(Dobbs) When Good News Means There's Worse News Somewhere Else
Repression, chaos, poverty, starvation exist on almost every continent.
In journalism, we get criticized for reporting too much bad news here at home and failing to report enough good news.
So here’s a twist: the news is even worse across much of the rest of the globe, which makes much of our news sound not so bad at all. Except for Australia and Antarctica, there’s unnerving news on every other continent. It might distress you, it might depress you. But it’s a realistic picture of many parts of the world today. And a realistic perspective on how lucky the rest of us are.
This is only a sampling but start with Europe.
The sad story of Ukraine writes itself.
The United Nations commissioner for human rights reports that since Russia invaded more than 18 months ago, there have been upwards of 26,000 civilian casualties, nearly 9,500 of them fatal. The physical devastation in people’s lives, meantime, cannot even be measured. According to The World Bank, rebuilding everything from homes to businesses to infrastructure itself will cost more than $400-billion, and that’s so far.
But the bad news from the far side of the Atlantic isn’t just about Ukraine. Hungary, according to the European Union’s parliament, is becoming an “electoral autocracy.” The EU says President Viktor Orban has waged attacks on the nation’s judiciary, its universities, its media, and most directly, the rights of its LGBT community. Unlike those who wage similar attacks here in the U.S., Orban has almost total control and has reshaped his nation into what he calls an “illiberal Christian democracy.” Hungary today still has elections, but little resemblance to real democracy at all.
Anyone can see the narrowing of civil rights in Russia. The freedoms we take for granted— freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press— blossomed when the Soviet Union fell apart. For a brief moment in their history, the Russian people had something to smile about. But when Vladimir Putin came to power, he slowly but surely started narrowing down those long-cherished rights. In recent years, if he doesn’t try to have his adversaries killed, they end up accused of fraudulent charges and put behind bars, which might explain why public protests against his costly war in Ukraine have not filled the streets with demonstrators.
In Asia, we usually use China as a focal point for autocracy on the rise. Human Rights Watch says, “Repression (has) deepened across China.” According to HRW, “Authorities continue to harass, detain, and prosecute people for their online posts and private chat messages critical of the government, bringing trumped-up charges of ‘spreading rumors, picking quarrels, provoking trouble, and ‘insulting the country’s leaders’.” Surveillance of citizens has become ubiquitous. There have been secret trials and imprisonments of people whose only infractions were organizing discussions about democracy and human rights.
But there’s bad news from every corner of Asia, not just China.
Afghanistan keeps sinking deeper in almost every way. Since the Taliban retook control of the country, its rule, according to the Brookings Institution, has “progressively hardened.” Brookings says the Ministry of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has become a “principal tool of repression.” It stated in a recent report, “The Taliban conducted extrajudicial executions, arbitrary arrests, torture and unlawful detention of perceived opponents with impunity." Limited opportunities in both education and vocation for which women already had only slim hopes have been narrowed almost to the point of extinction. And the economy has become a wreck. Brookings says six million Afghans are “on the brink of famine.”
Next door, there’s Iran. Right now Iranians are girding themselves for a crackdown at the end of next week when dissidents demonstrate a year after the death of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested by the nation’s “morality police” for refusing to publicly wear a hijab— the scarf that covers most of a woman’s head. When she died in custody, angry protests broke out across the country and at least 500 people were killed, seven of them executed by hanging.
Now, according to The New York Times, the Islamic government preemptively is arresting “women’s rights activists, students, ethnic minorities, journalists… and family members of protesters killed by security agents.” The Times says a popular singer was arrested at his home last Monday after releasing a song that praised Iranian women who have showed their hair as an act of civil disobedience. The government claims his song is “illegal” and defies the “morals and norms of an Islamic society.”
In the Middle East, where citizens began to dream during the Arab Spring a decade ago of freedoms they’d never had, many nations have returned to a state of oppression, if not a state of war.
Yemen is the worst of several sad examples. The headline of a recent report by the Council on Foreign Relations was, “Yemen’s Tragedy: War, Stalemate, and Suffering.”
A long-fought civil war— with Iran and Saudi Arabia backing different adversaries— has displaced more than four million people and opened the door to cholera and famine. An estimated three-quarters of its population lives in poverty.
Armenia is in another corner of Asia and it’s fighting its own war against a neighbor. Ancestors of the victims of ethnic cleansing by the Turkish Ottoman Empire more than a hundred years ago are seeing signs of it again at the hands of neighboring Azerbaijan. For nine months now, mostly Muslim Azerbaijan has blocked the one mountain route that leads to an isolated, mostly Christian Armenian population, cutting off food, fuel, and medicine— even supplies from the International Red Cross.
The BBC quoted a local journalist who said, “People are fainting in the bread queues.” A former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has declared, “There is an ongoing genocide,” saying that its invisible weapon is starvation.
In eastern Asia, the minority Muslim population of Myanmar, called the Rohingya, has been brutalized by the Buddhist generals who run the dictatorship. Described by the United Nations as “the most persecuted minority in the world,” almost a million of them had to escape to a hellacious refugee camp called Cox Bazar, across the border in Bangladesh. It has become the largest refugee camp in the world.
And there is no relief in sight. The assessment of Myanmar by the Brookings Institution is that the “abysmal state of armed conflict, insurgency, chaos, and anarchy has only been deteriorating.”
And we can never ignore North Korea. In a land where every child once was taught to sing a song called “We Have Nothing to Envy in the World,” the BBC managed to interview three citizens in June who said that the fatal famine of the 1990s is back. One woman, in the capital Pyongyang, told the BBC’s reporter that she knew a family of three who had starved to death at home. “We knocked on their door to give them water,” she said, “but nobody answered.” Even the Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un has acknowledged a “food crisis” but that doesn’t stop him from spending more than half-a-billion dollars— enough money to mitigate the famine— to launch missiles to threaten his enemies.
Africa, meanwhile, rarely has a moment of peace.
As The Washington Post put it last week, “There’s little end in sight for Sudan’s hideous civil war.” In this battle between rival warlords in the Sahara, massacres have become commonplace and have led to “thousands of civilian deaths, displacing roughly a tenth of the country’s population and leaving millions hungry and bereft of medical care.” According to The Post, “Conditions on the ground grow worse. Some 20 million Sudanese people face acute food insecurity. Around 14 million children lack access to basic services, including education and medical care like vaccinations. Eighty percent of Sudan’s health facilities are out of service, due to a lack of supplies, electricity or both. Hospitals themselves have been targeted by the warring parties.”
In East Africa, Uganda has waged a war against gays. After intolerable legislation was passed in May, gay marriage is against the law, same-sex relationships can result in a sentence of life in prison, and “aggravated homosexuality” can produce a sentence of death.
In our own hemisphere, the immigration crisis on the southern U.S. border tells the story of how bad life is in parts of Central and South America.
Venezuela, once wealthy from its abundance of oil, is a mismanaged mess. The State Department warns U.S. citizens not to travel there “due to crime, civil unrest, kidnapping, and the arbitrary enforcement of local laws.” Hospitals are closing, orphanages are bursting, and some 95% of the population today lives in poverty.
In El Salvador, the rate of violent crime makes it the most dangerous nation in the hemisphere. In the gun-crazy United States of America, the rate of homicides two years ago was 6.8 per 100,000 citizens. In El Salvador, where gangs have earned their nation the nickname of “murder capital of the world,” it has been as high as 103 murders per 100,000 people.
In Cuba, ever since the days of Fidel Castro, people have regularly run the risk of secret trials and arbitrary imprisonment for the smallest criticisms of the government. Political dissidents have been tortured, some have just disappeared. Meantime Cuba’s planned economy has been stagnant for years. Depending on imports for 70% of its food, its inflation rate has soared as high as 200%.
Sometimes when people ask me how I am, my stock answer is, “Just fine, as long as I can ignore the chaos everywhere else.” But of course I can’t. None of us should. The picture I’ve painted of the world around us is sobering. But if there’s any good news for us, it is that as dreadful as things sometimes seem here at home, they are immeasurably worse in many other corners of the earth.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Greg, this was so well written & researched & terribly troubling. Thanks for your continued insights.
greg, our generation is one at a time coming to the end of our lives leaving this earth in horrible shape, only to be dealt with by future generations. we should all be ashamed for letting it happen, just selfishly looking away while autocracies and poverty destroy our world. Only continual, public leadership shame and embarrassment by the media will bring back awareness and some accountability. Keep it up!!! jskalet