Each Thanksgiving, and whenever I need to remind myself to feel thankful, my mind turns to an interview I conducted in a Southeast Asian refugee camp decades ago…
Back in 1985, fresh out of law school, I was dispatched by a U.S. human rights group to document and write a report about a torrent of abuses against 370,000 Cambodians who had escaped across the border of their war-torn homeland to find precarious shelter in refugee camps in Thailand. Most had languished there since fleeing the 1979 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.
The savagery threatening the refugees took appalling forms: unspeakable brutality by Thai soldiers assigned to protect them, by rampaging gangs of Cambodian bandits and by Cambodian resistance militias battling the Vietnamese occupation, ostensibly on their behalf; deadly shelling of the camps by Vietnamese artillery based just a few miles away, in Cambodia; and brutal repression in the few camps controlled by the remnants of the fanatical Khmer Rouge regime, which had once ruled their country in a reign of terror.
Every day for over two weeks, I spent dawn to dusk interviewing as many victims as my (non-refugee) Cambodian interpreter/guide could find. At the end of the trip, in Bangkok, I met with a Thai general who dismissed his troops’ cruelty with the glib observation that “boys will be boys.”
That chat was a doozy. But an interview with a particular refugee stood out far more. The memory has both haunted and moved me over the years…
Darkness was descending on the largest refugee camp, Nong Samet, when a furious, feisty, elderly woman rushed up to my interpreter and me. She’d heard that we were seeking victims to interview. We met with her and her 15-year-old granddaughter in a bamboo hut. The first thing that caught my eye was the circular scar, a healed bullet wound, spanning the girl’s wrist.
Getting shot was not the most recent attack that she had suffered, however. Just a month before my visit, a Thai soldier had viciously assaulted the girl, apparently as punishment for her sneaking to a banned edge of the camp to get water. She described the crime through a sea of tears. The crippled wrist, crushed spirit and brutalized body seemed to encapsulate the terrors visited upon her people.
Many months later, colleagues and press coverage informed me that my resulting report, along with other types of pressure, helped spark Thai government action to better protect the refugees. But the abuses did not come to an absolute end until 1993, when a peace treaty finally led to the Vietnamese army’s withdrawal from Cambodia, the camps’ closure and the refugees’ repatriation.
Why in the world am I recounting this story, from so long ago, on the cusp of Thursday’s happy holiday?
Each Thanksgiving, we break bread with friends and family. We toast with those loved ones. We’re thankful for what we have, as well we should be.
But we might also pause to be thankful for what we don’t have.
By and large, in America and other privileged nations, we don’t have our lives filled by wars, starvation, devastation and repression that plague many parts of the globe. Most of us don’t have the hunger and poverty that mar the lives of millions of fellow Americans.
While giving thanks, perhaps we can pledge to take whatever small steps we can toward the cures for such ills, at home or abroad.
My point here, however, is not just about suffering. It’s also about the incredible human spirit, strength and courage that enable people to survive horrific situations and to help each other despite the dangers and deprivation they face.
I have no idea what became of the specific refugees I interviewed in Nong Samet and the other camps back in 1985. But I do know that the remarkable resilience of the Cambodians there enabled most of them to endure, so as to eventually return home safely or resettle here in America.
With all of this in mind, this Thursday, I’ll reflect on a post-it note I wrote years ago. I still have it stuck to the corner of my laptop screen.
I glance at the note almost every day. I particularly value it when I’m feeling less than thankful and need a reminder about my own blessed lot in life.
The note reads, “The Girl at Nong Samet.”
So here’s a toast to whatever you do to remain thankful throughout the year. And Happy Thanksgiving.
If you go to https://www.ci.benicia.ca.us/strategicplan, or simply search for “Benicia Strategic Plan,” you’ll find a short but important online survey that the City has commissioned to help set priorities for years to come. The survey is one stage in a strategic planning process, stretching into early next year, by which we can all weigh in on where Benicia goes from here in terms of building on our strengths and tackling our challenges.
An online meeting this past Tuesday, attended by about 80 Benicians, provided a chance to discuss the planning process. We’ll have several more opportunities in the months to come. Watch for emails from and other announcements by City Manager Mario Guiliani for updates and future forums. The survey is a key component of this initiative.
But be aware:
The deadline for survey responses is November 3.
(Given the amount of time it can take for word about something like this to percolate, I’d suggest that the deadline should be extended. But let’s assume it’s set at November 3.)
The exercise takes maybe five or ten minutes to complete. It’s well worth the slight but interesting effort involved.
In taking the survey, I found myself wanting to endorse all fifteen potential answers for the “What are the things that make our community a great place to live?” question. We can only select up to five, however.
Nonetheless, there’s an opportunity to go beyond that list, under the “Other” option. I discussed the City’s waterfront setting as a significant asset that sets us apart from so many other communities.
Conversely, I wanted some more specificity regarding potential answers to the survey’s “What do you think are the top opportunities for improvement that the City of Benicia should focus on?” question. But thankfully, again, there is an “Other” option by which you can add and explain your own preferred answer(s).
Two things came to mind regarding that “Other” option:
First, I realize that we rely on Valero to some degree for jobs and other benefits, I appreciate the many fine Benicians who are its employees or retirees, and I respect the perspectives of our fellow community members who fully support it. But…
A truck drives into the Valero refinery in Benicia in July. | Rich Pedroncelli / AP.
There’s a major need to better address the massive, hazardous, longstanding air pollution violations Valero has committed, and which it didn’t tell us about for many years, while our kids, older adults and many other citizens possibly suffered health effects from potentially toxic emissions hundreds of times government limits. There are too many incidents and ongoing issues to detail here. But I’ll note that two examples of such repeated violations – at least one stretching back well over a decade – only came to light in 2022 and 2023.
Moreover, there’s nothing about Valero’s positive contributions that make them mutually exclusive with it being a better, safer neighbor. It’s the only refinery in the Bay Area that operates without a city or county ordinance geared to protecting citizen health and safety. The Texas-based corporation could do much better in partnering with the City, making its refinery here a less hazardous operation and sharing information vital to our safety and health.
The second thing that the survey brought to mind – even without specifically offering this as a potential answer – is that Benicia has the opportunity to diversify and strengthen its economy by taking advantage of potential private sector, federal and state funding to encourage manufacturing, servicing or otherwise profiting regarding wind, solar and other emerging technologies. Such initiatives would be great for local jobs and businesses, as well as our overall economic growth and health.
In a related vein, and even as we’re wary of the hazards the Valero refinery imposes or grateful for the economic benefits it brings, the facility won’t be here forever – or conceivably could be sold or altered in ways that make the need for alternative economic opportunities much more urgent. The strategic planning process, including the survey, gives us a chance to start considering such alternatives.
But those are just my quick reactions. And to be clear, the survey is about far more than such specific concerns, as it touches on parks, infrastructure, community engagement, arts and culture, festivals, policing, fire protection and a host of other matters.
So what are your thoughts? If you want to weigh in, the survey provides a great chance to offer your own goals and concerns. Yet another of its questions asks us to rank priorities; it’s a pretty thought-provoking exercise to engage in.
And again, it only takes five to ten minutes, at most.
And again, the deadline is November 3. Check it out!
Benicia resident Stephen Golub offers excellent perspective on his blog, A Promised Land: Politics. Policy. America as a Developing Country.
To access his other posts or subscribe, please go to his blog site, A Promised Land.
[Note from BenIndy Contributor Nathalie Christian: Public Citizen and other allies are organizing rallies around the country for this Thursday, August 3 — the day of Trump’s arraignment — to demand accountability and support the rule of law. I looked and the closest rally (that I can find, so far) is in Petaluma, at 5:30pm. If anyone local catches wind of a more local rally, or wants to initiate one, please email me and I’d be happy to promote it. From Public Citizen: Find a rally near you.]
This post was produced by Benicia resident Stephen Golub. Steve blogs about domestic and international politics and policy, including lessons that the United States can learn from other nations, at A Promised Land: America as a Developing Country. If interested, you may sign up for future posts by subscribing to the blog.
A US Courthouse in Lower Manhattan. | Image uncredited
Jack Smith is doing his job. The rest is up to us.
Yesterday, a grand jury indicted Donald Trump for, in essence, trying to gut American democracy. In securing that indictment, Special Counsel Jack Smith launched a case of unprecedented importance to our country.
I’d thought that I might greet the news with relief that the inevitable has come to pass, or despair over what Trump’s abuses signify, or trepidation over the societal ruptures that await us.
But I feel something far more stirring. Not quite elation.
Pride.
I’ve spent my career working to promote democracy and the rule of law across the globe. As I’ve written, the effort has largely flopped, though there have been powerful exceptions to that unfortunate rule.
One of the heartbreaking aspects of this endeavor has been how blind America has been to our own failures here at home. Even as the United States has sought to teach, train and tut-tut other societies about their democratic and legal shortcomings, we’ve ignored our own glass house.
But at this one historic moment, this country has lived up to its promise.
On this one day, we’re seeing the rule of law in action in its most vital sense: No one is above the law.
The indictment, practically free of legalese and packed with persuasive detail, makes for compelling reading. It portrays how Trump and six so-far unindicted and unidentified co-conspirators undertook a multi-stage drive to undo the election results. It superbly illuminates how they sought to pressure state and federal officials, line up fake electoral college electors, bulldoze then-Vice President Pence and ultimately ignite a mob, all in order to block Joe Biden from being certified as president-elect on January 6.
By citing abundant incriminating evidence from Trump’s own top aids and allies, including contemporaneous notes by Pence, it also shows how Trump knew that his allegations of electoral theft were lies.
In an irony that perhaps will not go unnoticed by Trump’s nativist and white nationalist fans, both the federal magistrate to whom the indictment was presented and the federal judge who will oversee the case are immigrants, respectively from India and Jamaica.
Now, none of this is to say that any of this will play out well, even if Trump is convicted. Things will get ugly, vicious, maybe even violent.
Nor does it compensate for what got us here, from Trump’s depravity to his followers’ tribal loyalty to Republican leaders’ craven acquiescence to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s ill-advised delay in approving the Trump insurrection investigation.
Furthermore, as I’ve previously suggested, the ultimate forum that will decide Trump’s legal fate will be the court of public opinion. That is, whether he will be held legally accountable for his alleged crimes against this country will probably hinge on whether he wins next year’s election.
But this first step had to happen. At this pivotal point in our history, we had to move from a hypocritical glass house to a literal, crucial courthouse. Smith and his team will do their best to hold Trump accountable for his crimes.
Now, the rest of us must do our part to ensure that Trump loses in the court of public opinion as well.
This post was produced by Benicia resident Stephen Golub. Steve blogs about domestic and international politics and policy, including lessons that the United States can learn from other nations, at A Promised Land: America as a Developing Country. If interested, you may sign up for future posts by subscribing to the blog.
Read more from Steve by visiting his blog or clicking any of the links below.
[Note from BenIndy Contributor Nathalie Christian: While I think all of Steve’s posts are well worth the time it takes to read them, I really encourage everyone to sit down with this one, especially because we’re still very close to Independence Day. The seeding, care and feeding of democracy abroad is a complicated undertaking at the best of times. Keeping it alive and thriving in our own garden has become a surprisingly fraught enterprise, too. Steve’s thoughtful analysis of what has and hasn’t worked provides a reasonable framework for the cultivated endurance of democracy and, perhaps more importantly, it provides at least me with very welcome hope.]This post was produced by Benicia resident Stephen Golub and originally appeared in the Washington Post‘s ‘Made by History’ section. Steve blogs about domestic and international politics and policy, including lessons that the United States can learn from other nations, at A Promised Land: America as a Developing Country. If interested, you may sign up for future posts by subscribing to the blog.
For 40 years, the U.S. government has ignored what sorts of democracy promotion work — and which ones don’t
As America celebrates Independence Day, we find our democracy not nearly as strong as we’d once thought. Authoritarian challenges threaten our institutions, our rights and the rule of law.
Ironically, this sobering reality confronts us after the United States, along with affluent allies, has devoted decades and massive resources to trying to build democracy in the world’s poorer and post-communist societies, including via rule of law, good governance, human rights and anti-corruption programs. With some exceptions — mostly centered on providing electoral assistance and fortifying civil society and media — these efforts have largely fallen flat. Data from Freedom House, the World Bank and the World Justice Project confirm the decline in democracy and associated fields across the globe.
Why the widespread failure? First, we hubristically bit off more than we could chew. The United States mistakenly assumed that foreign aid for training and equipping recipient nations’ government institutions could overcome the deep-seated political, historical, economic and cultural forces permeating them and could thus build democracies in our image.
Second, in focusing most democracy aid on such government institution-building, the United States put a relative paucity of resources into nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other civil society forces that modestly but more effectively strengthen specific policies, processes and populations.
In some ways, the roots of this failure reach back to our experience in the Philippines at the outset of the 20th century. At that time, America’s imperialist endeavor drove the Spanish from the archipelago and brutally crushed an indigenous independence movement. During the next half-century, we built corrupt, elite-controlled government institutions instead of strengthening grass- roots participation in representative government. This became an unintentional template for our subsequent democracy-building abroad decades later.
That template became salient when, in the 1980s, a host of actors and factors combined to make democracy a U.S. foreign policy priority.
Providing political cover for its wars in Central America and right-wing allies throughout Latin America, the Reagan administration funded government-focused, ostensibly democracy-promoting programs in the region. The unfortunate upshot was, for example, partnering with human rights-violating governments on major and, ultimately, unsuccessful administration of justice initiatives to which officials in our partner nations were actually resistant or indifferent. Similarly flawed and government-focused U.S. democracy programs arose alongside backing for authoritarian Cold War allies elsewhere.
In a more promising development, the 1980s also saw bipartisan support for the new National Endowment for Democracy, new U.S. Agency for International Development projects and other U.S. initiatives that provided small grants to civil society and media initiatives around the world. But such funding was (and is) dwarfed by major USAID programs and related support for government institutions.
This funding disparity meant that, as the United States started pouring money into top-down programs geared toward building American-style government institutions abroad, it tended to downplay support for civil society programs that could directly benefit and strengthen populations poorly served by those institutions.
By contrast, various private funding sources prioritized civil society. The Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corp. and other donors made grants to South African NGOs pursuing anti-apartheid legal activism. Financier George Soros began providing funds for innovators, budding democracy activists, journalists and international exchanges as Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union slowly started to liberalize. The partly U.S.-funded but private Asia Foundation supported Bangladeshi NGOs’ innovative local dispute resolution work. (I worked for the foundation elsewhere, and later evaluated and researched that work.)
These privately supported efforts exhibited promising results as they expanded their operations and impact in the 1990s. They contributed to significant health, housing and other victories in South Africa after the racist regime stepped down. Bangladeshi NGOs’ local dispute resolution models gathered steam — and support from additional donors and the Bangladeshi government itself — by ameliorating gender inequities and providing the poor with alternatives to a distant, corrupt and incomprehensible judicial system.
Around the world, both foundations and donor nations alike funded a growing array of NGOs featuring paralegals who, unlike those working in U.S. law offices, were typically community-based volunteers whom NGO attorneys trained and collaborated with. They advocated for and with their communities and fellow citizens to address health, housing, land, gender and other issues.
These programs thrived at the same moment that the United States and other affluent nations began pouring greatly expanded sums into seeding democracy worldwide in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Eastern European communist regimes and the Soviet Union. Books on “exporting democracy” — even presenting it as America’s destiny — assumed it was the wave of the future.
Yet, the United States ignored the success of the projects funded by foundations and clung to the notion that foreign aid to governments could secure dramatic democratic transformations. This partly stemmed from foreign policy priorities, including the post-Cold War perspective that fortifying U.S.-friendly capitalist democracies was in our own economic and political interest. But it also flowed from a bureaucratic reality: It was easier to secure funding in Washington for ambitious programs that promised to build up national ministries, legislatures and judiciaries than for local programs that worked with farmers, women or other disadvantaged groups.
Maintaining this unfortunate focus, George W. Bush linked his post-9/11 military and political programs to both defeating terrorism and installing democracy, stoking cynicism in many circles about that latter effort. Even if viewed in the most charitable light, U.S. democracy-building efforts in Afghanistan proved no match for the dominance of warlords and — as with some other aid recipient nations — entrenched corruption networks that permeated the government.
The past two decades have seen U.S. democracy aid flow and ebb, in response to such events as the Arab Spring and its demise. This aid has continued to feature a blend of foreign policy priorities, immense bureaucracy, hubris, cynicism and idealism. Its misplaced priorities have endured: Despite the documented success of paralegal programs, for example, many have suffered funding cutbacks from American and other sources.
All of this helps explain the mediocre record for U.S. democracy promotion: The United States has focused too much on working with change-resistant institutions and too little on supporting the civil society and media change agents that might gradually affect such institutions over the long haul. Even in the short term, these shortchanged programs have a record of helping citizens bring about concrete results — improving farmers’ land tenure, combating corruption, reducing violence against women, enhancing communities’ health or strengthening inputs into local governance, among other goals. They may not be as sexy as transforming a country’s government, but history indicates such programs actually work.
All told, the United States has poured about $100 billion into democracy aid over the past 40 years, mostly for large-scale, government-focused programs, often designed and implemented by international consulting firms.
However, despite far less funding, homegrown projects that draw on local knowledge — which foreign consultants and aid officials lack — and that help partner populations pursue economic, health, political or human rights priorities have proved far more successful.
In a related vein, U.S. support for free and fair elections — programs often carried out by American NGOs that provide election-oriented monitoring, advice and training — has yielded notable achievements. Such programs have protected electoral integrity in some instances and fueled successful drives to challenge corrupt results in others, including Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution.
With the exception of such dramatic electoral results, civil society support may not produce the seismic shifts that American officials seek. But neither has the top-down, institution-building approach that has fruitlessly gobbled up vast resources.
Authoritarians are strong until they’re not. History is littered with the downfalls of repressive regimes that once appeared firmly entrenched. Just recently, the world saw Vladimir Putin’s seemingly iron hold on power shaken by the corrupt forces he himself enabled.
Thus, the global pendulum may yet swing back toward democracy. Helping to make that happen, in however modest a manner, demands supporting the kinds of efforts that have worked in the past and rethinking those that have not.
These lessons apply at home as well. Even as we honor Independence Day, the health of our government institutions seems in question. But a vibrant civil society, a thriving free press and safeguarding elections can protect those institutions’ integrity, keeping the flames of political accountability burning and ensuring that our democracy endures.
This post was produced by Benicia resident Stephen Golub. Steve blogs about domestic and international politics and policy, including lessons that the United States can learn from other nations, at A Promised Land: America as a Developing Country. If interested, you may sign up for future posts by subscribing to the blog.
Read more from Steve by visiting his blog or clicking any of the links below.
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