Behind the Scenes
Just a quick note today – I’m getting ready to go out of town for 10 days and I have things to do today.
Like many of you, I am always looking for ways to understand what’s going on around us during our current dystopia. I don’t subscribe to very many newspapers or magazines, but I do get Atlantic, both in hard copy and online. I recommend it to you.
One of Atlantic’s smartest writers is Ann Applebaum, an academic historian and journalist who has focused on Russia and Eastern Europe for more than three decades. She was one of the cofounders of Democracy Lab, an online journal established in conjunction with Foreign Policy magazine to track the movement of countries toward or away from democracy. Since the 2016 election in the United States, she has been documenting the impact of MAGA on American democracy. If you’re not already reading her stuff, I recommend it.
I’m writing about her today because of an article she published this morning about the State Department’s reports on human rights, published annually since 1977. The purpose of the reports is to collect and disseminate reliable information so that legislators and diplomats can base decisions about sanctions, foreign aid, immigration, and political asylum on a solid understanding of conditions in the world. These reports are generally perceived as impartial, and because they were written by professionals reporting from the ground, they became the gold standard widely used by people around the world, who cited them in court cases and political campaigns.
She wrote about this because the 2024 reports came out yesterday – delayed from January of 2025, when the Biden administration had completed them as was customary, readying them for publication in March or April. But the reports were delayed this year, as the new Republican administration’s political appointees changed them. Applebaum’s article details the changes – and here’s a free link so you can read it yourself – but here are the high spots:
What’s left out: references to corruption, restrictions on free and fair elections, rights to a fair trial, the harassment of human-rights organizations, threats to freedom of assembly.
I can’t imagine why the current Republican administration doesn’t want to focus on these issues
Criticism of Israel is classified as “antisemitism.”
What’s new: harsh and surprising assessments of democratic US allies like the UK, Romania, Germany, and Brazil; softer depictions of countries favored by MAGA world, like El Salvador and Israel.
Applebaum notes that her sources tell her that the wholesale revisions of the entries about these two countries explain the delay in publication.
In the course of preparing these documents, dozens of professionals have been fired from the State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Because of course they have. This is definitely a shoot-the-messenger administration. Maybe even literally — I’m waiting for the Stalinesque show-trials.
The article is full of details like this. She goes on to note that it appears that the document was written more to shape US domestic policy rather than foreign policy.
In my essay from a couple of days ago, I wrote about this administration’s efforts to undo the Enlightenment experiment that has defined the United States since its 18th-century founding. The politicization of what had been accepted as factually accurate and useful reports about conditions around the world is just a continuation of this process. I knew about these reports and have used them in the past, but I wasn’t aware that they were late this year because of the ongoing manipulation of facts and reality behind the scenes. That’s why I read Applebaum – because she knows more about these things than I do and writes about them because that’s her job and her passion.
I imagine you have your go-to writers as well. Who do you read and why?