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Critics have accused the Modi administration of using the NRC to target Assam’s large Muslim community.

Government sources say those excluded from the list retain their rights and have 120 days to appeal at local “Foreigners Tribunals”. If that fails, they can take their cases to the High Court of Assam and ultimately the Supreme Court. What happens to those who fail at all levels of appeal is yet to be decided, they said.

Last month the local chapter of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party expressed dismay after it became apparent that many Hindus had also been excluded from the list. Officials said the government may pass legislation to protect legitimate citizens. The government is already in the process of bringing legislation to grant citizenship to Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist immigrants from neighbouring countries. Muslim immigrants are not included in the law.

On January 24, the government opened a control room to deal with the situation, made plans to isolate people, including home quarantine, and looked at the existing provisions of equipment including N95 masks, and PPEs (Personal Protective Equipment). On January 30, India registered its first Coronavirus infection in Kerala; it was a student who’d returned home from China.As of May 4, 462 people have recovered from the infection in Kerala, and there have been just three deaths. Even the oldest patients have recovered—a couple, aged 88 and 93. “When their tests came back positive, they were moved to a medical college because they were very vulnerable,” she shares. “In fact, we had special nurses and the best ICU set aside for them. And so, we brought them back to life,”

Kerala has long been focused on public health, education and social upliftment. Over the last few years, and since Shailaja Teacher got the health portfolio, there’s been renewed attention to the state’s public healthcare institutions. “We had a three-point agenda: government hospitals should be patient-friendly, high-tech, and out-of-pocket expenditure must reduce. Primary healthcare units are very important, especially in rural areas, they now have testing labs and are able to catch early signs of different diseases. Medical college hospitals have new equipment, and good infrastructure. Our focus definitely strengthened the system,”

a daily video conference with different frontline staff of the healthcare community across 14 districts. “Each day’s video conference is dedicated to groups of people doing different kinds of work, from district medical officers, nurses, ASHA workers. It gives us the opportunity to talk to people and hear them out. Keeping in touch with those working at the grassroots level is extremely important, we try to maintain that at all costs. When the minister, or a health secretary directly wants to understand their ground reality, it makes a huge difference, especially to keep morale up.”

Morale is especially important because there’s little knowing how things will pan out. Shailaja Teacher is cautious: “It will take time to get back to normal life. It is a truth that people must accept now. This virus is not like others. Many people test positive then test negative within a few days, but others take upward of 30 days to test negative. It sometimes takes five or six tests before it comes back negative. So that means this virus remains in the body for a while, and there’s a possibility of a transfer. In Kerala, we have it under control but if we get over-confident then we may have a second wave.”

When I spoke to Shailaja Teacher, she had another 9 or 10 hours of meetings, files, discussions, and even a press conference ahead of her. Her husband, two grown-up sons and their families, check in on her just before midnight via phone calls. 

African countries, too, are making manufacturing a top priority. Ethiopia alone has opened nearly a dozen industrial parks in recent years and set up a world-class government agency to attract foreign investment. The World Bank has lauded sub-Saharan Africa as the region with the highest number of reforms each year since 2012.

In the last five years, the American Enterprise Institute’s China Global Investment Tracker has recorded 13 large Chinese investment deals in Africa and only nine in South Asia.

In the past few years, Bangladesh has fallen to 176 out of 190 countries in the global Ease of Doing Business country rankings. DBL Group, a Bangladeshi company, is investing in a new apparel manufacturing facility that will generate 4,000 jobs -- in Ethiopia.

The Chinese government views American corporations as vehicles for American political influence, which they clearly are. The fact that a laundry list of high-level U.S. politicians have commented on the dispute—while the U.S. is negotiating a trade deal with China—only proves that Beijing is right to see incursions by U.S. businesses into China as a threat. Seen in this light, arguments that the NBA should insist on American speech rules in China are arguments for using American corporate power to meddle in another state. This would trouble a country in any context, but it is likely especially worrying given the United States’s history of virulent and aggressive corporate imperialism.

Another distasteful and unconstructive thread running through the current debate is America’s moral superiority because of its robust speech rights. At the core of the argument that U.S. firms should not do business in China—or if they do, they should somehow not comply with Chinese rules—is an argument about China’s speech constraints and, therefore, its moral inferiority. But, as I’ve said before, evaluating China along welfare or human rights grounds is not so simple. Speech rights are much less robust than in the West, to be sure, but China has shown extraordinary concern—and done more than any other country—for its poor. The country has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, and a child born in China today has a better shot at upward social mobility than a child born in the U.S.

The point is not that the two countries are morally equivalent. Rather, it is simply hard to swallow the moral superiority that underlies so much American rhetoric about China

a larger history of American firms insisting on American speech rules for the rest of the world. Whatever one thinks about American-style free speech, it is not universally beloved; indeed, it is nearly universally rejected. Yet Americans expect domestic companies to push it around the world, and many do. This issue comes up again and again in discussions about technology policy in particular, because so many tech tools are platforms for speech

Speech rules, many Americans and American tech firms feel, should be both uniform and maximal; the American rule should predominate everywhere. And this view has U.S. government backing. That is why the U.S. is pushing platform immunity provisions in its trade deals, which would protect firms like Facebook from liability associated with speech harms. And that is why the U.S.-U.K. data-sharing agreement gives the U.S. veto power over British attempts to get criminal evidence in cases that implicate free speech concerns

American speech imperialism never made much sense—why should the rest of the world adopt the American rule on anything? But if it ever made sense, it makes less sense today, given the state of our communications platforms, which enable mass shootings, radicalization, election hacking and more. The results of American platforms’ free-speech free-for-all have not been happy in Myanmar, India and much of the rest of the world. The U.S. does not have this all figured out; we should stop pretending that we do.

bloated, inefficient health-care system

Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable

decades-long process of shredding the nation’s social safety net

same social-media platforms that sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors for conspiracy theories

the COVID‑19 debacle has also touched—and implicated—nearly every other facet of American society: its shortsighted leadership, its disregard for expertise, its racial inequities, its social-media culture, and its fealty to a dangerous strain of individualism.

SARS‑CoV‑2 is neither as lethal as some other coronaviruses, such as SARS and MERS, nor as contagious as measles. Deadlier pathogens almost certainly exist. Wild animals harbor an estimated 40,000 unknown viruses, a quarter of which could potentially jump into humans. How will the U.S. fare when “we can’t even deal with a starter pandemic?,”

The U.S. cannot prepare for these inevitable crises if it returns to normal, as many of its people ache to do. Normal led to this. Normal was a world ever more prone to a pandemic but ever less ready for one. To avert another catastrophe, the U.S. needs to grapple with all the ways normal failed us

Many conservationists jump on epidemics as opportunities to ban the wildlife trade or the eating of “bush meat,” an exoticized term for “game,” but few diseases have emerged through either route. Carlson said the biggest factors behind spillovers are land-use change and climate change, both of which are hard to control. Our species has relentlessly expanded into previously wild spaces. Through intensive agriculture, habitat destruction, and rising temperatures, we have uprooted the planet’s animals, forcing them into new and narrower ranges that are on our own doorsteps. Humanity has squeezed the world’s wildlife in a crushing grip—and viruses have come bursting out.

This year, the world’s coronavirus experts—and there still aren’t many—had to postpone their triennial conference in the Netherlands because SARS‑CoV‑2 made flying too risky.

In 2003, China covered up the early spread of SARS, allowing the new disease to gain a foothold, and in 2020, history repeated itself. The Chinese government downplayed the possibility that SARS‑CoV‑2 was spreading among humans, and only confirmed as much on January 20, after millions had traveled around the country for the lunar new year. Doctors who tried to raise the alarm were censured and threatened. One, Li Wenliang, later died of COVID‑19. The World Health Organization initially parroted China’s line and did not declare a public-health emergency of international concern until January 30. By then, an estimated 10,000 people in 20 countries had been infected, and the virus was spreading fast.

Even after warnings reached the U.S., they fell on the wrong ears. Since before his election, Trump has cavalierly dismissed expertise and evidence. He filled his administration with inexperienced newcomers, while depicting career civil servants as part of a “deep state.” In 2018, he dismantled an office that had been assembled specifically to prepare for nascent pandemics. American intelligence agencies warned about the coronavirus threat in January, but Trump habitually disregards intelligence briefings. The secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, offered similar counsel, and was twice ignored.

“By early February, we should have triggered a series of actions, precisely zero of which were taken.”

Travel bans make intuitive sense, because travel obviously enables the spread of a virus. But in practice, travel bans are woefully inefficient at restricting either travel or viruses. They prompt people to seek indirect routes via third-party countries, or to deliberately hide their symptoms. They are often porous: Trump’s included numerous exceptions, and allowed tens of thousands of people to enter from China. Ironically, they create travel: When Trump later announced a ban on flights from continental Europe, a surge of travelers packed America’s airports in a rush to beat the incoming restrictions. Travel bans may sometimes work for remote island nations, but in general they can only delay the spread of an epidemic—not stop it.

countries “rely on bans to the exclusion of the things they actually need to do—testing, tracing, building up the health system,”

genetic evidence shows that the specific viruses that triggered the first big outbreaks, in Washington State, didn’t land until mid-February. The country could have used that time to prepare. Instead, Trump, who had spent his entire presidency learning that he could say whatever he wanted without consequence, assured Americans that “the coronavirus is very much under control,” and “like a miracle, it will disappear.” With impunity, Trump lied. With impunity, the virus spread.

it found a nation through which it could spread easily, without being detected

sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise

In response to the global energy crisis of the 1970s, architects made structures more energy-efficient by sealing them off from outdoor air, reducing ventilation rates. Pollutants and pathogens built up indoors, “ushering in the era of ‘sick buildings,’ ” says Joseph Allen, who studies environmental health at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Energy efficiency is a pillar of modern climate policy, but there are ways to achieve it without sacrificing well-being. “We lost our way over the years and stopped designing buildings for people,”

As of early July, one in every 1,450 Black Americans had died from COVID‑19—a rate more than twice that of white Americans. That figure is both tragic and wholly expected given the mountain of medical disadvantages that Black people face

The indoor spaces in which Americans spend 87 percent of their time became staging grounds for super-spreading events. One study showed that the odds of catching the virus from an infected person are roughly 19 times higher indoors than in open air. Shielded from the elements and among crowds clustered in prolonged proximity, the coronavirus ran rampant in the conference rooms of a Boston hotel, the cabins of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and a church hall in Washington State where a choir practiced for just a few hours.

Between harsher punishments doled out in the War on Drugs and a tough-on-crime mindset that prizes retribution over rehabilitation, America’s incarcerated population has swelled sevenfold since the 1970s, to about 2.3 million. The U.S. imprisons five to 18 times more people per capita than other Western democracies. Many American prisons are packed beyond capacity, making social distancing impossible. Soap is often scarce. Inevitably, the coronavirus ran amok. By June, two American prisons each accounted for more cases than all of New Zealand. One, Marion Correctional Institution, in Ohio, had more than 2,000 cases among inmates despite having a capacity of 1,500.

America’s nursing homes and long-term-care facilities house less than 1 percent of its people, but as of mid-June, they accounted for 40 percent of its coronavirus deaths. More than 50,000 residents and staff have died. At least 250,000 more have been infected. These grim figures are a reflection not just of the greater harms that COVID‑19 inflicts upon elderly physiology, but also of the care the elderly receive. Before the pandemic, three in four nursing homes were understaffed, and four in five had recently been cited for failures in infection control. The Trump administration’s policies have exacerbated the problem by reducing the influx of immigrants, who make up a quarter of long-term caregivers.

the Department of Health and Human Services paused nursing-home inspections in March, passing the buck to the states. Some nursing homes avoided the virus because their owners immediately stopped visitations, or paid caregivers to live on-site. But in others, staff stopped working, scared about infecting their charges or becoming infected themselves. In some cases, residents had to be evacuated because no one showed up to care for them.

its problematic attitude toward health: “Get hospitals ready and wait for sick people to show,” as Sheila Davis, the CEO of the nonprofit Partners in Health, puts it. “Especially in the beginning, we catered our entire [COVID‑19] response to the 20 percent of people who required hospitalization, rather than preventing transmission in the community.” The latter is the job of the public-health system, which prevents sickness in populations instead of merely treating it in individuals. That system pairs uneasily with a national temperament that views health as a matter of personal responsibility rather than a collective good.

“As public health did its job, it became a target” of budget cuts,

Today, the U.S. spends just 2.5 percent of its gigantic health-care budget on public health. Underfunded health departments were already struggling to deal with opioid addiction, climbing obesity rates, contaminated water, and easily preventable diseases. Last year saw the most measles cases since 1992. In 2018, the U.S. had 115,000 cases of syphilis and 580,000 cases of gonorrhea—numbers not seen in almost three decades. It has 1.7 million cases of chlamydia, the highest number ever recorded.

In May, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan asserted that his state would soon have enough people to trace 10,000 contacts every day. Last year, as Ebola tore through the Democratic Republic of Congo—a country with a quarter of Maryland’s wealth and an active war zone—local health workers and the WHO traced twice as many people.

Compared with the average wealthy nation, America spends nearly twice as much of its national wealth on health care, about a quarter of which is wasted on inefficient care, unnecessary treatments, and administrative chicanery. The U.S. gets little bang for its exorbitant buck. It has the lowest life-expectancy rate of comparable countries, the highest rates of chronic disease, and the fewest doctors per person. This profit-driven system has scant incentive to invest in spare beds, stockpiled supplies, peacetime drills, and layered contingency plans—the essence of pandemic preparedness. America’s hospitals have been pruned and stretched by market forces to run close to full capacity, with little ability to adapt in a crisis.

Sabeti’s lab developed a diagnostic test in mid-January and sent it to colleagues in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. “We had working diagnostics in those countries well before we did in any U.S. states,”

American hospitals operate on a just-in-time economy. They acquire the goods they need in the moment through labyrinthine supply chains that wrap around the world in tangled lines, from countries with cheap labor to richer nations like the U.S. The lines are invisible until they snap. About half of the world’s face masks, for example, are made in China, some of them in Hubei province. When that region became the pandemic epicenter, the mask supply shriveled just as global demand spiked. The Trump administration turned to a larder of medical supplies called the Strategic National Stockpile, only to find that the 100 million respirators and masks that had been dispersed during the 2009 flu pandemic were never replaced. Just 13 million respirators were left.

The supply of nasopharyngeal swabs that are used in every diagnostic test also ran low, because one of the largest manufacturers is based in Lombardy, Italy—initially the COVID‑19 capital of Europe. About 40 percent of critical-care drugs, including antibiotics and painkillers, became scarce because they depend on manufacturing lines that begin in China and India. Once a vaccine is ready, there might not be enough vials to put it in, because of the long-running global shortage of medical-grade glass—literally, a bottle-neck bottleneck.

As usual, health care was a matter of capitalism and connections. In New York, rich hospitals bought their way out of their protective-equipment shortfall, while neighbors in poorer, more diverse parts of the city rationed their supplies.

A study showed that the U.S. could have averted 36,000 COVID‑19 deaths if leaders had enacted social-distancing measures just a week earlier. But better late than never: By collectively reducing the spread of the virus, America flattened the curve. Ventilators didn’t run out, as they had in parts of Italy. Hospitals had time to add extra beds.

the indiscriminate lockdown was necessary only because America’s leaders wasted months of prep time. Deploying this blunt policy instrument came at enormous cost. Unemployment rose to 14.7 percent, the highest level since record-keeping began, in 1948. More than 26 million people lost their jobs, a catastrophe in a country that—uniquely and absurdly—ties health care to employment

In the middle of the greatest health and economic crises in generations, millions of Americans have found themselves disconnected from medical care and impoverished. They join the millions who have always lived that way.

Elderly people, already pushed to the fringes of society, were treated as acceptable losses. Women were more likely to lose jobs than men, and also shouldered extra burdens of child care and domestic work, while facing rising rates of domestic violence. In half of the states, people with dementia and intellectual disabilities faced policies that threatened to deny them access to lifesaving ventilators. Thousands of people endured months of COVID‑19 symptoms that resembled those of chronic postviral illnesses, only to be told that their devastating symptoms were in their head. Latinos were three times as likely to be infected as white people. Asian Americans faced racist abuse. Far from being a “great equalizer,” the pandemic fell unevenly upon the U.S., taking advantage of injustices that had been brewing throughout the nation’s history.

Of the 3.1 million Americans who still cannot afford health insurance in states where Medicaid has not been expanded, more than half are people of color, and 30 percent are Black.* This is no accident. In the decades after the Civil War, the white leaders of former slave states deliberately withheld health care from Black Americans, apportioning medicine more according to the logic of Jim Crow than Hippocrates. They built hospitals away from Black communities, segregated Black patients into separate wings, and blocked Black students from medical school. In the 20th century, they helped construct America’s system of private, employer-based insurance, which has kept many Black people from receiving adequate medical treatment. They fought every attempt to improve Black people’s access to health care, from the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in the ’60s to the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

A number of former slave states also have among the lowest investments in public health, the lowest quality of medical care, the highest proportions of Black citizens, and the greatest racial divides in health outcomes

“We’re designed for discrete disasters” like mass shootings, traffic pileups, and hurricanes, says Esther Choo, an emergency physician at Oregon Health and Science University. The COVID‑19 pandemic is not a discrete disaster. It is a 50-state catastrophe that will likely continue at least until a vaccine is ready.

Native Americans were similarly vulnerable. A third of the people in the Navajo Nation can’t easily wash their hands, because they’ve been embroiled in long-running negotiations over the rights to the water on their own lands. Those with water must contend with runoff from uranium mines. Most live in cramped multigenerational homes, far from the few hospitals that service a 17-million-acre reservation. As of mid-May, the Navajo Nation had higher rates of COVID‑19 infections than any U.S. state.

Americans often misperceive historical inequities as personal failures

the largely unregulated, social-media-based communications infrastructure of the 21st century almost ensures that misinformation will proliferate fast. “In every outbreak throughout the existence of social media, from Zika to Ebola, conspiratorial communities immediately spread their content about how it’s all caused by some government or pharmaceutical company or Bill Gates,”

Rumors coursed through online platforms that are designed to keep users engaged, even if that means feeding them content that is polarizing or untrue. In a national crisis, when people need to act in concert, this is calamitous. “The social internet as a system is broken,” DiResta told me, and its faults are readily abused.

Like pandemics, infodemics quickly become uncontrollable unless caught early.

In 2016, when DiResta spoke with a CDC team about the threat of misinformation, “their response was: ‘ That’s interesting, but that’s just stuff that happens on the internet.’ ”

The WHO, the CDC, and the U.S. surgeon general urged people not to wear masks, hoping to preserve the limited stocks for health-care workers. These messages were offered without nuance or acknowledgement of uncertainty, so when they were reversed—the virus is worse than the flu; wear masks—the changes seemed like befuddling flip-flops.

Drawn to novelty, journalists gave oxygen to fringe anti-lockdown protests while most Americans quietly stayed home. They wrote up every incremental scientific claim, even those that hadn’t been verified or peer-reviewed.

By tying career advancement to the publishing of papers, academia already creates incentives for scientists to do attention-grabbing but irreproducible work. The pandemic strengthened those incentives by prompting a rush of panicked research and promising ambitious scientists global attention.

In March, a small and severely flawed French study suggested that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID‑19. Published in a minor journal, it likely would have been ignored a decade ago. But in 2020, it wended its way to Donald Trump via a chain of credulity that included Fox News, Elon Musk, and Dr. Oz. Trump spent months touting the drug as a miracle cure despite mounting evidence to the contrary, causing shortages for people who actually needed it to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. The hydroxychloroquine story was muddied even further by a study published in a top medical journal, The Lancet, that claimed the drug was not effective and was potentially harmful. The paper relied on suspect data from a small analytics company called Surgisphere, and was retracted in June.**

Science famously self-corrects. But during the pandemic, the same urgent pace that has produced valuable knowledge at record speed has also sent sloppy claims around the world before anyone could even raise a skeptical eyebrow.

No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie about whether the U.S. had the pandemic under control; that a racist who gave birth to birtherism would do little to stop a virus that was disproportionately killing Black people; that a xenophobe who presided over the creation of new immigrant-detention centers would order meatpacking plants with a substantial immigrant workforce to remain open; that a cruel man devoid of empathy would fail to calm fearful citizens; that a narcissist who cannot stand to be upstaged would refuse to tap the deep well of experts at his disposal; that a scion of nepotism would hand control of a shadow coronavirus task force to his unqualified son-in-law; that an armchair polymath would claim to have a “natural ability” at medicine and display it by wondering out loud about the curative potential of injecting disinfectant; that an egotist incapable of admitting failure would try to distract from his greatest one by blaming China, defunding the WHO, and promoting miracle drugs; or that a president who has been shielded by his party from any shred of accountability would say, when asked about the lack of testing, “I don’t take any responsibility at all.”

Trump is a comorbidity of the COVID‑19 pandemic. He isn’t solely responsible for America’s fiasco, but he is central to it. A pandemic demands the coordinated efforts of dozens of agencies. “In the best circumstances, it’s hard to make the bureaucracy move quickly,” Ron Klain said. “It moves if the president stands on a table and says, ‘Move quickly.’ But it really doesn’t move if he’s sitting at his desk saying it’s not a big deal.”

everyday Americans did more than the White House. By voluntarily agreeing to months of social distancing, they bought the country time, at substantial cost to their financial and mental well-being. Their sacrifice came with an implicit social contract—that the government would use the valuable time to mobilize an extraordinary, energetic effort to suppress the virus, as did the likes of Germany and Singapore. But the government did not, to the bafflement of health experts. “There are instances in history where humanity has really moved mountains to defeat infectious diseases,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “It’s appalling that we in the U.S. have not summoned that energy around COVID‑19.”

People suffered all the debilitating effects of a lockdown with few of the benefits. Most states felt compelled to reopen without accruing enough tests or contact tracers. In April and May, the nation was stuck on a terrible plateau, averaging 20,000 to 30,000 new cases every day. In June, the plateau again became an upward slope, soaring to record-breaking heights.

It is no coincidence that other powerful nations that elected populist leaders—Brazil, Russia, India, and the United Kingdom—also fumbled their response to COVID‑19. “When you have people elected based on undermining trust in the government, what happens when trust is what you need the most?”

the United States underperformed across the board, and its errors compounded. The dearth of tests allowed unconfirmed cases to create still more cases, which flooded the hospitals, which ran out of masks, which are necessary to limit the virus’s spread. Twitter amplified Trump’s misleading messages, which raised fear and anxiety among people, which led them to spend more time scouring for information on Twitter.

The virus was never beaten in the spring, but many people, including Trump, pretended that it was. Every state reopened to varying degrees, and many subsequently saw record numbers of cases. After Arizona’s cases started climbing sharply at the end of May, Cara Christ, the director of the state’s health-services department, said, “We are not going to be able to stop the spread. And so we can’t stop living as well.” The virus may beg to differ.

The long wait for a vaccine will likely culminate in a predictable way: Many Americans will refuse to get it, and among those who want it, the most vulnerable will be last in line.

It is almost unheard-of for a public-health measure to go from zero to majority acceptance in less than half a year. But pandemics are rare situations when “people are desperate for guidelines and rules,” says Zoë McLaren, a health-policy professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. The closest analogy is pregnancy, she says, which is “a time when women’s lives are changing, and they can absorb a ton of information. A pandemic is similar: People are actually paying attention, and learning.”

As the economy nose-dived, the health-care system ailed, and the government fumbled, belief in American exceptionalism declined. “Times of big social disruption call into question things we thought were normal and standard,” Redbird told me. “If our institutions fail us here, in what ways are they failing elsewhere?” And whom are they failing the most?

It is hard to stare directly at the biggest problems of our age. Pandemics, climate change, the sixth extinction of wildlife, food and water shortages—their scope is planetary, and their stakes are overwhelming. We have no choice, though, but to grapple with them. It is now abundantly clear what happens when global disasters collide with historical negligence.

America would be wise to help reverse the ruination of the natural world, a process that continues to shunt animal diseases into human bodies. It should strive to prevent sickness instead of profiting from it. It should build a health-care system that prizes resilience over brittle efficiency, and an information system that favors light over heat. It should rebuild its international alliances, its social safety net, and its trust in empiricism. It should address the health inequities that flow from its history. Not least, it should elect leaders with sound judgment, high character, and respect for science, logic, and reason.

The NSO Group, for example, sells sophisticated surveillance technology it says is for fighting terrorism to governments around the world, several of which have turned around and deployed it against journalists. Its Pegasus spyware has been linked to government surveillance of journalists in India, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and the United States, including associates of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Now the company is reportedly testing in a dozen countries a new technology that matches location data collected by national telecoms with two weeks of mobile-phone tracking information from an infected person to identify those vulnerable to contagion who were in the patient’s vicinity for more than 15 minutes.

implementing sunset clauses on any new surveillance powers is essential if we don’t want coronavirus to undermine our rights as well as our health

the claim that Chernobyl caused a legitimacy crisis for the Soviet Union rests on sweeping causal claims that underestimate authoritarian resilience and oversimplify how complex societies really work

More than two decades after the end of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, it should be clear that authoritarian regimes can endure chronic and acute crises that rival, if not exceed, the severity of Chernobyl. After all, the Soviet Union itself had done so many times, from the famines of 1921 to 1922, 1932 to 1933, and 1946 to 1947.

Many systems endure a long time even as they produce a plenitude of lies.

relying on analogical reasoning clutters rather than clarifies thinking about international relations and foreign policy.

The National Endowment for Democracy’s blog pivoted effortlessly from calling the January 2020 shootdown of a Ukrainian airliner “Iran’s ‘Chernobyl’ moment” to labeling the COVID-19 infection as “China’s biological ‘Chernobyl.’” The Atlantic Council mused (as did others) whether the coronavirus could be a “Chernobyl moment” for Russian President Vladimir Putin. An independent review panel suggested the coronavirus could be a “Chernobyl moment” for the World Health Organization—the clearest evidence the Chernobyl metaphor has become untethered from any evidence-based moorings.

Where the logic of the fable emphasizes how closed authoritarian systems promote untruths and thus engender disaster, the relatively open societies of the United States, Canada, Europe, Brazil, and now India have proved vulnerable to COVID-19, a failing that crossed ideological complexions of ruling parties and varieties of democracy alike.

the appeal of the fable is it reassures Western audiences that democratic institutions possess some natural immunity to the lies and bureaucratic dysfunction that poisoned the Pripyat marshes with radiation.

It may be true (indeed, it’s probably likely) that open systems prove more self-correcting in the long run than closed ones. Yet societies that pride themselves on being democratic are apt to overrate their own virtues—and their preparedness for disaster.

COVID-19 failures are already creating a fable in China that democracies won’t take the tough measures needed to halt disasters despite the counterexamples of Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand.

Authoritarian systems are not fated to crumble because of one or another catastrophe, and democratic ones will not avert disaster out of their own innate virtues.

postcolonial states across the Arab and Muslim world, all the way to Asia, Africa and Latin America have lost their raisons d'etre and therefore their legitimacy.

More specific patterns of regional histories need to be taken into account before we turn to more global trends.  

Within what historians call the longue duree frame of reference, the success of counter-revolutionary forces in derailing these uprisings is but a temporary bump. The fundamental, structural causes of the Arab (and other world) revolutions remain the same and will outlast the temporary reactionary stratagems designed to disrupt them.

Defiance of abusive state powers and their foreign backers - think of the junta in Egypt and their US and Israeli supporters, or Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian enablers - cannot be suppressed by yet another abusive total state. The statism at the heart of old-fashioned total revolutions - that one good state will follow one bad state - has long since lost its relevance and legitimacy. What we are witnessing today is the sustained synergy of delayed defiance, open-ended revolutions, and public happiness that in its revolutionary potential is far more enduring than the false promises a total state can deliver.

The naked brutality of state powers in suppressing the transnational uprisings were clear indications of their absolute and final loss of legitimacy.

In its global configuration, that "democratic" spectacle has resulted in the murderous Hindu fanaticism in India ("the largest democracy in the world") and the corrupt and ludicrous reality show of Donald Trump in the US ("the oldest democracy in the world") or else in the boring banality of Brexit in the United Kingdom. The world has nothing to learn from these failed historical experiments with democracy. The world must - and in the unfolding Arab revolutions - will witness a whole different take on nations exercising their democratic will. Delayed defiance will systematically and consistently strengthen this national will to sovereignty and in equal measures weaken the murderous apparatus of total states which have now degenerated into nothing more than killing machines.

Remittances from Yemeni workers abroad had dropped by 80% – $253m (£200m) – in the first four months of 2020 as a result of job losses across the Gulf region. The closure of supply routes has led to food shortages and food price hikes in the country, which imports 90% of its food.

Democratic Republic of the Congo, Venezuela, the west African Sahel, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, and Haiti as extreme hunger hotspots.

Oxfam said countries with existing problems, such as South Sudan and Syria, were already seeing hunger worsen but there was also concern for middle-income countries such as India and Brazil. Mass unemployment was affecting all countries, but informal labourers were suffering the most, often unable to travel to work. Travel restrictions were also hitting food supplies by preventing farmers from hiring workers and small-scale producers from accessing their own fields.

humanitarian assistance around the world had been curtailed by restrictions on movement and other precautions to prevent the virus spreading

a crisis in Africa’s Sahel region, where at least 4 million people have been displaced by extreme climate conditions that were damaging crops, causing greater tension between communities sharing resources.

In 1952, the Italian government commissioned a study of its past colonial activities from a group of 24 scholars, largely former colonial officials, including governors and geographers. The committee, known as “Comitato per la documentazione dell’Opera dell’Italia in Africa,” (Committee for the Documentation of the Italian Activities in Africa) continued its work until 1984, producing 40 volumes, most of them hagiographies.

Fascist troops conquered Ethiopia in 1936, with the help of chemical weapons, and took Albania in 1939

“Having colonies was seen as a way of being modern,”

It’s estimated that during the 60 years of Italian colonialism, almost 1 million people died due to war, deportations, and internment

widespread summary executions, torture, and mass incarceration. To crush the Libyan resistance, in 1930 the Italian general Rodolfo Graziani, nicknamed “the butcher of Fezzan,” put the civilian population in concentration camps. In Ethiopia, the Fascists deployed chemical attacks. When Ethiopian rebels tried to kill him, in 1937, Graziani had 19,000 Ethiopian civilians executed in retaliation.

After the end of World War II, Italy’s new ruling class, largely composed of anti-Fascists, created two intertwined myths: the myth of the “good Italian colonialist” and the myth of the “good Italian soldier.”

The aim was to create a sense of cohesion between the new anti-Fascist government and the general population, by reassuring the latter they don’t share the blame of the dictatorship’s deeds

The myth of the good colonialist was devised as a propaganda tool to make the point that Italy should keep its colonies that were conquered before Fascism, which didn’t work out.

When Ethiopia requested the extradition of Graziani in 1949, Italy refused, despite the fact that he was included in a list of war criminals of the United Nations for the use of toxic gases and the bombing of some Red Cross hospitals.

In 1882, the Kingdom of Italy, which was founded only two decades earlier, invaded Eritrea, and seven years later, it conquered Somalia. Between 1895 and 1896 Italy also tried to conquer Ethiopia, but it failed spectacularly, with the Ethiopian troops inflicting on the Italian attackers the worst defeat ever suffered by a European nation in Africa. In 1911, the Italians took Libya.

Unlike other European countries, Italy never had prominent voices confronting its colonial crimes

“The French public might not have agreed with the position of Sartre or Fanon, but they knew who they were,”

colonial brutality is the subject of a classic of Italian cinema: Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and a nomination at the Academy Awards, chronicled the brutal French repression of Algeria. It posed no problem, because the bad guys were the French.

the Italian governement intervened in 1982 to prevent the distribution of a movie that would have put Italy’s colonialism in bad light: Lion of the Desert, chronicling Italy’s repression of the Libyan resistance led by Omar al-Mukhtar, was not aired until 2009, during a state visit by Muammar al-Qaddafi

As recently as 1997, Italy formally protested against the United Kingdom because the BBC aired a documentary, called Fascist Legacy, about Italian war crimes. The Italian state TV channel RAI bought a copy of the movie but never aired it.

in 2012, a mausoleum honoring Graziani, the war criminal, was erected near Rome. A court ordered it to be taken down, because it violated a law against “Fascist propaganda” (Graziani also headed the pro-Nazi army of the Salò Republic), but the order was never carried out. While it has been defaced and mocked with graffiti, the mausoleum still stands.

Italy decolonization was “a passive process, not an active one.” Italy did not go through a lengthy independence war, as France did in Algeria, nor did it witness a large-scale civil rights movement, as Britain did in India: Italy simply lost its colonies because it lost the war

there were “two types of removal: one from the authority but also one from the Italian people.” She points out that many Italian families have recent ancestors who fought in colonial wars in Africa. “If people were to check in their attics, they will likely find memorabilia of that period,” but they ignore it

a small but growing number of Italian authors who are tackling Italy’s colonial violence head on

Italian authorities should build monuments to the victims and start teaching about colonial violence in schools: “Many high school books still claim that Italy went to Africa to bring civilization.”

Despite the fact that Italy is fast becoming a multiethnic society, and despite the fact that its colonies came to an end almost 80 years ago, the country doesn’t seem ready to face its own past.

The Middle East and North Africa are becoming a kind of citizenship frontier: a region where certainty, permanence, and protection of citizenship is being uniquely and dangerously corroded. And Western countries are enabling this dynamic.

The creation of a new, opaquely defined but unambiguously lesser form of citizenship is not a symptom of exploitative labor conditions. It’s a symptom of a regional erosion of citizenship.

Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain all emerged as states containing substantial populations of bedoon—stateless residents who were not recognized as citizens and were, in some cases, denied even birth certificates.

Most significant of all are the post-1948 populations of Palestinians in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, millions of people who were eventually issued identity documents by several governments, such as subvariants of Syrian passports (Syrian travel documents for Palestinian refugees), which looked like and served as passports but faced adamant political insistence from all sides—save Jordan, which eventually largely naturalized Palestinians—that this documentation was not, in fact, citizenship.

that Qatar has redefined the very nature of citizenship—without fanfare, controversy, and with the sole goal of appeasing FIFA nationality regulations—takes this story of temporary citizen soccer players beyond the realm of Gulf labor exploitation

Since the 2010s, the Middle East is emerging as a kind of experimental zone where the erosion of citizenship rights can be trialed. While Qatari soccer players are temporary citizens naturalized with an expiration date—even if the details of when their passports expire is not public—Western countries are increasingly comfortable denaturalizing and revoking the citizenship of their own immigrant citizens of Middle Eastern origin when those citizens are accused of terrorist activity in the region.

some right-populist movements are claiming that Middle Eastern and North African immigrants are somehow not really American, Dutch, or British

The West looks the other way as Gulf states chip away at citizenship norms for expediency, and local governments don’t protest too much when Western governments strand their denaturalized ex-citizens in the region. Especially after the emergence of the Islamic State, with its large contingent of Western, immigrant-origin fighters, the revocation of citizenship became an appealing alternative to long and complicated criminal prosecutions.

Western institutions in the Middle East have led the way in demonstrating that the definition of citizenship can be changed to solve an embarrassing problem, be that one of your citizens swearing allegiance to the Islamic State or the fact that half your national soccer team is foreign

The erasure of citizenship rights in these cases can be tolerated by international legal regimes because they are considered exceptional. It’s just for some athletes. It’s just for terrorists. But it doesn’t stay that way: The model, once implemented, is attractive for other uses.

conditional citizenship, a term coined by the American author Laila Lalami to describe people who, through a web of big and small prejudices and bureaucratic procedures, have “rights the state finds expendable.”

In 2018, Tunisia signed an agreement to join the "Belt and Road" initiative, which was established by China in 2013. Bin Mabrouk went on to say: "After Algeria announced that it will join the group, we will also announce our intention to join BRICS." Alegria had earlier announced plans to join the BRICS group next year.