Hope On Those Normandy Beaches

BAYEUX, France — Each October this medieval gem of a town by those Normandy beaches takes stock of global realities that so many people refuse to see. The view has never been bleaker as a heedless world sleepwalks toward endgame.

Still, Bayeux is bulwark of sanity, a time capsule with a clear view of the present. Elders and kids alike fortify hope for a planet in urgent need of saving itself. I come up every year for recharge at the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy War Correspondent Prizes.

Time remains to snap awake and act. Yet nothing will change without trusted firsthand honest reporting about what is going wrong — and why.

Our jury of 40 includes reporters fresh from warfronts and forgotten places where people quietly suffer and die. We select words and images that fit human detail into broad context. Meantime, we learn from a thoughtful public how we can do better.

Correspondents mingle with more than 15,000 teenagers who ask probing questions before awarding their own prizes. Schoolkids mob photo exhibits and a huge tent for nightly insights and onscreen projections that reveal why war is hell.

Bayeux's cathedral houses the first newsreel, an embroidered tapestry that depicts the Norman conquest of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066. That sparked a thousand years of territorial warfare, now splintered into countless brutal conflicts.

Allied troops from the opposite direction stopped a malignant narcissist from turning democracy into despotism. Hitler's aim was ethnically purified societies ruled by big money with a perverse hypocritical version of Christianity.

Now there is Donald Trump. No Führer, he is a pathetic, sick manchild who grabs whatever catches his eye with no regard for others. Still, he uses the same big-lie racialist tactics to inflame the gullible and greedy with blood-libel distortions.

For the first time in my 14 years on the jury, grim reflection dimmed the late-night partying. So many faux journalists get things wrong, inadvertently or on purpose, that real ones question whether it is still worth wading into the thick of things.

It is. Yet American news organizations are cutting back. Elsewhere, foreign correspondents are a dying breed, literally as well as figuratively.

The wooded Reporters Memorial is a forest of 34 marble columns with 3,046 names of men and women put to death or cut down since World War II while trying to bear witness. Another 73 were added this year, with a moist-eyed tribute to Palestinians.

Gazan stringers swept the photo awards as they did last year. Israel bars outsiders from their besieged enclave, so "locals" brave fire at times targeted at them to picture their own families' plight in an onslaught that could have ended much sooner.

America's media mainstream lauded Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu for making peace. Reporters who overcame obstacles to cover the war know better. If anyone at Bayeux had a good word for their delays, duplicity or obvious future intent, I missed it.

Freeing the hostages was huge. Yet so much needless death, suffering and destruction preceded that. The war was effectively over more than a year ago. Joe Biden proposed a workable plan in mid-2024 with a path toward Palestinian autonomy.

Hamas agreed to terms. Israel kept pounding. Republicans and a strong Jewish lobby limited Biden's clout with Netanyahu. But Trump could have imposed a ceasefire on "day one" as he promised. Instead, he stood back as his old pal Bibi doubled down.

A separate dispatch will delve into complex unholy land strife. There is so much else to say.

Journalists committed to integrity, solid sources, ethics and observable fact are more vital than ever. But with so much now at stake, the job description that counts is reporter.

Analyzing news at a distance requires perceptive reporters close enough to see it and hear it. When a deviant American president floods shit on the citizens he is sworn to protect, they also need to smell it.

The Prix Bayeux started small in 1994 on the 50th anniversary of D-Day landings. It grew to international prominence under the mayor, Patrick Gomont, and Jean-Léonce Dupont, a former French senator who presides over Calvados département.

Dupont held the big tent in rapt attention at the closing ceremony, He is a Bayeux native who remembers better days, with American generosity and a serious approach to newsgathering. This was the essence of his alarm:

"Dare I admit I am disoriented, despondent...Is there a place today in this country, on this continent, in this world, for reasonable discourse when only 6.6 percent of the global population lives in fully functioning democracies?

"What to do when certain media only act on perceptions, if not to say emotions, to engage in the destruction of factual truth? What to do when even an image can no longer have any value and some media assist in totally effacing truth?

"How to react when influencers with millions of 'friends' can spread fake news with such efficient immediacy?"

There is no easy answer when electorates are ill-informed and easily swayed. A democratically elected government must produce tangible successes within a limited mandate. Dictatorships simply rig balloting to stay in power.

Far-right parties gain ground fast when democracies abandon the concept of "loyal opposition." Rather than compromise for the common good, they attract short-sighted voters with simplistic promises they have no intention, or capability, to keep.

President Emmanuel Macron faces stalemate without a legislative majority. As in much of Europe, domestic squabbling distracts from overriding threat of intractable war and climate collapse.

Europeans have learned reality the hard way. Most know why Vladimir Putin must be stopped at the Ukraine border and why Israel is at risk without some fair outcome for Palestinians. They see the need for alternative energy and free trade.

In America, the Republicans' scorched-earth tactics paralyze the nation best able to help a wayward world get back on track. Apathy and ignorance allow them to blame their failings on Democrats, who argue among themselves rather than forge a united front.

Seasoned correspondents watch this play out. Billionaires and big corporations exploit Trump's skill at masking mafia ruthlessness with conman charisma. Fading fast at 79, he may step side for their straw man, an articulately fork-tongued vice president.

If Trump makes it to 2028 and cannot manage to suspend elections, they stand a good chance of convincing voters that J. D. Vance is not what he is: an amoral chameleon eager to douse the lights on the world's once-admired "shining city on the hill."

However events play out, Trump has my vote for the most dangerous man the world has yet seen. A lot of past monsters qualify. But at the rate he is going, our planet is out of time to recover from the havoc he wreaks.

In Bayeux, when spirits flagged in the Hotel Lion d'Or bar, one word was enough to spark merriment. Nobel. Reporters know Trump had little or nothing to do with settling those eight wars he constantly boasts about. Few are wars; nothing was ended.

In some cases, he has made bad situations worse. Others are simply preposterous horse crap.

Trouble between Ethiopia and Egypt dates from the 1960s when the Soviets built Egypt's Aswan Dam on the Nile. I have followed developments on trips to both countries since the 1980s.

Egypt would wither without enough dependable Nile water. Ethiopia plans a massive dam that would limit the flow. In recent bilateral talks, diplomats might have been shouting. No one was shooting.

The peace prize is no infallible seal of approval. Trump obsesses over it because Barack Obama got one. In 2019, so did Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, a stone-cold killer who still pursues vicious fighting with Eritrea that he was honored for stopping.

Foreign leaders who shamelessly tout Nobel nominations to feed Trump's bottomless ego surely know better.

Print awards went to Wolfgang Bauer of Die Zeit and Declan Walsh of the New York Times for work in Sudan, on the Nile between Egypt and Ethiopia. Civil war raging since April 2023 has no end in sight. It is the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

At least 550,000 children have died of famine. Total casualties are only guesswork. Communications are cut off, and roads are too hazardous to travel. Relief is a thin trickle from aid workers whose own lives are at risk.

Sudan is larger than Texas, New Mexico and Arizona combined, but Trump somehow overlooks it. In 1985, I saw the beginnings in Darfur. Drought killed crops, and the Khartoum government blocked international food aid to ethnic minorities.

Dark-skinned Arab nomads on horses and camels — the Janjaweed — raided Bantu tribes' farms, murdering men and raping women. They are now part of the Rapid Support Forces, which battles Sudan's plundering, undisciplined national army.

The irony is tragic. Six months before all hell broke loose, the 2022 jury was smitten by "The Spider-Man of Sudan," a TV documentary. An upbeat activist dressed as "Spidey" rode his motorbike through Khartoum, then still intact, to bolster kids' spirit.

Diplomacy and targeted aid might have averted the conflict had the world been watching. The Times' Nicholas Kristof began covering Darfur in 2003 and kept returning to write columns he joked ruefully that only his mother read. Few others bothered.

Trump claims he ended 31 (or 35, his number varies) years of war between Congo and Rwanda. My Associated Press career abroad began in 1967 covering wars — some tribal, others for access to mineral riches — in those same places.

Many millions have died since then. Trump brought leaders to Washington for a meaningless accord, likely thinking of the wrong Congo. His visa ban on warring African states named Congo-Brazzaville, a smaller ex-French colony across the river.

That segues to immigration from poor African states and other places Trump calls shitholes.

Immigration is a perfect issue for fearful, inward-looking people who ignore reality. But rich nations can only reduce it by defusing conflicts, confronting climate collapse and helping families in poor countries to remain home where most would rather be.

When forced to leave, they do. Neither walls nor armed agents can stop the tide. Decent fathers who watch their children starve are pushed to become the terrorists and criminals that far-right politicians claim they already are.

It is simple enough. Fill a glass with water. Keep on filling. Try to stop the spillover by putting one finger anywhere on the rim. Then picture all those water drops as parents with children who they will do anything to protect.

Trump's pretend peace mongering at times makes things far worse. Yet lapdog faux journalists seldom ask questions, let alone push back, when Karoline Leavitt, the Bad Barbie press secretary, feeds them palpable lies.

His foreign aid cuts, indifference to deadly pathogens and America-only policies cause incalculable death. But he claims in delirious moments to have saved of tens of millions in Nobel-worthy dealmaking.

Just consider India and Pakistan, where he says nuclear-armed foes were at the brink of war. In fact, Malaysia brokered the deal, and the threat was nothing close to that.

The last thing those subcontinent neighbors want is a hot war at the top of the world in Kashmir, an idyllic setting they share. Hostilities break out repeatedly along the disputed border. Diplomacy gives them a way to back down and save face.

From Washington, India's Hindustan Times noted what is an obvious main reason Trump now favors Pakistan, infuriating Prime Minister Narendra Modi and pushing him closer to China and Russia. Don Jr. has growing cryptocurrency interests there.

A wider view puts sharp focus on the global danger of Trump's quixotic, greed-driven foreign dealings. Start with Leavitt's defense of his demolishing so much of the presidential mansion lent to him on a four-year lease.

She said Obama complained when he had to put up outdoor tents to feed an Indian delegation at a state-visit dinner. Tearing down the stately wood-paneled East Wing precincts would solve that problem.

In fact, Obama knew India would be a vital ally in a showdown with China, and its innovative society made it a valuable U.S. ally. What he said was this:

"In India, some of life's most treasured moments are often celebrated under the cover of a beautiful tent. It's a little like tonight...Under the stars, we celebrate the spirit that will sustain our partnership—the bonds of friendship between our people."

The only complaint came from Trump, whose offer back then to build a grand dining room was ignored. Now a vindicative small man is building his fool's gold Versailles, bulldozing an historic world icon, an elegant symbol of what America is meant to be.

What's next? A garish red sign on the façade that reads, "The White House"? At the rate he is going, that would be more accurate if the "it" in White was changed to "or."

When the Bayeux jury got to work, nothing about Trump approached levity. They all know the drill. Rewrite history and dumb down schools so new generations are easy to manipulate. But first and foremost, flood the zone with shit.

Politico's leak of secret exchanges among "Young Republicans" — some as old as 40 — shed light on Trump's hard core. They exulted about watching Jews burn, re-enslaving "watermelon eaters" and such. Some of them had jobs in government they still have.

House Speaker Mike Johnson laughed it off: boys will be boys. This sort of cynical, cruel, greed-driven ideology is highly contagious, and the United States is far from being the only source of it.

Bayeux offers hope that enough people can stand up while there is still time. This is drop-dead important. Without competent, truthful correspondents out on watch, we are deaf, blind and dumb in an imperiled world.