“I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long, they really don’t think I’m human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters.” –James Baldwin
LET’S GET THIS OUT OF THE WAY: When it comes to the recent deaths of immigrants being held in detention, it would be wrong to describe the situation as wholly unprecedented. Detainees died under Bush, Obama, and Biden. But detainee deaths have accelerated during President Donald Trump’s second term, with 17 already since his inauguration. During the Biden administration, there were 26 deaths in 48 months—roughly one death every two months. During Trump’s term, that rate has nearly quadrupled. And ICE, now one of the best-funded operations of the federal government, is planning to double detention space before the end of the year.
“It’s absolutely horrific,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the ranking member of the immigration subcommittee, told me before jumping into the numbers above. In July, ICE was awarded $45 billion to expand its operations—its budget is now significantly larger than that of the federal prison system. And now, Jayapal points out, a little-known LLC has been awarded a $1.2 billion contract to build a facility in Texas despite never having previously won a federal contract for more than $16 million. Meanwhile, another $2.25 million contract was given to a Republican donor who received a presidential pardon from Bill Clinton in 2000 after having pleaded guilty to mail fraud.
“Contracts are being distributed to Trump’s buddies and people with no experience running detention centers, many of these contracts are no-bid,” Rep. Jayapal said. “They’re incarcerating people and allowing them to die, not providing medical facilities. There are no standards. It’s horrific.”
Most ICE and border patrol agents will continue working during the government shutdown; their status as “essential” will shield them from the layoffs OMB director Russell Vought has requested in lieu of furloughs from most agencies and departments. But the nature of immigration officers’ “essential” work has significantly changed over the past eight months to become something far more brutal than procedural; in some cases, it has come to appear simply heartless. We have entered a period in which it is becoming important to ask: What happens when our leaders and the people who work for them see immigrants not as human beings but as scum? And what happens when that way of thinking about people starts also to be applied to others, like journalists and political opponents?
Professor Ryan mentions the events of May 13, 1985. On that day, about 500 police officers arrived at a row house at 6221 Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia to serve arrest warrants against several members of the militant black anarcho-primitivist group MOVE which has been called a terrorist organization by city officials and which had been in conflict with neighbors. After refusing to surrender to police, officers lobbed tear gas into the house and fired more than ten thousand rounds of ammunition in the house with residents returning gunfire. After a long standoff, the police commissioner ordered that the compound be bombed, in part because of fear there was a fortified gun bunker on the roof of the building. Six adults and five children died in the fire that followed.
In the aftermath of the bombing, the police and fire department let fires burn out of control for almost one and a half hours at the order of the Mayor which destroyed sixty-five houses in the neighborhood. Professor Ryan mentions that her grandmother’s house was one of those that was destroyed by these fires.
A commission instituted to investigate the events found that dropping a bomb on an occupied row house was unconscionable. While no one involved was criminally prosecuted, the city was later ordered to pay $1.5 million to the survivors of the bombing and $12.83 million to other residents displaced by the bombing and the fires. In November 2020, the Philadelphia City Council approved a resolution to formally apologize for the MOVE bombing.
Daniil Bazel, candidate for the Zaporizhzhia regional Duma in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine Social media photo via Important Stories
The Russian authorities plan to hold “elections” in the parts of Ukraine they have annexed—the parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions held by Russia, and the so-called people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk—on September 8–10. The “lawmakers” elected to the parliaments thus formed will appoint the heads of the regions and municipalities. Local residents will play no part in this process.
The “elections” will be held on the basis of party lists, which Important Stories and the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) perused together. On those lists we found collaborators, acting members of the Russian State Duma, corrupt officials, and even mobilized men. For example,
One of the candidates is State Duma member Igor Kastyukevich, who is running as United Russia’s number two candidate in the elections in the Kherson region. Kastyukevich has been implicated in the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. A year ago, he recounted how he had assisted in moving over fifty children from the Kherson Children’s Home to Crimea.
Roman Batrshin, the appointed head of the Zaporozhzhia regional court, is running for the Zaporizhzhia regional duma. Previously, Batrshin was acting head of the Smolensk court. He became a “local” in the occupied region quite recently.
When our correspondent called Batrshin’s number, the voice on the other end of the line sounded like Batrshin’s. When asked about the elections he said, “It’s not me you’re talking to. He’s not here.”
Among them is Daniil Bazel, a 23-year-old mobilized soldier. In Moscow, he worked in the one of the arms of the Russian National Guard, but is now trying his hand at entering the Zaporizhzhia regional “parliament.”
“I’ve decided to run because I’ve come to like the region a lot,” Bazel told Important Stories. “It has to be developed. I myself am a mobilized soldier. I spent eleven months in Zaporizhzhia and and now I am directly performing tasks related to the service in the Zaporozhzhia region [sic]. I saw it all from the inside and I wanted to help fix everything.”
It is apparent from the candidate lists that the main problem faced by the organizers of the “elections” was finding people willing to run. Thus, 27% of LDPR’s candidates are pensioners and housewives far removed from politics, while such people make up nearly half of the candidates on the CPRF and A Just Russia lists.
LDPR is also running several serial candidates, that is, people who have run in dozens of elections at various levels but who have never once been elected. But there is one federal politician on the LDPR list—party chair Leonid Slutsky, who is running simultaneously in all four occupied regions.
The General Radio Frequency Center, which is subordinate to Roskomnadzor, and the company Crib Room, which develops solutions for locating and analyzing destructive content on the internet, have drafted a white paper entitled “Russia’s Gaming Industry.” The authorities see online gaming communities as a channel for communicating with young people and “a tool for state information influence on society.” According to the paper, the state can use games “to promote political ideas, brands and attitudes among young people,” which may require the development of technological tools for working with gaming communities.
Market participants note that the authorities’ growing interest in the industry creates problems for companies negotiating with foreign studios to launch games in Russia. Foreign companies do not want to deal with excessive regulation and censorship. “The Russian market is already small in global terms, and foreign studios were beginning to restore a cautious interest in it, but [the Russian authorities] are trying to regulate it rigidly, while the economic feasibility of such an approach is not broached by the people behind the initiative,” stresses Vasily Ovchinnikov, CEO of VIDO [the Videogame Industry Development Organization].
“It’s a Soviet-era candy bar made with cow’s blood.” Still from “Enervo,” Season 4, Episode 20 of The Rookie (ABC)
‘Following a drive during which we learned that Agent Fox is gay and Simone herself is bi, Fox tasked Clark with rifling through screens and screens of tipline calls possibly about the Russian, but “people person” Simone instead sneaked off to talk to locked-up Zeke, her former student, asking if he remembered anything else about the bomber. This led to Zeke sketching a Russian candy bar that the guy munched on, and that in turn — thanks to some Russian musicians that Simone’s dad Cutty sometimes jams with — led Simone to a store. Not waiting for Nolan to catch up, Simone approached and tried to chat up Gurin by herself, but that led to a brief brawl, where the Russian walloped the unarmed trainee hard, and then ran off.’
Source: Matt Webb Mitovich, “The Rookie: Grade Part 2 of the Spinoff Pilot, Tell Us If You’d Watch It,” TVLine, 1 May 2022. In Russian, konfeta means “candy,” and is derived from the Italian confetto. The Russian word for “blood” is krov’ (with a so-called soft v), not krov (as here, with a so-called hard v), which, on the contrary, means “roof” and, by extension, “shelter, a place to stay” (“a roof over one’s head”). So, in their misguided effort to confect “blood candy,” the writers of The Rookie actually conjured up a “roofy.” And the Russian word for “chocolate” is shokolad, not shokold, as here. But that mistake can be put down to Zeke’s “poor” memory. UPDATE (2 May 2022). My boon companion, who was born and raised in the Soviet Union, told me earlier today that she and other children were given sweet “Hematogen” nutrition bars to raise their hemoglobin levels, as she put it. These bars were sold in pharmacies and labeled as such, not as chocolate, candy or “krovfeta.” Adults did not eat Hematogen bars, she said, adding that she stopped eating them when she realized what was in them. In 2019, Vice published a provocatively titled article about Hematogen bars that might have inspired the writers at The Rookie. I’m happy to admit that, despite having lived in Russia twenty-some years, I’d never heard of them until today. ||| TRR
