Michael Abramowitz of Freedom House, writing for the Persuasion newsletter, tells a Trump-distracted world what’s been going on outside of the United States. And it’s ugly:
…Away from Western-media scrutiny, an authoritarian resurgence has been worsening for years, and it seems to have accelerated during the Trump-Biden contest and these past months of the Covid crisis.
When Americans anxiously watched their televisions and phones for the fragmentary results on Election Night, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia—winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize—was launching military attacks in a rebellious region that could escalate into civil war, also threatening a democratic opening in one of Africa’s most important countries. In Syria, government forces accelerated their relentless shelling of rebel-held territory in Idlib Province, killing more civilians, according to human rights monitors. In Thailand, the military-backed government sought to suppress a protest movement calling for democratic reforms. And in Zimbabwe, one of the country’s leading journalists and anti-corruption crusaders was arrested.
Around the world, civil liberties and political rights have deteriorated for each of the past 14 years, a recent Freedom House report shows. The events of this year are expected to result in further declines. Since the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, many governments have used the cover of the health crisis to limit transparency, to crack down on journalists and free expression, to undermine elections, scapegoat minority groups, and otherwise weaken democratic institutions and strengthen their hold on power.
[…]
Several autocratic tactics have stood out. The first is a dramatic escalation of efforts to curb free expression, an independent media, and journalists themselves. The Freedom House report showed that 91 countries experienced new or increased restrictions on the news media as a result of the outbreak—almost half of the 192 countries we covered. In Egypt, for example, the Supreme Council for Media Regulation threatened legal action against journalists or media outlets that might depict negative aspects of the government’s response to Covid. A fog of misinformation around the virus has prevented people from taking the necessary steps to protect their health, notably in Nicaragua, Turkmenistan and Burundi, where the president died, likely of Covid. (The leaders of some democracies, including the United States, have also promoted misinformation, but they lack the repressive power to silence factual reporting and corrective statements by other officials.)
One-third of the human rights experts and activists surveyed for the report identified corruption and money in politics among the three most significant issues affected by the pandemic response in their countries. They shared stories of massive government outlays with little accountability, supplies disappearing, and suspicious contracts granted to favored businesses.
A final worrying trend is the intensification of a classic authoritarian tactic: the scapegoating of ethnic, religious and other minority groups. In Myanmar, the military has stepped up attacks on ethnic minorities, and some of the experts surveyed by Freedom House saw the pandemic as a distraction that helped facilitate these actions. Meanwhile in Kuwait, the authorities imposed greater restrictions on movement in neighborhoods populated by noncitizens.
China is not even pretending to maintain the pretense of democracy in Hong Kong anymore:
The authoritarian trend didn’t start with Trump - if anything, he’s a symptom, not a cause. But once he got into the White House and starting mucking about with American democracy, it became that much harder for United States to credibly speak out against the squeezing of democracy elsewhere. In some cases, such as Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, Trump didn’t even try speaking out at all.
And now that he’s a lame-duck President with nothing to lose, bleating about rigged elections and gutting the national-security establishment because it chose loyalty to the U.S. Constitution over loyalty to himself, the timing is just right for any authoritarian ruler who wants to settle some old scores.
American special forces are currently in Taiwan carrying out routine joint exercises with the Taiwanese military. Good thing, because if the People’s Republic ever wanted to take back that rebellious island once and for all, this would be the time to do it.
With Ontario breaking its record for new COVID-19 infections almost every day, Doug Ford says the province may have to impose tougher lockdown measures:
Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he "will not hesitate" to move forward to the next stage in the lockdown system and will make a decision on whether to do so by Friday after new COVID-19 modelling showed the province could see 6,500 new cases per day by mid-December.
Ford made the comments during an interview with CP24 on Thursday evening, saying he would receive a briefing from his health team in the morning and will then "make a decision."
"I can assure you I haven't hesitated to make a tough decision and I promise you I will not hesitate for a second if we have to go further," Ford said. "That is what we will do."
"I will not hesitate to move forward to the next stage if we continue seeing this."
Ford said he was "shocked" by the new modelling data released on Thursday afternoon that showed Ontario's COVID-19 case count could exceed several jurisdictions in Europe that are now in some form of lockdown by December.
Here’s the thing: by the time you realize the coronavirus is a problem, it’s already too late to stop it. Once you have community spread, there are already scores of people walking around with it who don’t yet realize they’re infected. The time to lock down tightly is before large numbers of cases start showing up.
But who has the appetite for that, especially after we already locked down earlier this year? Keeping the virus down meant closing businesses, laying off many people from work and throwing the school system into total chaos. And if it works, you have loudmouths on social media insisting it was never a big deal all along.
It’s kind of like the old Y2K problem: so many people worked so hard to fix it that when the ball dropped and nothing outside of Al Gore’s website was seriously affected, everyone assumed it was just an unwarranted panic or even a hoax.
Futurama put it perfectly:
Gotta keep busy when the acting jobs stop coming in.
Cases in the Maritimes and Newfoundland have been rising. Total of 14 a couple of days ago. 8 in NB and 2 in NS yesterday (https://www.covid-19canada.com/). It’s at our doorstep, probably much more literally than we think.