Contents – Unsung heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression
Contents
The power of protest
Protests have the power to rally people, express objection to political decisions, and in the most successful cases, elicit change. They are a fundamental form of self expression, and a crucial mechanism of any democracy. This week, we saw South Koreans take to the streets to protest President Yoon Suk Yeol’s shock move to impose martial law, which temporarily placed the military in charge and suspended many civilian rights, including the right to protest.
The move was immediately declared illegal and unconstitutional. The leader of the country’s largest opposition party was able to rally MPs to vote down the declaration in parliament, and ordinary citizens to protest against it, despite the ruling that they couldn’t. Within 24 hours, Yeol’s attempt was toppled and he now faces impeachment charges.
South Korea’s bizarre turn of events shows the potential effectiveness of collective action against authoritarianism. The power of persistent campaigning was also brought to light in Iran this week, when the jailed rapper and activist Toomaj Salehi (a former winner in the arts category of Index’s Freedom of Expression Awards) was released from prison. He had previously been sentenced to death (later overturned) for voicing support for anti-government protests, including the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022. Tireless international protest from campaign groups – jointly led by Index, the Human Rights Foundation and Doughty Street Chambers – undoubtedly put pressure on Iranian authorities to permit his release.
But of course, attempts to congregate against injustice are not always successful, or accepted. In Georgia this week, where we have seen a degradation of democracy under the Georgian Dream party, there was a horrendous crackdown on peaceful protesters.
Since the country’s contested election in October, where the party secured a fourth term, citizens have come out in droves and have been met with state violence, including being physically assaulted, and attacked with water cannon and tear gas. You can read more about the steady decline towards autocracy in Georgia in this piece by Index CEO Jemimah Steinfeld, who visited Tbilisi in October.
This response is just one example of how peaceful protest is being eroded, despite it being protected as a human right under international law. We’re seeing examples of this all over the world. Last month, Clemence Manyukwe reported for Index on how anti-government protesters in Mozambique were injured and even killed following the country’s disputed presidential election.
And even when violence isn’t used, legal mechanisms can be utilised to undermine people’s right to show dissent. On our own shores, the previous government introduced the Public Order Act, which has substantially restricted people’s ability to protest freely, and has made it easier to criminalise protesters by lowering the threshold at which police can arrest them. The result has been hundreds of activists being arrested and prosecuted, including the climate activist Greta Thunberg.
Earlier this year, the High Court found that the former home secretary Suella Braverman had acted unlawfully in introducing this legislation, but the Home Office appealed the ruling. The new Labour government has continued the appeal, which has spurred criticism from human rights organisations. Katy Watts, lawyer at Liberty, said: “For the countless people currently in the over-stretched criminal justice system because of these unlawful regulations, we must see the law quashed and the government respecting our fundamental right to protest.”
Protest movements are not always against governments. Also in the UK this week, we saw a large media workers’ strike from staff at The Guardian and The Observer over the sale of the The Observer to Tortoise Media, an acquisition which has proved controversial.
Whilst the sale of a business does not, on its own, represent a risk to free expression, concerns have been raised over whether there are safeguards in place to protect the newspaper’s editorial independence, as one of the few remaining liberal news outlets in the UK. There have also been concerns over the ability of company staff to speak out publicly against the deal without fear of punishment or recrimination, with some employees reporting being warned against voicing their opinions freely.
Index was one of many signatories of a letter addressed to The Scott Trust – which owns the Guardian Media Group – and Tortoise raising concerns about the risks to free expression from the mechanisms of the sale. Despite the 48-hour strike, the sale went ahead this morning, indicating that protest is not always an effective mechanism for change.
But whilst it may not always result in the desired outcome, it sends a message – whether to governments or private businesses – about individuals’ rights to express their disapproval or outrage. The ability to do so without fear of criminal reprisal or violence is a fundamental right and must be protected at all costs.
Democracy, but not as we know it
Hybrid regimes, illiberal democracies, democraship, democratura: these are all slightly terrifying new terms for governments drifting towards authoritarianism around the globe. We have been used to seeing the world through the binary geopolitics of the more-or-less democratic free world on one side, and the straightforward dictatorship on the other. But what is Hungary under Viktor Orbán? Or Narendra Modi’s India? And, as the world comes to terms with the reality of President Trump’s second term, will America itself become a hybrid regime dominated by tech oligarchs and America First loyalists?
At a recent conference in Warsaw held by the Eurozine, a network of cultural and political publications, Tomáš Hučko from the Bratislava-based magazine Kapitál Noviny, told the dispiriting story of his country’s slide towards populist authoritarianism. The Slovak National Party, led by ultranationalist Prime Minister Robert Fico, drove a coach and horses through media and cultural institutions, he explained, beginning with the Culture Ministry itself. Fico then changed the law to take direct control of public radio and TV. The heads of the Slovak Fund for the Promotion of the Arts, National Theatre, National Gallery and National Library were all fired and replaced with party loyalists. A “culture strike” was met with further attacks on activists and critics of the government. “There were constant attacks on the journalists by the Prime Minister including suing several writers,” said Hučko.
Fellow panellist Mustafa Ünlü, from the Platform 24 (P24) media platform in Turkey spoke of a similar pattern in his country, where President Erdoğan’s government has withdrawn licences from independent broadcasters.
It is tempting to suggest that these illiberal democracies are a passing political trend. But the problem, according to several Eurozine delegates, was that such regimes have a tendency to hollow out the institutions and leave them with scars so deep that they are difficult to heal. Agnieszka Wiśniewska from Poland’s Krytyka Polityczna, a network of Polish intellectuals, sounded a note of extreme caution from her country’s eight years of rule under the Catholic-aligned ultra-right Law and Justice Party. Although the party was beaten by Donald Tusk’s centrist Civic Coalition in last year’s elections, the damage to democracy has been done. “There is the possibility of reversing the decline,” said Wiśniewska. “But the state media was turned into propaganda media.” In part, she blamed the complacency of politicians such as Tusk himself: “Liberals didn’t care enough,” she said.
Writing on contemporary hybrid regimes in New Eastern Europe, an English-language magazine which is part of the Eurozine network, the Italian political scientist Leonardo Morlino identifies a key moment in July 2014 when the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán began using the expression “illiberal democracy”.
He later clarified what he meant by this: that Christian values and the Hungarian nation should take precedence over traditional liberal concern for individual rights. For Morlino, however, Hungary is not the only model of hybrid regime. He provides an exhaustive list of countries in Latin America (Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico and Paraguay) with “active, territorially widespread criminal organisations, high levels of corruption and the inadequate development of effective public institutions” where democracy is seriously weakened. Meanwhile, in Eastern and Central Europe he recognises that Russian influence has created the conditions for hybrid regimes in Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and even Ukraine.
The term “democratura” comes from the French “démocrature” and combines the concepts of democracy and dictatorship. In English this is sometimes translated as “Potemkin democracy”, which in turns comes from the phrase “Potemkin village”, meaning an impressive facade used to hide an undesirable reality. This is named after Catherine the Great’s lover Grigory Potemkin, who built fake show villages along the route taken by the Russian Empress as she travelled the country.
It is tempting to suggest Donald Trump is about to usher in an American Democratura, but none of these concepts map neatly onto the likely political context post-2025. The USA cannot be easily compared to the fragile democracies of the former Soviet Union, nor is it equivalent to the corrupt hybrid regimes of Latin America. It is true that Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon liked to talk about “illiberal democracy” but more as a provocation than a programme for government.
And yet, there is an anti-democratic tone to the language used by Trump’s supporters. In the BBC series on US conspiratorial ideology, The Coming Storm, reporter Gabriel Gatehouse noticed the increasing prevalence of the right-wing proposition that the USA is a “constitutional republic”, not a democracy. This line of thinking can be traced back to an American ultra-individualist thinker, Dan Smoot, whose influential 1966 broadcast on the subject can still be found on YouTube. Smoot was an FBI agent and fierce anti-Communist who believed a liberal elite was running America as he explained in his 1962 book, The Invisible Government, which “exposed” the allegedly socialist Council on Foreign Relations.
Such rhetoric is familiar from the recent election campaign, which saw Donald Trump attacking Kamala Harris as a secret socialist and pledging to take revenge on the “deep state”.
But there are worrying signs that Republicans under Trump will be working from an authoritarian playbook. As The Guardian and others reported this week, an attempt to pass legislation targeting American non-profits deemed to be supporting “terrorism” has just been narrowly blocked. Similar laws have already been passed in Modi’s India and Putin’s Russia.
Trump has consistently attacked critical media as purveyors of fake news. He has suggested that NBC News should be investigated for treason and that ABC News and CBS News should have their broadcast licences taken away. He has also said he would bring the independent regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, under direct Presidential Control. In one of his more bizarre statements, he said he wouldn’t mind an assassin shooting through the “fake news” while making an attempt on his life.
Whether a Trump administration emboldened by the scale of the Republican victory will seriously embark on a project to dismantle American democracy is yet to be seen. The signs that the President has authoritarian proclivities are clear and he has made his intentions towards the mainstream media explicit. Hybrid democracy may not quite be the correct terminology here. We may need a whole new lexicon to describe what is about to happen.
On the brink
Patriotism hasn’t been a standard stance of the Democrats, and especially not of their left flank. But front and centre issues in this election – freedom and democracy – are two words that have become the mantra of the Democratic standard bearer, Vice President Kamala Harris. There may be many reasons for this transformation, or this embrace, but I would venture that the main reason is that a second Trump presidency is so profoundly dangerous to the notions of democracy and freedom that make the United States the nation that we are. These two notions are intertwined – the American experiment is one that put the citizen at the core of our national experience. Our very citizenry is at risk.
The battle lines are drawn. This will be a close election, way closer than it should be, considering the credentials of the two candidates – Vice-President Kamala Harris and former president and convicted criminal Donald Trump. But America is a divided nation, with a profoundly dangerous fissure among a disenfranchised white working class conjoined with a cynical white business class, versus, well, the rest of us.
It’s perhaps extraordinary that we have never since our founding seen our freedom and democracy at risk as we do now. The Republican candidate Trump has made clear that if he is re-elected, he will put in jeopardy everything from the right to vote to the right to an abortion, the right to read what you want and the right to teach in the classroom even the most basic of civics lessons. His plans are so massive that there is very little that will be left off his agenda.
It’s important to understand that the Trump candidacy is the tip of a movement in America that seeks to take us backwards. With a Republican party totally in his grip, and a determined activist base, this is an anti-freedom movement that must be squashed so that the United States can fulfill its most basic self-professed promise of democracy.
The blueprint for a second Trump term is found in a massive document called Project 2025 prepared by the right wing Heritage Foundation. Among the policy plans are defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, shuttering of the Department of Education, so that “education decisions are made by families,” along with the gutting of the national public education system.
Abortion of course is at even more risk than it is already, since we are living with the legacy of the first Trump campaign and his packing of the US Supreme Court with anti-choice justices. There is a proposal by the Trump campaign to create a National Anti-Abortion Coordinator while also forcing states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions. (In some states, doctors are already at legal risk for providing health care to pregnant women). He has endorsed using the Comstock Act, a 19th century relic that censors free speech, to enforce abortion by making it a crime to promote or receive abortion pills across state lines.
The freedom to learn is already at risk, also a legacy of the first Trump term. Imagine things to get so much worse if there is a second term. According to PEN, the writer advocacy group, “Since the fall of 2021, PEN America has counted over 10,000 book bans in schools across the country. The full impact of the book ban movement is greater than can be counted, as ‘wholesale bans’ in which entire classrooms and school libraries have been suspended, closed, or emptied of books, either permanently or temporarily, restricted access to untold numbers of books in classrooms and school libraries Overwhelmingly, book banners target stories by and about people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.”
This has trickled down into communities all across America. Teachers are afraid to teach in classrooms across the country (see p102). Public school and small town libraries are being stripped of books deemed inappropriate by those who want to limit knowledge. School boards are among the fiercest election platforms, often with groups that appear to be grassroots but are otherwise funded by those allied with the Trumpist movement.
And finally, at risk is that most basic of rights, the right to vote. The USA is already the most repressive democracy in the world regarding access to voting. Under a Trump regime, it will become even more so.
Trump, as we know so well, tried to steal the last election. Now, under plain sight, he and his allies are plotting to do the same – packing electoral panels and trying to manipulate state election laws. There will be key challenges in states known as battleground states that could go either Democratic or Republican, like Georgia and Arizona. The arcane system of the electoral college is vulnerable to this manipulation in ways we never have seen before Trump’s emergence on the world stage. To challenge this, the Harris campaign has added an army of lawyers. Their immediate focus is to challenge the right to vote in key states where the Trump campaign is litigating against it. The second focus will be on the myriad of challenges that Trump plans to throw up regarding the actual vote count and legitimacy of the vote itself. As the New York Times recently reported: “The battle over whose votes count – not just how many votes are counted – has become central to modern presidential campaigns,” as a legacy to the Trump phenomenon.
When the election results are challenged, the deciding bench will be the US Supreme Court, the most conservative and anti-democratic court in our nation’s history. Were he to win a second term, his legacy would impact generations far into the future.