Hosted by Justin Podur
Podur, J. (2014). A Short Course on Development in “Post-conflict” Congo. Radical Teacher, 98, 52-57. doi:10.5195/rt.2014.70
This article, published in the journal Radical Teacher, is about higher education in the eastern DR Congo, based on my experience teaching a course at the Universite Evangelique en Afrique (UEA) in Bukavu in 2011.
With an attempted coup underway in Venezuela, those of us who studied the 2004 Haiti coup are looking back at Haiti 10 years ago and being reminded of the parallels. Actually, I wrote about the Venezuela coup of 2002, which followed a similar playbook to the coup attempt currently underway.
I write about a lot of different countries and a lot of different political situations, and people have implied to me that it is impossible for anyone to be knowledgeable about so many different contexts. It seems to me though that in many of these situations, the same external actors are intervening (for example, the US and other Western countries), and they have a limited number of ways of conducting intervention. There’s some kind of a playbook out there, and for people who are concerned about development or democracy or freedom in the poor countries, there is no way to avoid trying to understand what is in that playbook of intervention. That’s why I wrote Haiti’s New Dictatorship, and why I really liked Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood. I think of both books as an attempt to understand the way external power operated to destroy the sovereignty of a country – in this case, Haiti. Peter showed how it was done, and I tried to focus on the post-coup results.
One of the strongest moral voices against coups in Latin America for the past decade and a half has been, and you wouldn’t know it from the name, the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). Their name only covers one aspect of their organization’s personality – the fact that they are extraordinary researchers and that they do their homework. Their name doesn’t cover the fact that they are a strong voice of principle, when the media are full of murky justifications for coups and violence, and murky accusations of violence against targeted enemies. They have been very strong on Venezuela and on Haiti.
In this interview, published on CEPR, Dan Beeton and Georgeanne Nienaber interview former OAS Special Representative in Haiti, Ricardo Seitenfus. It’s a powerful account because it comes from someone who was part of the post-coup attempts to bring Haiti under control. It reveals a lot about how Haiti has been governed, post-coup. Seitenfus was fired for telling the truth about what was going on. If you read Haiti’s New Dictatorship, you’ll find this interview with Seitenfus verifies a lot of what I argued was going on based on other sources.
Egypt was ruled by the Mubarak dictatorship for 30 years before the people managed to overthrow him in 2011.
Mubarak was not overthrown by the internet. Some business and technological literature claimed that, because the internet made it more difficult to keep secrets (a valid claim), the “dictator business” was obsolete. An NBC news story from February 2011, hardly unique, described the Egyptian government’s attempt to shut down the internet to slow the spread of public outrage at government atrocities, but did not really offer an argument to substantiate its title: “How the internet brought down a dictator” (Wilson Rothman, NBC News, Feb 14, 2011.)
The business professor Henry Lucas reasoned as follows: “The governments of two dictators in Tunisia and Egypt did not survive citizen uprisings that were non-ideological in nature. The people were tired of the results of the dictatorships, and they found that technology helped them organize for change.” (Lucas, The Search for Survival, Praeger, 2012, pg. 151). If ideology is a set of beliefs that govern political behaviour, then there are no citizen uprisings that are “non-ideological in nature”, and Egypt’s 2011 was as ideological as any other. Both Lucas and NBC were writing before 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed the universality of internet surveillance by the US National Security Agency, revelations that also put a damper on hopes for emancipation through technology.
But let us allow for a minute the two claims, that 1) those who mobilized to overthrow Mubarak in 2011 used twitter, facebook, and youtube over the course of their mobilization and 2) these technologies made it more difficult for the Egyptian regime to keep their human rights violations secret. Does it follow that dictatorships are doomed?
It does not. The dictatorship of Egypt’s military was restored in a coup in July 2013. So, rather than asking if dictatorships are doomed, since they evidently are not, perhaps a better question might be, how do dictatorships adapt to a situation where their citizens have platforms to communicate more freely than they did before? Mubarak ruled through the standard dictatorial methods: terror, propaganda, and selective support (especially from elites and from foreign powers). Egypt’s post-2013 dictators use the same methods, though they have adapted the balance somewhat, having learned some important lessons in propaganda, and in information-management-through-terror, from 2011.
After the overthrow of Mubarak in 2011, politics in the country split into three tendencies. The army, with business interests, elite and international connections, and tremendous resources, retained much of its power. The Muslim Brotherhood, which had maintained an organization throughout the decades of dictatorship, was a significant force. The newest grouping, and also the least-organized, was inspired by the Arab Spring to oppose the dictatorship and struggle for political freedom and economic reform.
Mubarak was ousted, but the army’s power was preserved. It began taking steps to return to power immediately. The army was able to manipulate the legal process, to rush through a constitutional process, and to rush to an election that denied the ‘civil society’ group the chance to build an organization that could compete electorally with the establishment’s party or the Brotherhood. In the May-June 2012 elections, the relatively unorganized ‘civil society’ split the vote, and the Brotherhood defeated the establishment candidate.
In the months that followed, the army retained not only control of key aspects of the economy, but also many key government portfolios and executive functions. The army was able to manipulate the rationing system to exacerbate economic problems while the Brotherhood government took the blame. The Brotherhood alienated the majority secular vote with its policies of social control and its alliance with the army against secular political protests. The Brotherhood eventually generated massive resistance against it, which the army took advantage of to re-take control in the July 2013 coup.
The internet may not have made dictatorships obsolete, but Egypt’s rulers are working on developing a model of dictatorship for the internet age. In the seven months since the July coup, Egypt’s new dictatorship, which is made up of the same establishment as Mubarak’s dictatorship, has used extraordinary violence to try to thoroughly crush those forces that overthrew Mubarak in 2011.
The first order of business was to keep people off of the streets. When those who opposed the July coup used some of the same methods that had overthrown Mubarak, namely street demonstrations and sit-ins in public squares, they were surrounded and massacred, with huge massacres taking place in August.
Supplementing the massacres on the streets were mass, as well as targeted, arrests, and the return of long-term administrative detention. Legal processes, always under the oversight of the army, are a very important part of Egypt’s dictatorship. A constitutional referendum was held on January 14-15. Those who campaigned for a “No” vote were arrested. The referendum passed with the kind of massive majority that marked Mubarak’s electoral exercises.
The government is in the middle of a counterinsurgency war in the Sinai, on Egypt’s border with Gaza and Israel. The government’s opponents, the Bedouin in the Sinai, are labeled terrorists, and anyone questioning the government’s counterinsurgency policy is similarly labeled.
Information management has been key. Journalists were arrested in advance of the constitutional referendum and are still being held. The dictators treat internationals – journalists or other members of civil society – to the same arbitrary legal processes as locals: long detentions, administrative renewals, frivolous charges. Meanwhile, local media, especially television, under concentrated establishment control, engage in virulent propaganda. The main theme in the media is that everyone who opposes Egypt’s dictators are terrorists, starting with the Brotherhood and going from there to everyone – including secular civil society – who opposed the coup. Or, indeed, who writes or says anything about the coup.
Sharif Abdel Kuddous writes of the Al Jazeera staff currently detained on terrorism charges (http://madamasr.com/content/war-journalists) that ‘prosecutors assigned a team of “media experts” from the Egyptian Union for Television and Radio to inspect equipment seized from the hotel where Al Jazeera English was operating. The technical reports show that “the footage was altered and video scenes were modified using software and high-caliber editing equipment.” So they used Final Cut Pro. They edited. They probably even selected the fiercest footage of clashes for their reports.’
Sharif also quotes from the new anti-terrorism bill: ‘Article 21 of the bill is astonishing in its vagueness and scope: “Anyone who directly or indirectly promotes acts of terror, either verbally or in writing, or through any other means of broadcasting or publishing, or through letters or online websites that others can access, shall be punished by imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.”’
So, seven months later, we have the new Egyptian dictatorship’s answer to the internet: monitor its users, jail its journalists in Egypt, and use it to broadcast messages of hate and misinformation about political opponents. So far, it is working, but it won’t work forever. Not because of the internet, but because of the people. Dictatorships are overthrown when people lose their fear, and the Egyptians have lost their fear more than a few times in recent years.
#FreeAJStaff
Justin Podur blogs at podur.org
My latest article is Jan/Feb 2014 cover story in Briarpatch Magazine. In it I analyze science and politics, talking about three different things that are called science: Science A (authority), Science B (business), and Science C (curiosity). Hope you enjoy.
Link: http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/science-and-liberation
A colleague of mine in environmental science recently told me that he is about to run out of funding since his Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) discovery grant has not been renewed, twice in a row. Scientists like him, focused as they are on their work, are encouraged to think their funding has not been renewed because there is something wrong with them or their research. In fact, there are broader social forces at play.
It turns out that the feminist slogan the personal is political is relevant to science as well. For decades, the membership card in the club of Canadian scientists was the NSERC discovery grant. The purpose of the grant was to give every working scientist basic funding to do their research. In recent years, two changes have been made to this paradigm. First, as detailed in a new book by Chris Turner, the federal government has declared an outright war on science, cutting funding for basic research and redirecting it to business-friendly projects. Second, NSERC has moved to a model of rewarding “excellence,” which in fact has nothing to do with excellence but means concentrating funding with smaller numbers of researchers while leaving many researchers with nothing.
Last September, a group of scientists took the unique step of organizing themselves into a movement called Evidence for Democracy. Mounting a series of rallies and media events, they announced a platform targeting the federal government with three demands: to fund research from basic through to applied science; to base decisions on the best available science and evidence; and to make scientific findings open to the public.
While their demands are hardly radical, these scientists have been galvanized to step out of their labs and enter the public sphere because of a Canadian government that, like the North American conservative movement from which it sprang, dislikes science. We are at a point in Canada where Prime Minister Harper’s government controls communications by government scientists from Environment Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. It has eliminated the position of national science adviser. It has scrapped Statistics Canada’s long-form census (vital to research on social inequality) and closed labs and environmental monitoring stations. And more than any other government in the world today, the Canadian government is dedicated to denying the results of climate change science and preventing civilization-saving action at international climate forums.
The conservative movement’s attack on science has several prongs. Where they can attain government office, as in Canada, they use the highly effective tools of funding and de-funding, and regulation and de-regulation, to control government scientists and embolden private interests. The goal is to transfer power and resources from public services and public science to private institutions, while often appealing to moral and religious doctrines in the process.
The success of these attacks on science are partly due to vulnerabilities caused by the way science itself is done in our society, for the word science has multiple meanings.
Albert Einstein said that science is the refinement of everyday thinking. In that sense, science is a fundamental human activity: it means paying attention to evidence, using logic, rendering explicit assumptions, and testing hypotheses formally in a way that is repeatable by others. It is this kind of science that is under attack from conservatives and other forms of authority. Let us call this kind of science Science C, where C stands for curiosity.
Today, hacker subculture exemplifies Science C better than academic science does. Hackers are dedicated to following their curiosity wherever it goes, and the open-source, free software movement that most hackers belong to is also dedicated to making information freely and universally accessible. No one exemplified Science C and hacker culture better than Aaron Swartz. Swartz developed Creative Commons, Reddit, and other innovative works before moving into activism explicitly.
Creative Commons is an organization and a licensing system that facilitates the sharing and use of creative work. Like the GNU Public License (GPL) for software developed by Richard Stallman, Creative Commons has an implicit philosophy that creative work is a collective endeavour and that human instincts to share knowledge and information should be celebrated and encouraged, not suppressed. This is the spirit of Science C.
Creative Commons and the GPL are legal tools to facilitate sharing, and in their domains they are analogous to peer review and publication in scientific journals for scientists. However, like the conflict between free and proprietary software, there is a conflict between open access and proprietary access to scientific publications, a conflict Aaron Swartz became aware of as an activist.
Swartz was so appalled by the privatization of scientific knowledge in expensive journals that he took direct action to make the journals public, breaking the copyright of the academic database known as JSTOR. As Swartz explained, without broad public access, “Everything up until now will have been lost.” Swartz believed the commodification of essential knowledge must be vigorously resisted: “Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.”
Facing dire federal charges that could have landed him in jail for decades, Aaron Swartz committed suicide in January 2013.
If Science C is about curiosity, and as such constitutes a potential threat to those with power, science can also mean authority. Anyone making any claim wants to say that science backs them. In popular media, scientists from government and prestigious universities can make authoritative statements because they possess scientific authority. Let us call this aspect of science Science A, for authority. Ideally, the practice of Science C can lead to the authority of Science A. But in reality, the authority of Science A is abused and sold as a commodity.
In a famous case from the mid-’90s, University of Toronto medical researcher Nancy Olivieri discovered harmful effects of a blood disorder drug called Deferiprone. In the stir of controversy that followed, Olivieri was forced to defend herself, her research, and her job against a wide range of attacks from the drug manufacturer and senior staff at her hospital.
The most pressing attack on scientific authority today, however, centres on the consensus of climate scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which released its fifth and most dire report this past October. Before resigning from NASA as the world’s leading climatologist, James Hansen once lamented “the politicization of reporting of global warming.” Hansen stressed that with corporate consolidation of the media, the task of resisting the negative politicization of scientific inquiry, including attacks on the credibility of scientists, is “formidable.”
Such direct attacks on scientific authority are relatively rare, but they reveal how powerful business interests seek to discredit scientific authority when scientific findings challenge their profits and social control. More insidiously, such business interests do not merely wait to attack scientific results they don’t like. On the contrary, they have developed sophisticated ways of channelling and controlling scientific curiosity.
This is what I call Science B, the business of science. The sad truth is that most of what scientists do is not Science C, exploring the world through systematic investigation. Most of what scientists do is try to raise funds, generate publications in prestigious journals, find students to work on their projects, and keep up with other scientists according to these metrics. Science B operates like other sectors of capitalist society. It is competitive, comparative, and divided by status into superstars, has-beens, and also-rans.
The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) launched a campaign last summer called Get Science Right. Aiming to overhaul the federal science policy that oversees Science B, CAUT argued for more money for basic science, since funding in the natural sciences has fallen by 6.4 per cent since 2007. Meanwhile, the federal government has increased funding for research partnerships – partnerships between science and business – by 23 per cent since 2011.
The business of science makes science vulnerable to attack by authoritarian governments and conservative movements, streamlining opportunities for the wealthy and powerful to steer science to their own benefit. As a result, we can create tens of thousands of chemicals but haven’t thought much about what to do with them after we’ve used them. Half a dozen countries have nuclear weapons that can destroy whole cities, but no country has a functioning renewable energy system. Human curiosity (Science C) could have solved our environmental problems long ago, but it cannot take flight because it is trapped within Science B.
Writing for the Baffler magazine, the well-known cultural anthropologist David Graeber assessed the problem. “The increasing interpenetration of government, university, and private firms has led everyone to adopt the language, sensibilities, and organizational forms that originated in the corporate world. Although this might have helped in creating marketable products, since that is what corporate bureaucracies are designed to do, in terms of fostering original research, the results have been catastrophic.
“Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone … if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.”
Graeber gives us an important insight into how Science B has come to trump Science C. Leftists, meanwhile, are natural supporters of Science C, and left-wing scientists like the evolutionary biologist Richard C. Lewontin and the mathematical ecologist Richard Levins use the term “people’s science” to describe how science could be done in a better society. While most of us have a healthy anti-authority streak that can bring us into conflict with scientific authority (Science A), the best challenges to that authority, indeed any authority, are themselves made on the basis of logic, evidence, and inquiry. One of the tasks of the political left, then, is to liberate and encourage the rigorous curiosity of Science C.
Marx and the early socialists viewed their work as scientific in nature, and even their errors can be understood as failures to act according to their own scientific principles. Generations later, socialists like Trotsky, Luxemburg, and others tried to popularize scientific discoveries and intellectual culture for the people. Today, even though leftists are few in number and not especially influential, the natural and social sciences are good places to look for them.
Leftists try to make change by convincing large numbers of people to take action in social movements. Insights from the social sciences could inform leftists in these efforts. For example, recent studies correlating a wide range of social problems with economic inequality suggest that people are highly sensitive to status and that social policy should be designed to minimize inequality with this in mind. Philosophers have long debated whether human nature has an instinct for freedom, and while scientific knowledge about human nature remains extremely limited, what little science has revealed suggests that humans do have instincts both for freedom and for equality.
Another set of studies, about moral licensing, suggests that voluntarist appeals have severe limitations. In one study, subjects who had made a green or eco-friendly consumer choice were afterwards less likely to donate to a good cause or help an individual in need. Here, too, we find social science research that suggests that relying on solidarity works better than relying on charity, as charity can be brittle.
A third area of research shows that political ideology affects consumer choices. An American study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that “conservative individuals were less likely to purchase a more expensive energy-efficient light bulb when it was labelled with an environmental message than when it was unlabelled.” Today’s capitalist society means that many of these insights are coming from business-oriented research on marketing and organizational behaviour. Leftists shouldn’t shy from studying these insights, discarding the useless ones, and adapting the helpful ones.
The scientifically minded do not automatically gravitate toward the political left. Partly because of the influence of Science A (authority) and Science B (business), many scientifically minded people assume that to be scientific means to be neutral, to reserve judgment, to refuse a stance even on the most critical issues of the day. In fact, science says no such thing. Scientific objectivity means being conscious of biases within a given framework and acting to minimize them while testing claims against evidence. It does not mean having no opinion and no point of view (or, for that matter, accepting a given framework without question). In fact, in the book Descartes’ Error, the neurologist António Damásio calls on studies that show rational decision-making is impossible without emotions.
In the case of climate change, we have an overwhelming and nearly unprecedented scientific consensus, with all the authority Science A can bring combined with all of the knowledge that Science C has been able to generate. But without major political change, elites are able to continue on a path of greater fossil fuel use and escalating climatic rupture. As with other issues, vested interests direct policy by proactively controlling the direction of science (Science B), using media and government agencies to attack the credibility of scientists, their reputation, and their morale, and hiding or confusing the information available to the public. Facing this kind of resolute political opposition, an approach, a strategy, and a set of political principles must be chosen. Science itself cannot provide these things.
This becomes clear when we consider two different approaches to combatting catastrophic climate change. For many mainstream environmentalists, the path has always seemed clear. We live in a democracy, after all. So, first, we convince enough people that the climate problem is serious. We demonstrate that the technology is available to solve it without sacrificing most comforts and conveniences. Then we convince our leaders to make the necessary technological and policy changes, and if they don’t, then we elect leaders who do. Many of those who make economic decisions aren’t elected, it’s true. But they, too, can be convinced by rational arguments. Business leaders meet with environmentalists regularly. If parts of the planet become uninhabitable and there are a series of climate-related catastrophes, that would be bad for business, the argument goes. So even captains of industry will come along with the right arguments and proposals.
In 2014, as oil and gas production continues at a breakneck pace in Canada and the U.S., we have more than enough evidence to know that such an apolitical approach of lobbying and persuasion has failed disastrously. The basic nature of the system we live in isn’t democratic. It’s a system that takes the elements of life – nature, land, water, energy, cultures, and peoples – and converts them into commodities for profit and control. The system has its own logic. If you are a player in it, you have to follow that logic. You have to take what you can grab – for most people it’s their own lives – and turn it into money. If you’re excluded from the system, you’re excluded from the very means of survival. If you’re excluded and you try to get the means of survival for yourself or your loved ones outside the system, you will be met with violence. Profit, accumulation, and economic growth are more than dominant ideas: they define capitalism as a system of relations.
Thus, for a stabilized atmosphere, we are going to have to defeat some very powerful people and institutions in the process of liberating ourselves – and science – from the dictates of profit. Success in this struggle will require all the tools of social change: organization, communication, demonstration, and experimentation with different actions.
The intelligence that drives scientific inquiry is a profound human capacity, but science alone can never tell us how to act. It cannot provide principles, even though it can help us to act within them once we have them. For this reason, science will never be enough to do political battle with conservative movements or powerful corporations. For that, people have to find moral guidance from other human capacities and other cultural resources: art, literature, philosophy, relationships, and even, in its proper place, religion. In the fight for a just and sustainable world, there can be no substitute for organized political struggle – a fact scientists themselves increasingly recognize.
Justin Podur is an associate professor of environmental studies at York University where he teaches landscape ecology and geographic information systems. He blogs on international politics at podur.org
Since it’s the last day of 2013, I thought I would look over what I did this year. I spent half the year in India, so I have a fair bit of India content here. I also started the Ossington Circle this year, which has been fun. I am not including short blogs in this list, just longer articles and videos.
You’ll see 7 articles, 3 book reviews, 8 interviews (4 of which are video interviews), 2 lecture videos, and 2 mini-documentary videos.
January 17, 2013: A review of Douglas Bland’s 2009 book, Uprising, about a fictional indigenous uprising in Canada – I compared it to the real Idle No More.
January 31, 2013: The Delhi Rape and the Struggle for Space I argue that a big part of misogyny is trying to drive women out of public space.
February 21, 2013: Can 1.7 Billion Dollars Imagine Wrong? I review a book about India’s politics by Nandan Nilekani, one of India’s billionaires.
March 5, 2013: Hugo Chavez, Presente A little lament for Hugo Chavez, who I admired.
March 28, 2013: Why the Taliban is unlikely to win My assessment of Afghanistan’s near future based on a trip I took there from Delhi in March.
April 3, 2013: To Break a Siege A review of Nirmalangshu Mukherji’s book about the war in Chhattisgarh.
April 20, 2013: The Bastar Land Grab An interview with Sudha Bharadwaj, an activist from Chhattisgarh.
May 3, 2013: Evicting the Gandhians An interview with Gandhian activist Himanshu Kumar, who was evicted from his ashram, which was bulldozed by the state, in Chhattisgarh.
May 27, 2013: Eleven things India must change in Kashmir I examine what a rights-based approach, as opposed to a solutions-based approach, would look like in Kashmir, borrowing from the Palestine BDS movement.
June 11, 2013: India: Struggle for Indigenous Autonomy A short documentary about Chhattisgarh’s indigenous struggle
June 24, 2013: Waiting for 2014 in AfghanistanA short documentary about Afghanistan’s travails
July 3, 2013: Austerity and Resistance an interview with OCAP’s John Clarke for the Ossington Circle talk show
July 6, 2013: Kashmir: the fruits of isolation I argue that India’s policy has brought about the opposite of what it says it wants.
July 14, 2013: A generation-long war an interview with Jon Elmer for the Ossington Circle talk show
July 17, 2013: The Zimmerman Verdict and MMA My reaction to the politicized, simplistic, and self-serving martial arts analysis of the so-called ground and pound “technique” used by the defense in the Zimmerman trial.
August 4, 2013: Architecture, Occupation, and Resistance an interview with Suzy Harris-Brandts for the Ossington Circle talk show
October 19, 2013: Free, Tarek and John A summary of the efforts to get Tarek Loubani and John Greyson out of Egyptian jail.
October 28, 2013: The future of India’s conflict zones A lecture on India’s Kashmir and Chhattisgarh conflict zones, both of which I visited in 2013.
November 11, 2013: Public action and a lifeline for rural workers an interview with Jean Dreze.
November 23, 2013: Afghanistan: Perils and Possibilities A lecture on Afghanistan at the Toronto Public Library.
December 29, 2013: The Therapy Industry An interview with author Paul Moloney for the Ossington Circle talk show.
Jean Dreze is an economist and activist who teaches at Allahabad University’s Department of Economics. He has written on famines with Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics for work on the issue. I met him in India earlier this year and interviewed him over email.
Justin Podur (JP): I think perhaps you are best known for your work with Amartya Sen on famines and hunger. Can you talk a bit about that, how that work came about, and your findings?
Continue reading “Public action and a lifeline for rural workers: an interview with Jean Dreze”
by Justin Podur and Dan Freeman-Maloy
Note: this is a rather long article. If you prefer a PDF version, it is linked here.
As the emergency contact for Tarek and John, I was happy to field media calls and requests. Now the emergency is over, and media are being handled by the most excellent and wonderful Touchwood PR. If you wish to schedule an interview with Tarek and John, pleaes contact Touchwood at press@touchwoodpr.com.
When Tarek and John were arrested on August 16, we were taken by surprise. We used whatever tools we had to hand to get the message out. As their emergency contact, I used my own blog and my own twitter handle, and became one of their official spokespeople. In the intervening 50 days, we set up a change.org petition, and a dedicated website, tarekandjohn.com. The plan was always to make the transfer so that tarekandjohn.com was the only place to go for news about them, but events kept moving quickly and we did not have a moment to pause to make the transition. Now that things have slowed down, we are doing that.
podur.org will no longer be the place to go for updates on Tarek and John from the family’s perspective. It will resume being what it was before August 16, my blog about (mostly) international politics. When the families and friends of Tarek and John (and Tarek and John themselves) need to communicate something officially, we’ll do it through tarekandjohn.com.
Tarek and John are out of jail, so all that remains is to get them home. Thanks to everyone who came this far and for this long. We’ll meet up again at the finish line.