“Never Again”? Look Around Before It’s Too Late

BAYEUX, France — A hard truth was brutally plain as reporters gathered near the Normandy beaches, a global crime scene in vivid memory, to celebrate their living and mourn their dead. “Never Again!” is an empty promise in the heart of Europe and across an imperiled planet.

In this noble little city that miraculously escaped allied bombing, heart-stopping images and eyewitness accounts made reality crystal clear: humanity is nearly out of time to save itself. Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine onslaught is the worst of it. But there is so much else.

For 29 years, the annual Bayeux Calvados-Normandy War Correspondents Awards has singled out reportage by insightful old pros and gutsy young ones with new skills. This time, entries far surpassed that overworked word of the day: horrific.

The irony defies belief. America waded in to help stop genocidal Nazis from ruling the world. Now a far different country may soon enable a seditious, bigoted, lying, isolationist Trump-besotted minority to destroy a 234-year-old democracy when it is so badly needed.

Elections next month, already corrupted by treachery in Republican-run states, could make the world safe for murderous despots, a fascistic far right and oligarchs who abandon principle for profit. A massive turnout can sweep them into history. And, still, that would only be a start.

Climate calamities push ever-larger human tides to besiege closed borders. But the immediate challenge is conflict. The military-industrial complex Dwight Eisenhower foresaw has waged unwinnable war since the 1960s, full-on or by proxy, with scant regard for millions who suffer.

America, though hardly the only culprit, has the wealth and wherewithal to wage peace. When diplomacy and targeted aid fail, muscular military coalitions need to confront threats before they spiral out of control. Solid up-close reporting is crucial to get that right.

Bayeux winners this year were mostly fresh faces. Ukrainians depicted their own tragedy. A Burkina Faso freelancer described rape and terror in a former bright spot on a dark continent; she wept on a video link at the award ceremony, overcome that the world had finally noticed.

A Sudanese Spiderman enthralled the jury with a 19-minute television piece for the Guardian that ended with optimism. A single brave soul can inspire revolution against tyranny. But not without support from outsiders who care. We’ll get back to Spidey; please read on.

Entries exuded a troubling foretaste of the future. With limited collective memory in today’s warp-speed world, little is learned from a tragic past. War is hell, all right, and it is part of human nature. Once allowed to start, its indelible scars are beyond calculation.

Post-war reports from Afghanistan describe a Taliban now far stricter than it was in 2001 when Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda — not the Taliban, and certainly not Iraq — attacked America.

The first newsreel, nearly 1,000 years old, was a 230-foot-long embroidered tapestry in the Bayeux Cathedral reporting the Norman conquest of England. Technology has improved since then. In an adjacent chapel this year, Mariupol was displayed in toe-curling horror.

Jerome Delay, my old Associated Press sidekick, put together 40 photos and eight videos from two AP Ukrainian laureates who hurried back to their war after the closing ceremony. Evgeniy Maloletka won best photo. “This is not a news story,” he told me later. “It is our life.” Mstyslav Chernov, a close second in the TV category, urged 1,500 people in the big tent not to lose interest in a long fight.

Other Ukrainians were unanimous: they will beat back Russia even without outside help. Vlada Liberov and her husband took wedding photos before turning toward combat. “It’s not even a question,” she said. “War is like that. One day everything is fine and then suddenly it isn’t.” If the world’s Putins are not stopped now, she warned, no one is safe anywhere.

In Bayeux, I always debrief colleagues who live the stories they cover. This year, Andrei Soldatov and his partner, Irina Borogan, joined the jury. They moved their essential news service, agentura.ru, to London after their books on Putin’s secret services rankled the Kremlin.

Andrei’s take: Putin is neither sick nor likely to be overthrown. Educated guesswork about his next steps is only that. Sanctions will take time to bite hard. And he is capable of anything when desperate.

Putin demonstrated who he is in Chechnya. By 2009, when he gave up trying to subdue the breakaway enclave, 10 percent of Chechens had been killed— more than 100,000. Grozny was pounded to rubble.

Bayeux weekends begin in a leafy grove with white columns listing journalists killed since World War II. The total had surpassed 2,000 when I first came 12 years ago, and there are a lot more now — 66 in 2021. One is Al Jazeera star Shireen Abu Akleh, Palestinian and American, shot in the West Bank. Her niece, Lena, gave a damning eulogy: It was deliberate murder.

Shireen was killed while among other reporters for no apparent reason by an Israeli bullet that struck her face above body armor marked “PRESS” in bold letters. After first blaming Palestinians, Israeli authorities admitted a “high possibility” that she was accidentally shot. No one has been held to account.

Having covered the unholy land off and on since the 1960s with Rosenblum in my byline, I find any opinion provokes knee jerks from various directions. But I had just watched Ken Burns’ “USA and the Holocaust” — all six paralyzing hours. That “possible accident” verdict hit me hard.

Jews have suffered from collective punishment and ghettoized isolation for millennia. Israel has the capacity to target terror cells without the overkill that reporters document at firsthand in the West Bank and Gaza. Growing anti-Semitism is mostly about politics, not religion.

My own stance is clear, not for spiritual reasons but because reporters deal in fact and context. Israel, as designed, was essential after the war. A well-armed democracy is a vital cornerstone in a nasty neighborhood. But the old David and Goliath story needs an update.

Those Abraham Accords mean diplomatic ties, trade and freer travel to some Arab states. But many see Palestinians pushed farther into apartheid.

The terrorism threat is real. Yet most Palestinians, hardly terrorists, live under leaders they don’t choose. Peace talks have failed repeatedly, with shared blame, but if a fair two-state solution can’t be found, it is hard to imagine Israel surviving in an increasingly hostile world.

Enough on that. Please send angry retorts to firstgoseeforyourself@gmail.com. Back to the Sudanese Spiderman and some hope.

Sudan, a tragic case for centuries, was an Ottoman slave-trade center until Egyptians conquered it in the 1800s. After wars with Islamist zealots, Britain moved in until independence in 1956. Sudan’s vast arable lands watered by the Nile could feed Africa. I went there in 1985 to cover a killer famine.

Most of Sudan is Arab. The government blocked food aid to Darfur in the west and to parts of the south where Bantu tribes predominate. The durable dictator was replaced by a worse one, Omar al-Bashir, who lasted 30 years until 2019. Interim leaders relaxed sharia law and allowed a taste of freedom. Then a new bunch cracked down hard.

Protesters roiled into city streets facing live fire, tear gas and water cannons that marked them with red dye. Leaderless, crowds began to wane. Luckless Sudan is a hard story to sell. But Phil Cox of Native Voice Films found a mysterious rabblerouser on a motorbike in a Spiderman suit.

Cox’s film follows the masked man as his following builds. At one point, a fatherly voice on the phone shouted: “Stop this Spidey shit. They’re looking for you. You’ll be killed.” But his best friend was among the many dead. He kept at it, and word spread fast.

In the end, he leads laughing kids up an ancient pyramid, and they chant after him: “No fear!” Then, living up to that, he unmasks and speaks to the camera. “I see a future where this generation can overcome the people responsible for this coup so everyone can have a decent life.”

That hasn’t happened yet. But groups like the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which funded Cox, help independents stay out there watching until it does. The question is how many people take note and push their governments to act.

Sudan is a sideshow. Ukraine is not. It all matters, and it is all drop-dead urgent. One Holocaust survivor put it simply to Ken Burns: the time to save democracy is before it is gone.

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Here is Spiderman: http://www.nativevoicefilms.com/