, osiedle mieszkaniowe zniszczone przez rosyjski ostrzał, 31 maja 2022 r. / Foto: STRINGER/AFP Michał Płociński

Plus Minus: Jak przygotowuje się w Warszawie obchody powstania, gdy tuż obok inne miasta równane są z ziemią?

Dla Warszawy obchody rocznicy wybuchu powstania są bardzo ważne, bo stanowią manifestację wyjątkowej, wręcz magicznej wspólnoty. I to paradoks, bo wspominamy klęskę i zniszczone miasto, a jednak to jedyne wydarzenie, które jest w stanie połączyć wszystkich warszawiaków. W Godzinę „W” stają obok siebie wszyscy ci, którzy często przeżywają silne emocje związane z drugą stroną politycznego sporu. I na moment odnajdują coś, co ich spaja. Nie ma w Polsce wielu takich wydarzeń, wyjąwszy może sportowe.

Ale o tym rozmawialiśmy już wiele razy przy poprzednich obchodach, a tym razem będą one…

…wiem, szczególne. Dlatego ta wspólnota jest dzisiaj jeszcze ważniejsza. Jak ogląda się w telewizji niektórych ludzi, zwłaszcza tych mocno zaangażowanych w konflikt polityczny, można mieć wątpliwości, czy w przypadku ataku na Polskę byliby oni w stanie stanąć ramię w ramię z ideowymi przeciwnikami i bronić wspólnie ojczyzny. A powstanie warszawskie daje nadzieję, że gdzieś tam pod tym widocznym na co dzień konfliktem jest prawdziwa wspólnota, która by się ukazała, gdybyśmy znaleźli się w sytuacji ekstremalnej. Oczywiście wszyscy mamy nadzieję, że u nas wojny nie będzie, ale być może Ukraińcy też w to wierzyli.

I w Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego myślicie dziś, co robić, gdy ona jednak wybuchnie?
Program jeszcze niedawno dość abstrakcyjny.

Bo z wolnością jest jak z powietrzem – doceniamy ją dopiero wtedy, gdy jej zabraknie. Dzięki wejściu Polski do NATO i Unii Europejskiej nabraliśmy przekonania, że Francis Fukuyama miał rację: historia się skończyła, żadna wojna już u nas nie wybuchnie, a konflikty będą teraz dotyczyć jedynie podziału środków unijnych z funduszy strukturalnych i inwestycyjnych. A tu nagle okazuje się, że opowieść, którą aktualizowaliśmy przez ostatnie 18 lat, od momentu utworzenia muzeum, staje się rzeczywistością – historia wychodzi z książek, filmów oraz gablot wystawienniczych i zaczyna dziać się na naszych oczach. Gdy oglądam dziś telewizję, muszę się chwilę zastanowić, co widzę – czy to nasz film „Miasto ruin” o zburzonej Warszawie z 1945 r., czy jednak przelot drona nad Mariupolem, bo te kadry wyglądają łudząco podobnie. Historia, o której opowiadaliśmy, przestała być historią.

Czy to znaczy, że muzeum przestało być muzeum?

Zastanawiamy się, czy zwiedzający widzą u nas coś więcej niż tylko historię, dawne dzieje. Zamówiliśmy nawet na ten temat badania, by przekonać się, na ile to tylko nasze poczucie, że fotografie Mariupola są niepokojąco podobne do zdjęć zrujnowanej Warszawy, a na ile tak odbierają to wszyscy. Na ich wyniki musimy jeszcze poczekać, ale z jakiegoś powodu mamy dziś frekwencję na prawie takim poziomie, jak przed pandemią. To ewenement na skalę kraju, bo wiele polskich muzeów, niestety, nie potrafi ciągle podnieść się po lockdownach. W ostatnich tygodniach odwiedza nas prawie 2 tys. osób dziennie, w tym relatywnie dużo obcokrajowców.

Dziś na Zachodzie powraca dylemat, z którym często mierzymy się w Polsce w okolicach 1 sierpnia: bić się czy nie bić. Sami Ukraińcy chcą oczywiście walczyć, ale w różnych krajach intelektualiści dywagują, czy to na pewno najlepsze wyjście dla ukraińskiego narodu.

Ale jak wytłumaczyć np. obrońcom Azowstalu, że jednak nie powinni się bronić? Przecież dla nich to nie „bić się czy nie bić”, ale „żyć albo nie żyć”. Są miejsca, gdzie reakcja na agresję Rosjan nie przypomina powstania warszawskiego, tylko raczej powstanie w getcie – gdzie walka jest nie tylko próbą odzyskania wolności i warunkiem przetrwania, ale niekiedy tragicznym wyborem godnej śmierci z bronią w ręku. Oczywiście, takie porównania nie zawsze pasują, ale warto sobie uzmysłowić, co tak naprawdę stoi za propozycją, by się nie bić. Ja nie potrafię przejść do porządku dziennego nad tym, że morduje się żony walczących na froncie żołnierzy, ponieważ służą oni w formacjach zwalczanych przez Rosjan. Pytanie, czy w ogóle powinniśmy doradzać tym, których wojska rosyjskie chcą eksterminować, by się poddali, by nie ratowali własnego życia. Czy na pewno pacyfizm jest najlepszą odpowiedzią w takiej sytuacji? Moim zdaniem prawo do obrony własnego życia nie powinno być kwestionowane.

Szkoła realizmu politycznego jednak apeluje o rozwagę, nieporywanie się na pewną śmierć.

Tzw. realizm w polskim wydaniu ma jedną zasadniczą wadę – paradoksalnie jest oderwany od rzeczywistości. Wygrywanie bitew po fakcie i tłumaczenie z dzisiejszej perspektywy, z dzisiejszą wiedzą, co byłoby lepsze dla Polski np. podczas II wojny światowej, nie ma większego sensu. Wiele razy musiałem tłumaczyć młodym ludziom, którzy byli zafascynowani ideą, że Polacy mogli przecież pójść z Niemcami na „tego brzydkiego Sowieta”, jak to by wyglądało w praktyce. Bo czyimi rękami w takim scenariuszu mordowani byliby polscy Żydzi? Jaki to miałoby wpływ na sytuację Polski po wojnie? Te pytania zawsze pozostawały bez odpowiedzi. Tak samo jest dzisiaj, bo jaka jest tzw. realistyczna recepta dla Ukraińców? Powinni rozpoznać swoją słabość i przyłączyć się do silniejszego, ale kosztem – jak rozumiem – tych, którzy nie pasują do rosyjskiego wzorca. Ich by eksterminowano.

I znowu: prowadzimy dziś te same dyskusje jak co roku, tylko tym razem nie o powstaniu. Bo jakby Ukraińcy znowu się szybko poddali, jak w 2014 r., to może nie wydarzyłyby się takie tragedie, jak w Buczy czy Mariupolu?

Pytanie, czy Rosjanie i tak nie wyśledziliby i nie zamordowali tych ludzi, których chcieli eksterminować, a później ukryli nieudolnie ludobójstwo, jak próbowali to robić właśnie w Buczy. Ta rozpaczliwa próba ukrycia zbrodni łączy ich zresztą z III Rzeszą. I przecież to nie przypadek, że ciała w Buczy były rozebrane lub miały spodnie ściągnięte do kostek, a koszule podciągnięte do szyi – bo szukano u nich tatuaży wskazujących na służbę wojskową. Zatem jaka jest rada realistów dla takiego weterana np. z Pułku „Azow”, któremu i tak Rosjanie nie popuszczą? Jaka jest rada dla jego rodziny, która i tak zostanie wyśledzona? Mnie przeraża, że to się dzieje tu i teraz, że wkraczają wojska i mordują cywilów.

A zaskakuje?

Chciałbym, by Ukraińcy zrozumieli, że kiedy zaczęliśmy w muzeum tworzyć listę ofiar cywilnych powstania warszawskiego, okazało się, że brakuje nam około dwóch trzecich nazwisk. Udało nam się zgromadzić dane zaledwie 50 tys. ze 150 tys. ofiar. Zatem jeśli chodzi o anonimowych zamordowanych warszawiaków, ludobójczy plan Hitlera się powiódł, bo nie dość, że pozbawiono ich życia, to jeszcze zatarto pamięć o nich.

Dlaczego to się udało?

Bo szybko zaczęto tę historię zamilczać. W Norymberdze nie postawiono takich oskarżeń, jak zbrodnie niemieckie podczas powstania warszawskiego, nie gromadzono materiałów dowodowych w tej sprawie. W komunistycznej Polsce, może poza krótkim okresem tuż po wojnie, gdy zebrano trochę relacji, nie można było się tym zajmować, bo powstanie warszawskie miało zostać zapomniane.

I jak to się ma do dzisiejszej Ukrainy?

Jeżeli zamordowanych z Buczy ma spotkać inny los, to od razu teraz trzeba włożyć bardzo dużo pracy w dokumentowanie zbrodni, w zbieranie relacji, ustalanie tożsamości zarówno ofiar, jak i sprawców. Wystawa „Wola 1944: Wymazywanie. Ludobójstwo i sprawa Reinefartha” jest naszą reakcją na to, co dzieje się za wschodnią granicą. Za pomocą tej ekspozycji chcemy powiedzieć Ukraińcom: „Uważajcie, bo łatwo można ten moment przegapić, a kiedy dotrze do was, że chcecie o tym opowiedzieć światu, możecie znaleźć się w takiej sytuacji jak my, że będziecie znać tożsamość tylko jednej trzeciej ofiar, a reszta pozostanie bezimienna – i ludobójstwo znowu się dopełni”.

Polska na szczęście pomaga Ukraińcom także instytucjonalnie, bo wspomniany już Instytut Pileckiego powołał Centrum Dokumentowania Zbrodni Rosyjskich w Ukrainie im. Rafała Lemkina, a wy powołaliście Komitet Pomocy Muzeom Ukrainy.

Zaprosiliśmy do tego komitetu kilkadziesiąt polskich muzeów i koordynujemy pomoc. Zajmuje się tym m.in. lwowianka, którą przyjęliśmy do pracy nad tym projektem. Ta pomoc to transporty z materiałami potrzebnymi ukraińskim muzeom, pomoc w odbudowie jednego z nich, ale też stały kontakt z ludźmi tworzącymi te instytucje i wspólna praca nad nowymi koncepcjami. Bo ukraińska tożsamość będzie w końcu odbudowywana w oparciu o zbiory tych muzeów, ale najpierw ich narracje muszą przejść derusyfikację. Przecież wszystkie te instytucje sięgają korzeniami Związku Sowieckiego i właściwie nie były od tego czasu poważnie zmieniane. Teraz czeka je mnóstwo pracy, bo najwyższy czas skupić się na tożsamości ukraińskiej, a nie ogólnie postsowieckiej, nadszedł także moment zrewolucjonizowania sposobu prowadzenia narracji.

I ludzie je tworzący rozumieją te wyzwania?

Rozumieją je doskonale. Przychodzą dziś do pracy w pustych, ogołoconych z eksponatów muzeach. Na ścianach, często nieodmalowywanych od kilkudziesięciu lat, widzą ślady po obrazach, które teraz są pochowane w magazynach. Przypomina to bardziej dom, z którego ktoś w pośpiechu musiał uciekać, niż muzeum. I dociera do nich, że te wszystkie eksponaty nie mogą po prostu wrócić w te same miejsca, że wystawy trzeba będzie ułożyć całkowicie od nowa. A my chcemy im w tym pomóc, ale też dać nadzieję na to, że odbudowa jest możliwa – taka nauka płynie z Warszawy, która 78 lat temu wyglądała jak dzisiejszy Mariupol. Kiedy już w końcu wygrają i zapanuje pokój, ważne, by mieli pomysł na nową opowieść o sobie, bo na tym właśnie polega muzealnictwo – to nie jest antykwariat; muzeum poprzez swoje historyczne zbiory musi opowiadać również o współczesności.

A czy po tym, co widzieliśmy w Mariupolu i Buczy, my też będziemy musieli jakoś uaktualnić naszą opowieść o powstaniu warszawskim?

Nasza opowieść jest ciągle aktualna, dzięki temu mogliśmy to wszystko w jakimś sensie antycypować. Gdy czytaliśmy, co pisze Władimir Putin o Ukrainie – a przecież pamiętaliśmy o tym, co pisał wcześniej Adolf Hitler o innych narodach – wiedzieliśmy, że to jest nie tylko publicystyka polityczna, ale także bardzo precyzyjny plan. Dlatego nasza opowieść się nie zmieni, pytanie tylko, co teraz wyniosą z niej ludzie. Czy zrozumieją dziś wagę tego wyzwania, jakie stoi przed nami, by nigdy nie dopuścić do powstania. A jedyną drogą do tego, by to się nie powtórzyło, jest utrzymanie takich granic, jakie mamy, i niedopuszczenie do ataku na Polskę.

Jan Ołdakowski (ur. 1972) – m

Menedżer kultury i muzealnik, współtwórca oraz dyrektor Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego. Był producentem filmu „Miasto ruin” (2010) – cyfrowej rekonstrukcji zburzonego miasta – a także producentem i scenarzystą „Powstania Warszawskiego” (2014) – dramatu wojennego non-fiction, w całości zmontowanego z oryginalnych kronik powstańczych – oraz producentem filmu „Kurier” (2019) o Janie Nowaku-Jeziorańskim

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The Ailing Human Rights Industry

Aug23
The Ailing Human Rights Industry


ARMIN ROSEN

At this year’s Oslo Freedom Forum, even the most sanguine activists struggled to overcome a sense of drift and impotence

OSLO FREEDOM FORUM/JAN KHUR

The message emanates from the untroubled green hills, the unremarkable fjord, the pristine and car-free downtown, the silent trams, the colorless streets where there is no trash, no crime, no visible suffering of any kind: All is well here, for you are in a boring place. Dullness is Oslo’s great asset—only somewhere with total confidence in its solutions to all of modern society’s problems could fail to see the obvious absurdity of the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, which takes place at City Hall every year. Maybe the Oslo Freedom Forum, the Human Rights Foundation’s (HRF) annual convention of political dissidents, could only happen in a place characterized by a sense of post-historical languor.

In two prior trips to the forum I have met an activist from the famously rebellious Syrian city of Kafr Nabl who was murdered by an al-Qaida affiliate a little over a year later, overheard the embittered mutterings of the exiled former president of the Maldives while we killed time in a hotel lobby, and looked into the eyes of a secularist Bangladeshi blogger who was then near the top of a jihadi death list, glimpsing a mad imbalance of resignation and mortal fear. These and a hundred other interactions too inspiring and unsettling to convey in any single piece of writing all happened without my having to leave the Norwegian capital, where the convenience stores all close before 12, as if to punish you for even having an appetite.

The forum, which I attended this year for the first time since 2017, is based on a simple premise that no one would have disputed five years ago—namely that knowledge, publicity, technical know-how, and networking could free the oppressed from their shackles. The main programming is a series of TED-style 10-to-15-minute presentations from people who have fought autocratic regimes or nonstate groups, alongside similar talks from journalists, scholars, or technologists aiding the activists in their fight against tyranny. In between these sessions are hours’ worth of subtly curated workshops, dinners, and other quasi-structured schmoozing opportunities. These are all of astoundingly high quality because of the range of backgrounds and outlooks on hand. The forum is an experiment in discovering what anti-drug war activists, cypherpunks, Islamists, North Korean defectors, National Review staffers, Syrian torture survivors, and the CEO of Tumblr can learn from one another. In Oslo, relationships would be built and awareness would be raised, seeding some kind of future positive change for the billions who toil under dictatorship.

HRF was founded in 2006 by Thor Halvorssen, the libertarian-minded scion of a prominent family in his native Venezuela who had previously headed the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (since renamed the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), the leading group advocating for free speech on U.S. college campuses. HRF has a very different approach than Human Rights Watch (HRW) or Amnesty International. The latter groups seek to leverage their activist and donor networks, along with the waning illusion of moral authority, in order to accrue power within governments and multilateral organizations like the United Nations or the International Criminal Court, globe-spanning entities that the ideologists of the Western human rights industry believe to be legitimate, effective, and extremely important. In contrast, HRF avoids the incumbent human rights community’s lust for high politics, instead foregrounding the activists themselves, getting the advocates in front of people from a range of professional and ideological backgrounds who are capable of promoting their stories and advancing their work. Just as crucially, HRF exclusively focuses its attention on the denial of civil and political rights. The legacy human rights community gets much of its profile and fundraising from attacks on democracies like the United States, whose openness ensures that there is never any shortage of good- and bad-faith internal criticism. HRF cares only about dictatorships, predatory governments, and authoritarian militant groups, none of which handle dissent all that well.

Has either approach—the elite self-seriousness and sanctimony of Big Human Rights, contrasted with the freewheeling and heterodox HRF—really accomplished much? The world of 2022 is a nightmare compared to that of five years ago, the last time I was in Oslo for the forum. The list of things that have gotten worse is long and sobering. Any remaining hope that the Twitter and Facebook-driven revolutions of the Arab Spring would usher in an era of freedom and democracy in the Middle East has evaporated. Bashar Assad and his Iranian allies slaughtered their way to control over nearly all of Syria, Yemen became the site of an ever more violent and intractable proxy war, and even Tunisia devolved into a soft autocracy. The Taliban are back in power in Afghanistan; Nicholas Maduro held on in Venezuela, sending over 5 million of his subjects fleeing for their lives. Russia invaded Ukraine and became a full-on police state. Social media and the internet became an easy conduit for nearly any government in the world, democratic as well as autocratic, to track and manipulate just about anyone under their rule. China sent its Uyghur minority to concentration camps and dismantled democratic self-rule in Hong Kong, in defiance of international legal obligations, which of course counted for nothing in the end. The Chinese Communist Party might have created and accidentally leaked a pathogen that’s killed some 20 million people, a disease that proved to be a once-in-a-century boon for unfreedom the world over, in Sydney as well as Shanghai. The autocrats have grown more confident and more dangerous as democracies’ sense of weakness and drift settles into an indefinite and comfortable malaise.

Powerful bad people are defeating powerless good people, just as they have for millennia.

“Speaking personally,” said the exiled pro-democracy Hong Kong activist Glacier Kwong during her presentation on the final day of this year’s forum, “the last year has been an incredibly dark period for me, beset by shadows and the torments of my own thoughts.” She had seen an authoritarian regime destroy her society and jail her friends without suffering any consequences. “I’m sorry to say the international community has not honored our sacrifices,” said Kwong. She closed with a statement that, by virtue of its vagueness, might be the most realistic call to action possible in the face of the Chinese communist leviathan: “Honor the sacrifice Hong Kong has made for you.”

None of the world’s recent tragedies can be laid at the feet of HRF, and even HRW and Amnesty are relatively blameless. But in Oslo it was clear that the post-World War II human rights paradigm was crumbling under realities that are both current and also somehow premodern. Powerful bad people are defeating powerless good people, just as they have for millennia. Laws, values, and idealism are less immediately tangible than bullets and poison gas. Citizens of the major democracies have demanded their governments turn inward, such that from an American vantage point the atrocities of Aleppo or Xinjiang look like they’re happening farther and farther away from us. The modern world’s various channels of idealism—multilateral organizations, NGOs, democratic governments, technological innovators—are some combination of impotent, cravenly self-interested, or complicit in the broader decline.

When the rebels of the human rights world survey the wreckage, the most honest of them now see a landscape where victory isn’t inevitable, old dreams have been replaced, former certainties no longer hold, and idealism’s very survival requires a retreat into cold reality.

The forum opened on May 23rd at the Oslo Konserthus, a hulking concrete shed of Nordic modularity, with at least twice the capacity of the Oslo Nye Teater, where the event had been held in 2017. “The world has changed so much since we were last here three years ago,” opened HRF President Celine Assaf Boustani, alluding to the COVID cancellations of the past two forums. The pandemic, war, and democratic decline all plagued humankind. “Each of these,” she alleged to the roughly 1,000 people on hand, “is the result of authoritarians.”

Halvorssen then spoke briefly. He wore red sneakers and an olive jacket without a tie. Halvorssen’s youthful round face competes with the unblinking focus suggested in his sharp hairline. The 46-year-old has the intense self-possession of someone waging a lonely, longshot war against nothing less than evil itself. When I spoke with him later that day, he rattled off his family’s history with the regime in Venezuela, the country of his birth: His father had been a political prisoner, his family’s property was expropriated, his mother was shot by regime agents; his cousin Leopoldo Lopez, a leading opposition politician, spent seven years either in prison or under house arrest or holed up in the Spanish Embassy in Caracas. Halvorssen is the producer of The Dissident, a 2020 documentary about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

“More than half of humanity lives under the boot of authoritarianism,” Halvorssen announced onstage. “We have to keep repeating that number.” Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and various regimes’ desperate attempts to influence election outcomes and change minds proved that the mere existence of unfreedom was a danger to democratic societies. “If we don’t end dictatorships,” cautioned Halvorssen, “dictatorships will end us.”

HRF, and Halvorssen in particular, want their production to look good, marking another difference with more traditional human rights groups. The aesthetics in Oslo are not an afterthought; HRF aims for particular moments, images, and people to reach virality. The first striking image of the conference was of Evgenia Kara-Murza, wife of the imprisoned Russian democracy activist and former forum speaker Vladimir Kara-Murza, sitting on a spotlit high stool in a dour black jacket, facing the crowd in profile, reading a letter her husband had written to her from Moscow’s Fifth Pre-Trial Detention Facility. “The price of freedom is high,” Kara-Murza wrote, quoting his mentor, Boris Nemtsov, an anti-Putin figure murdered just outside the Kremlin walls in 2015. A fate more permanent than prison might be coming, Kara-Murza seemed to warn, lightly hinting at his own survival of two previous attempts to poison him. But, the jailed man continued, “I have no doubts and no regrets.”

Kara-Murza, we learned, had once said that the worst thing for a political prisoner is to be forgotten. At its best the forum was a three-day revolt against forgetting, even if it often had the unintended effect of reinforcing just how impotent memory can be. During his talk, Omar Alshogre, director of detainee affairs for the Syrian Emergency Task Force, dramatically acted out his cousin’s death in his arms in an Assadist dungeon in Syria. In the midst of trying and failing to imagine what Alshogre’s ordeal must have actually been like, it dawned on me that most Syrians like him—genuine liberals with English fluency and a bravery that democratic citizens can scarcely comprehend, a courage that to us looks almost like suicide—had been killed or exiled over the past 11 years of war.

The exhortations continued throughout the week. “I ask you to keep Belarus on the agenda,” pleaded one of the exiled leaders of that country’s pro-democracy movement, whose husband languished in prison for the crime of heading an opposition political party. “Help us internally in Eritrea so that we don’t have to choose between dictatorship and human trafficking,” urged Filmon Debru, who endured unspeakable torture, and the mutilation of his hands, when Bedouins kidnapped him in the Sinai during his escape from the hyperstrict Eritrean dictatorship. “My father is not doing well,” warned Carine Kanimba, adopted daughter of Paul Rusesabagina, the Hotel Rwanda hero now serving a 25-year prison sentence after being kidnapped to the country of his birth.

“Kazakhstan’s disappeared from the headlines already,” fretted one questioner during a panel discussion. Was it ever in the headlines? I thought. For someone who lives in Kazakhstan there might be few things more important than the state of political rights in that vast yet remote-seeming Central Asian country—remote to me, that is. Alas, the front pages, and the attention of the average democratic citizen, can only hold so much faraway suffering at once. One’s reserves of attention and emotion are preciously limited. Time grows shorter with every passing second.

In the shadow of these hard and ever hardening realities, the forum could feel like a series of attempts to either salvage or bury leftover and potentially discredited visions of human progress. The U.N.-led international system, said Ukrainian activist Oleksandra Matviichuk, was “in ruins like Mariupol,” a cutting reference to the Black Sea city that the Russian invaders had recently destroyed. On the more optimistic end of the spectrum, Tawakkol Karman, the “mother of the revolution” in Yemen and a winner of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, insisted that the chaos in her nearly destroyed country was not the fault of the protest movement that unseated the country’s long-ruling dictator. There had been, Tawakkol insisted, “a successful national dialogue that brought all of Yemenis together … We wrote a great constitution.” Awesome as that document undoubtedly was, it proved no match for “the forces of the counterrevolution,” namely the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, which had all sabotaged Yemen’s future. She took no responsibility for the post-Arab Spring chaos, and said nothing about what her movement could have done differently or what democratic activists could learn from her revolution’s failure. Karman’s speech, and Yemen’s plunge into chaos since the 2011 uprising, suggested a paradox that was uncomfortable to reflect upon at any gathering of political dissidents: A botched democratic revolution can ultimately turn out worse for human freedom than the regime it replaced.

Karmon was, as she noted, a member of the Facebook and Instagram oversight boards, a merging of Big Tech and human rights activism that also reflected the naivete of an earlier time. The tech giants had a conspicuous presence in Oslo: Twitter, Meta, and Jigsaw, which describes itself as “a unit within Google that explores threats to open societies,” each had displays and workshop rooms on the Konserthus’ ground floor. That these companies could themselves be threats to freedom, and that they are in an open and very often indecisive self-reckoning with the implications of their own vast power, are facts that are now too obvious to hide. “We can predict what the next conspiracy theory is going to be,” said Beth Goldberg, a research program manager at Jigsaw, during a panel discussion. “How do we boost people’s immunity?”

Google controls more information about more people than nearly any nonstate entity in history (I am typing this very article on a Chromebook, in Google Docs). The line between well-intentioned defense of the information space and a quasi-Orwellian campaign to manipulate hundreds of millions of minds in the service of a preferred corporate or political vision might be thinner than most people at Google or its peers seem to realize, even at this late stage. Goldberg spoke of “pre-bunking at the level of meta-narrative or a rhetorical technique” in response to future conspiracy theories, a form of subtle content manipulation that, she assures us, is “not even political. It’s way more cerebral.” To prevail against disinformation, she said, it was necessary to “tap into people’s deep-seated identities and beliefs.”

Scott Carpenter, Jigsaw’s director of policy, assured me that there’s nothing to worry about here, and insomuch as there is something to worry about, Google worries about it too. “The first principle has to be, ‘do no harm,’” he said of the ideal anti-disinformation content regime. “There’s a lot of harm out there already, so you’re balancing harms.” A counterproductive way to balance harms, he said, would be for Google to act as chief censor and force users to adapt to its heavy hand. “We want to get beyond the idea that the only response you have is to take things down,” he said. When lies proliferate on Google’s platforms, there can perhaps be “speed bumps so there’s a little bit of friction. People can push through them if they want.”

A speed bump isn’t a wall or a force field. That’s pretty reassuring. But could any web giant advance freedom in any meaningful sense if it held so much unaccountable power? I noted to Carpenter that his employer probably had the ability to read my email, and to read over my article drafts at the moment I was writing them—although I caught myself and admitted this is a power I continue to willingly give to Google. His reply pointed toward a fundamental dilemma of existence in the modern world, where people understand very little of the systems and technologies that allow them to live connected and relatively frictionless lives. “In the world in which we live,” Carpenter said, “ultimately you have to trust someone. Over the years in working for Google, I find that, in my experience, the commitment to security and protection for our users is really, really high.”

“Big Tech was never set up to be civil liberty-oriented,” Thor Halvorssen explained to me at the end of an emotionally draining first day of programming. “They’re set up to make money.” We met in the M.C. Escher-like entanglement of interlocking passageways that formed the Konserthus’ lower lobby as attendees filed out of the complex, catching a couple hours of decompression before dinner. Halvorssen is eminently capable of being funny but almost never laughs in public. He evinced no outward sense of accomplishment after a successful day of his organization’s premier event. The scope of the work ahead of him was just too daunting, work that extended even to the tech firms that sponsored the forum. “Big Tech needs to have a thorough education in authoritarian government and what it means. So many Big Tech companies have unwittingly become the tools of dictatorships,” he said. “Social media is not a place to share photos and opinions. It has become [like] weapons—their weapons.”

Twitter, Google, and Meta were all here, I observed. In fact the companies’ displays and seminar rooms were just down the hall. “Yes,” he said, “they’re not just here, they’re actually supporters of the Human Rights Foundation, and they are sponsors of the Oslo Freedom Forum. And obviously I’m speaking honestly. We’re grateful for their support. That does not mean that we are going to be oblivious and turn a blind eye to what these companies should do and are not doing.”

The 30-minute interview was a barrage of righteous accusation. “The billionaire who runs Apple” should declare himself an agent of China under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, Halvorssen charged. Fusion GPS, compilers of the debunked Steele dossier, “has been a criminal enterprise” because of its work smearing human rights defenders on behalf of the Russian and Venezuelan regimes. “Now,” he said, “we are a small conference that essentially stands in contrast to the world’s largest gathering of dictators.” Davos? I asked. No, Halvorssen corrected me: “The United Nations.”

I came to Oslo wondering if HRF had succumbed to the usual corruption-by-inertia, and if the NGO industrial complex, Big Tech, and politically minded corporate donors had nudged it toward the institutional progressivism that is now the monoculture of the educated West, conquering by attrition until everything looks and sounds like an episode of Pod Save America, except duller. Halvorssen is a big part of the reason this hadn’t happened. The founder and CEO of HRF was out to please nobody; he made no pretense toward any self-interest and made no obvious concessions to institutionalism, even in the case of the organization he’d built over 16 years. Maybe this was just the appearance of edginess, a kind of madman theory of human rights activism in the service of fairly conventional aims. Still, there was a plausible case for change that seemed to be organizing everything, one anchored in a certain realism about the sources of unfreedom and the difficulty of overcoming them.

“The world has been sliding in the wrong direction now for more than a decade,” he explained. “That has everything to do with the West being compromised or the West being cowardly.” Tech companies chased giant paydays in China; Tony Blair lived in a mansion paid for in part by a lobbying deal with the government of Kazakhstan. Held beside the flagrant corruption infecting the upper reaches of Western societies, human rights advocacy could be something countercultural, a way of exposing a dishonest elite and a redoubt of honesty in a world of lies. But those claiming liberal democracy could bring paradise on Earth no longer sounded credible, and those who did often sound credible, like Halvorssen, knew better than to make any sweeping utopian claims.

What next, after utopia? Many of the liberating hopes of the 20th and 21st centuries have taken a pretty awful beating lately. The dream of de facto global governance under a multilateral liberal regime has proven delusional or worse. Only an idealogue still argues that freer markets automatically result in freer societies. These days, no one talks about the emancipatory potential of social media unless they work for a social media company. The internet might spread ideas and connect activists to one another, but it’s also a means to surveil and manipulate people on an unprecedented scale, as well as a medium through which young children get hooked on Chinese government-owned spy apps and slightly older children get hooked on porn. By now we know that liberal democracy is a superior way to organize society while also being as potentially dangerous as most other messianic ideas.

The former modes of progress were premised on grand centralities, vast organizations standing for immutable universal truths and governed by virtuous administrators. Forget all that, the very large Bitcoin contingent at the forum seemed to say, and forget every other big idea to fix all the world’s problems—the administrators are mostly getting in the way of things. In Oslo, the Bitcoiners sought to progress beyond existing frameworks without anyone’s help or permission.

The Bitcoiners were easy to spot: The guy in the Pikachu hat and the cartoon Bitcoin gold chain was a Bitcoiner, as was the guy in the Long Bitcoin sweater. The guy in the Bitcoin is Dead sweater offered a more complicated case. Both presenters who went on the main stage in face-shadowing baseball caps were Bitcoiners. The crypto folks were cliquish and tended to be oblivious to the business casual and formal dress codes, like they’d achieved some new level of being in which our rules no longer applied to them. I get it, I thought to myself: The old level of being, the one I’m stuck in, is terrible a lot of the time. In this terribleness lies the optimistic long-term case for Bitcoin, namely that it could serve as a platform for solving problems that have never been solved before, and thus has both the velocity and the permanence of any other unkillable idea.

“In Nigeria everyone is governing themselves,” explained Bernard Parah, a 23-year-old from the Middle Belt city of Jos and the founder and CEO of a Bitcoin platform called Bitnob. “Even the government doesn’t trust itself,” a friend and fellow countryman chimed in from across our lunch table. In Nigeria, Parah explained, food prices were skyrocketing, and the national government’s dysfunction had made the currency practically useless. Parah knew a woman who was able to start a laundry business and pay her kids’ school fees just from a bump in Bitcoin prices after 2020.

“If you can rationally explain something about Nigeria,” Parah said, “you do not understand it.” In many parts of the world, in places where the cruelest and most capricious actor is the state itself, Bitcoin can actually be a hedge against the irrational. “In the next few years, Bitcoin will be more common in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world,” Parah promised.

Bitcoin, explained HRF Chief Strategy Officer Alex Gladstein during a main-stage presentation, is “an open and neutral new kind of currency,” one that could sneak behind barriers to financial autonomy, evading the reach of autocrats who “relentlessly persecute their critics with the weapon of money.”

“What makes Bitcoin so incredibly powerful is that no one controls it,” said Elizabeth Stark, CEO of Lightning Labs during a panel discussion. “In Africa, banks are like a luxury brand,” noted Fode Diop, the Senegalese founder of the Bitcoin Developers Academy, who during his time on the main stage recalled his family’s savings being cut in half when the West African franc was devalued in the 2000s. “The future of banking is an Android device connected to the Bitcoin network itself,” he predicted. Jack Mallers, the CEO of Strike, explained in a tone of blissed-out evenness that Bitcoin could “escrow value anywhere on the planet … at the speed of light, across oceans … across regimes.” It didn’t matter that the digital currency was plunging in value at the time, as it periodically does. “This illustration works if Bitcoin’s at $10,000 or $1,000.”

“I’m a philosopher,” said Reed College professor Troy Cross during a panel, remembering when he’d first learned about Bitcoin in the early 2010s. “I thought, this is one of the most beautiful ideas I’ve ever encountered.”

The next day, Cross and I found ourselves seated in the same bank of couches. Since he is a philosopher enchanted with the idea of Bitcoin, he seemed like exactly the person to ask about the technology’s potential dark side. Perhaps, I suggested, the people convinced that Bitcoin is the key to securing financial rights beyond the reach of autocrats and kleptocrats were repeating the mistake of early internet or social media enthusiasts high on the hypothetically democratizing power of a new technology. Cross, it turned out, wasn’t a starry-eyed crypto dreamer, but an intellectually curious man—a lover of long walks in the Oregon woods, I imagined—who wanted to explore the implications of something that seemed genuinely revolutionary. “I bought two dozen pairs of socks for five Bitcoin each from an Alpaca farmer in New Hampshire in 2011,” he recalled. “I thought it was probably gonna fail. Most of us did.”

Over the following decade, Cross watched as the value of Bitcoin rose, as crypto turned from the realm of oddball hobbyists into a series of exotic financial products, the true nature of which was poorly understood even among its biggest boosters. “It’s not gonna improve humanity,” Cross explained, referring to both the idea and the reality of an ungovernable global network for holding and transferring value. “It’s not gonna make us better. It’s a tool, like the internet. Even more than the internet, it’s gonna be like electricity itself. Imagine saying electricity is aligned with a philosophical mission—it’s a force of nature.” By this interpretation, Bitcoin is a system beyond all systems, outside of anyone’s real control, of a kind that would be built as soon as the technology existed. It would find its purpose, however beneficial or malign, once the old consolidating projects were exposed as inefficient or oppressive.

I realized that Bitcoin is useful to Nigerian peasants or Ukrainian defense militias or drug traffickers because it is in tension with the old and familiar human rights idea, which depended on state power, moral authority, and coercion. States, the source of fiat currency, appear less stable and less trustworthy; the forces of good are getting harder to identify, and outside pressure has very real limits when applied to oppressive governments. Bitcoin’s “use cases,” to borrow the ‘coiner jargon, spring from a myriad of failures.

“It’s not debt, it’s not a unit of account, it’s not a means of exchange, it’s not a good store of value in the short term,” Cross said of Bitcoin, meaning it fits none of the usual criteria to even be considered “money.” Bitcoin was, Cross explained, “part of nondeal political philosophy … In a perfect world it’s not viable. Its value is in the imperfection of our world.”

Bitcoin is almost a banality, or maybe a futile last gasp at agency against the world’s wrongdoers, when held beside someone like Carine Kanimba, adopted daughter of Paul Rusesabagina, who Don Cheadle played in Hotel Rwanda. Rusesabagina’s continuing imprisonment in Rwanda seems an insult aimed at a specifically American view of human progress and of reality itself. If a beloved actor gets an Oscar nomination for playing you in a movie, a movie that millions of people saw and that became a sociopolitical event unto itself, then nothing bad can possibly happen to you, according to the American faith in the metaphysical grandeur of entertainment and fame. You are untouchable, and the power of popular culture has taken you beyond the realm of the merely human.

Carine KanimbaOSLO FREEDOM FORUM/JULIE HRNCIROVA

In the case of the Hotel Rwanda rescuer, who saved the lives of 1,268 Tutsis and their sympathizers at the Mille Collines hotel in Kigali in the spring of 1994, it was force that mattered in the end. In September of 2020, Rusesabagina, a U.S. green card holder, was lured from his home in San Antonio, Texas, onto a private jet in Dubai, which he believed was taking him to a speaking engagement in Burundi. He was drugged onboard, and the plane landed in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. The forum, with its presentations from family members of the dead and imprisoned, could be an unintended reminder of the pathetic limits of awareness-raising and the puny dimensions of thought. The Uyghurs remain in concentration camps and Assad still rules Syria, neither of which are particularly obscure facts these days. Rusesabagina was tortured and sentenced to 25 years in prison by the regime of Paul Kagame, a former darling of the international development human rights industrial complex—the harsh sentence being an especially flagrant attack on the idea that publicity can advance the work of human rights activists and protect them against harm.

As Kanimba explained when I interviewed her in Oslo, Rusesabagina is her uncle by marriage. Her parents were slaughtered in the opening days of the genocide; amid the chaos Rusesabagina made sure that Kanimba and her sister, both little older than toddlers at the time, were rescued from a displaced persons camp and taken to safety at the Mille Collines. She is now in her late 20s, a poised and elegant spokeswoman for her father’s cause and someone whose years living in Belgium and the United States mean she can plead his case on different continents and in multiple languages. She does not remember the genocide, or her biological parents. “I think they waited until we were 6 or 7 to tell us that we were adopted because as kids they didn’t want to scare us,” she said of Rusesabagina and his wife, Tatiana. “And so watching the movie, it was also a way for me to learn about my life, what our family went through. And it was a way for them to be able to explain it to us in a way that we could understand.”

In a place like Kigali in the mid-’90s, a luxury hotel manager such as Rusesabagina was a person whose social and political clout went beyond his job title. He met Paul Kagame when he allowed the Mille Collines to be used for meetings of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the Tutsi militia group that ended the genocide before transforming itself into one of the most durable and sophisticated dictatorships in Africa. As an ethnic Hutu, Rusesabagina was too admired by Tutsis as a hero to be safe under a leader as jealous of admiration as Kagame. “Also,” Kanimba alleged, “they wanted to eliminate the influential Hutus,” which described Rusesabagina.

Rusesabagina moved his family to Belgium after the civil war. Kagame’s regime often sent representatives to ask him to return, dangling the prospect of high-level government employment. Rusesabagina realized this was a ploy to either imprison him or win his public loyalty. Then came Hotel Rwanda, released in 2004, in time for the 10th anniversary of the genocide. Rusesabagina felt he was in too much danger to attend a special screening at the national stadium in Kigali. Tatiana went instead, and watched from the same box as Kagame. “He stood up afterward and noticed how people were crying and people were admiring my father in the stadium,” Kanimba said of Kagame. Her adoptive mother had enough awareness of her country to know it was time to get out, more or less right that second. “She immediately left for the airport,” Kanimba recalled.

The serious threats didn’t begin until Rusesabagina’s two visits to the White House of George W. Bush after the release of Hotel Rwanda, once to meet the president, and then again to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Over the years, Kagame’s henchmen fabricated receipts connecting Rusesabagina to a rebel movement in the Congo and attempted to plant child pornography on his computer. The family moved to San Antonio, where Kanimba is certain Rwandan regime agents continued to surveil her father. Now in prison, Rusesabagina joins the annals of wartime heroes whose lives became haunted by their own heroism: Soviet agents murdered both Gareth Jones and Raoul Wallenberg, Oscar Schindler died poor, Varian Fry descended into alcoholism and obscurity and bitterness. One key difference in Rusesabagina’s case is that the worst of his suffering happened after he became a global symbol of human decency.

What does one even do in response to something like Rusesabagina’s imprisonment, grim evidence of what dictators can achieve when they gamble—often correctly—that their public image, and reality itself, can be discarded and reconstructed at will? The question of how to shame, pressure, or remove dictators, which animates the forum and its work, can sometimes only be answered one murder or prison sentence at a time. Hopefully it will be answered through the work of people like Kanimba, too. When her father was kidnapped, Kanimba quit her job at a New York-based impact investing firm. The campaign for Rusesabagina’s freedom has notched one significant policy win: In May, the U.S. government declared he was being “wrongly detained,” notable given that Kagame-era Rwanda and the United States have had generally friendly relations. With the help of her sister, Kanimba began filing lawsuits wherever she could to prove their father’s imprisonment was a state-sponsored hostage-taking. “I can send you the transcript of his torture and this kidnapping,” she said, the bitter fruits of one such legal expedition. She knows that her father was kidnapped using a private jet leased from a Greek company for $120,000. “We have the receipt,” she explained, “and it’s paid to the Office of the President.”

When Rusesabagina arrived in Kigali, Kanimba told me, “they held him in solitary confinement.” We were meeting in a modest dressing room behind the Konserthus stage. “I cannot imagine the pain that he felt because the room was smaller than this. The only lights that he had were between the door and the bottom.”

For Kanimba, the question of moral action in the face of an immovable dictator isn’t abstract—it’s not some metaphorical needle to be threaded between the figurative gaps in something called “human nature,” but an oppressive fact of existence filling every second of every day, aimed at destroying whomever it touches. The fight to change the mind of Paul Kagame hasn’t destroyed Kanimba, though. It is her privilege, she believes, to be able to carry such an immense burden on her father’s behalf, and perhaps on everyone else’s behalf too. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “Both my biological parents were slaughtered with machetes. My life was spared for a reason. And I was adopted by Paul Rusesabagina for a reason, and I’m grateful to be alive and I’m grateful to be able to stand up for him today. And so I think this is why I was saved.”

Armin Rosen is a staff writer for Tablet magazine.

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Y-Studs – Evolution of Jewish Music

Aug23
Y-Studs – Evolution of Jewish Music [Official Video]

  Y-Studs A Cappella


Y-Studs A Cappella proudly presents, the Evolution of Jewish Music!
Based on Pentatonix’s “Evolution of Music.”

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