A Powerful, Opaque al-Qaeda Affiliate Is Rampaging Across West Africa

Members of the Ghana Immigration Service patrol their country’s porous border with Burkina Faso, inspecting cars crossing in Gwollu, Ghana. (Guy Peterson/For The Washington Post)

BY RACHEL CHASON AND ADRIAN BLANCO RAMOS

TUMU, GHANA (WASHINGTON POST) — In the space of just a few months, the al-Qaeda affiliate has overrun major cities in Burkina Faso and Mali, carried out the deadliest-ever attack on soldiers in Benin and expanded its hard-line Islamist rule across the region. No one knows when its fighters will strike next — or where they plan to stop.

After years spent quietly gaining strength, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) is now the most well-armed militant force in West Africa and among the most powerful in the world, according to regional and Western officials, with as many as 6,000 fighters under its command. Local strategies employed to combat JNIM are accelerating its rise, officials and experts say, as atrocities by West African forces have allowed the group to claim the moral high ground and legitimize its growing authority.

The United States has largely pulled back from — or been pushed out — of the fight, leaving in its wake a deepening security vacuum and mounting anxiety over JNIM’s aims and capabilities.

“They’re creating a proto-state that stretches like a belt from western Mali all the way to the borderlands of Benin. … It is a substantial — even exponential — expansion,” said Héni Nsaibia, West Africa senior analyst for the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project, or ACLED, a nonprofit research group.

JNIM, along with the rival Islamic State-Sahel Province, has turned the region into an epicenter of Islamist insurgency. The Institute for Economics & Peace’s annual index last year found 51 percent of terrorism deaths worldwide were in the Sahel, a vast, tumultuous region south of the Sahara that spans the breadth of Africa. The chaos ravaging the region has helped military officers seize power in coups — vowing to break with the West and restore calm.

But in most countries the security situation has only gotten worse. In 2024, Burkina Faso ranked as the nation most affected by terrorist violence for a second straight year, and Niger saw the largest increase in terrorism-related deaths globally. In a sign of JNIM’s southward spread, Togo reported the most terrorist attacks it its history; Benin has reported nearly as many deaths in the first three months of this year than in all of 2024.

Increasingly, experts say, JNIM’s informant and supply chain networks are stretching into stable nations such as Ghana, Senegal and Guinea. Governments fear their fighters could soon follow.

The Washington Post interviewed experts and officials in five countries to shed light on why the group is growing so fast — and what its end game might be. Reporters also traveled to the porous borderlands between Burkina Faso and Ghana, where tens of thousands have fled violence by JNIM and government forces, to speak to refugees about life under militant rule.

They recounted how gun-toting JNIM members burst into mosques in Burkina Faso in recent years, announcing that strict Islamic laws would be implemented, schools would be closed and state institutions would be targeted. Violating the rules, the extremists made clear, would carry a price. Nearly 6,000 civilians have been killed by the group in the past five years, according to ACLED data.

Refugees said that initially, they rejected the group outright. But their anger was redirected by the government’s response: a militia-led wave of killing targeting the Fulanis, a semi-nomadic, predominantly Muslim ethnic minority spread out across West Africa. Skeptical locals became eager recruits.

“They were afraid, and they ran to them,” said Amadou Diallo, a 69-year-old Burkinabe refugee, describing his three daughters and their husbands who joined JNIM after militia members killed scores of their fellow Fulani.

As the threat grows across West Africa, the region has largely fallen off the radar in Washington, according to interviews with four current and former U.S. officials. Like other officials in this story, they spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details.

American drones once flown from Niger — where U.S. troops were forced out last year by the country’s military junta — have been moved out of West Africa, according to two former U.S. officials with knowledge of the situation. They added that plans to relocate the drones to Ivory Coast and Benin have been scrapped.

There are now fewer than 200 troops in the region, mostly stationed in countries along the coast — down from about 1,400 as recently as 2023 — according to current and former officials.

The State Department press office said the U.S. “continues to work with various partners in West Africa to counter the scourge of terrorism from groups like [JNIM]" and noted that Will Stevens, a top American official in the region, recently visited Burkina Faso, Niger and Benin “to discuss the growing presence of violent extremist organizations.”

U.S. Africa Command (Africom) declined to comment. A spokesperson pointed to recent remarks by Gen. Michael E. Langley, the head of Africom, who emphasized that the U.S. was focused on helping African nations build the “self-reliance” to fight terrorism.

But the vast majority of programs run through the Global Fragility Act — a multiyear initiative intended to bolster stability in vulnerable West African countries — have been shut down by the Trump administration.

“JNIM is ascendant,” one of the former U.S. officials said. “In a region where we used to monitor what was happening, we no longer have the tools.”

Evolving tactics

JNIM, founded in Mali in 2017 as an umbrella organization combining four Islamist extremist groups, is headed by Iyad ag Ghali and Amadou Koufa, leaders of a 2012 uprising that saw separatists and Islamists take over much of the country’s north.

Ag Ghali belongs to the mostly Muslim Tuareg ethnic group, which has fought for decades to establish an independent state in northern Mali. Koufa is a Fulani preacher based in central Mali. The differences between the two men have given the group broad appeal — and contributed to uncertainty about its goals.

The group operates on a “franchise” model, experts say, tailoring its strategies to local customs and its recruiting to local grievances. But wherever its fighters go, they enforce a strict Salafist version of Islamic law.

Ali Diallo, a 53-year-old herder from Burkina Faso’s Boucle du Mouhoun region, was washing himself before prayers at his local mosque in 2023 when a group of bearded men wearing turbans forced him and other men inside and locked the door.

“I thought we were going to die,” Ali Diallo said, recalling that the men wore machine guns across their chests. “But two men stood where the imam usually stood and started preaching. They said their fight was with the government and their goal was to spread Islam, not to kill us.”

Shortly afterward, the extremists closed his children’s school. “We were angry,” said Asseta Diallo, his 19-year-old daughter. “We just started sitting at home.” Strict dress codes were enforced in the community, with veils required for women and short pants for men. Naming and wedding ceremonies were banned. Loud music too.

In its strongholds in central and southern Mali, experts say, the group has made agreements with communities that compel residents to adhere to JNIM’s rules and pay zakat, or taxes, in exchange for not being attacked. In recent months, these local pacts have allowed JNIM to shift its focus, and move its manpower, to neighboring Burkina Faso and coastal nations such as Benin.

“These guys are smart, sophisticated and evolving,” said Corinne Dufka, a veteran Sahel analyst based in Washington. “And now, there is a model for mainstreaming their political evolution.”

Some of JNIM’s senior figures, Dufka said, are looking to Ahmed al-Sharaa — the Syrian leader who has recast himself as a moderate after once being associated with al-Qaeda — as a potential model for their own trajectory.

When Sharaa’s rebel group overthrew the Assad regime last year, JNIM issued a statement of congratulations. And when Koufa was interviewed by a French journalist in October, he did not mention al-Qaeda, prompting speculation about a possible break with the group.

Western and West African officials and experts estimate JNIM has between 5,000 and 6,000 combatants but say a lack of intelligence makes it difficult to arrive at a definitive figure. Fighters have long targeted symbols of foreign influence in the region, including attacks against French and U.N. forces, and more recently have threatened Russian mercenaries fighting alongside Malian troops.

Aneliese Bernard, a former State Department adviser who now runs a private security firm working in West Africa, said the group has metastasized to such an extent that it now “directly impacts [U.S.] national security.”

And, she added, “they are expanding undeterred into the countries we have long considered robust security partners.”

Propaganda war

Military officers have staged coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger in response to the growing violence, promising an all-out war against the extremists. In Burkina Faso, President Ibrahim Traoré’s strategy has hinged on arming more than 50,000 militia members, who have committed scores of atrocities, rights groups say.

Each attack has become a recruiting opportunity for JNIM.

In March, in the town of Solenzo, Burkina Faso, government militias killed dozens of mostly Fulani civilians and filmed the aftermath, according to rights groups. Videos shared by the perpetrators on social media showed the dead, including women and children, piled into trucks.

In the days after the attack, JNIM released videos condemning the government. “These miscreants want us to fight back and kill innocent women and kids … which will lead to a civil war,” said one JNIM leader in another video. “Yet our fight is not to defend a country or an ethnicity, but religion instead.”

The videos were part a wider propaganda blitz by the group during Ramadan in March. Fighters in brightly colored headscarves were filmed in action at training camps, or reading from the Quran, guns propped in front of them.

Since 2019, the group has killed more than 5,800 civilians in the region, according to ACLED; about 9,600 civilians have been killed by regional militaries and government-allied militias. In areas where JNIM has achieved strong control, violent attacks against civilians tend to decline, analysts say

When Amadou Diallo, the 69-year-old Burkinabe refugee, learned that his daughters and their husbands had joined JNIM, he said he was so distraught that he stopped sleeping. But then, he said, he thought of his three cousins who had been killed by government militias. Village elders had told Fulani residents to leave, that they could no longer protect them.

“The alternative was death,” he said. “At least now I hope they are safe.”

A lucrative insurgency

Long-haul truck driver Yakubu Janwi travels across the region, a dangerous job that gives him a window into JNIM’s expanding influence. The group controls many of the major roads in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, he said; truck owners have cut deals with the militants to ensure drivers are not stopped.

During one dispute over payment, he said, JNIM members seized his truck full of tea and left him wandering in the bush. He was rescued by another driver about 24 hours later, he said, but it took his boss a full year to get the vehicle back.

The trucking agreements are just one strand in a complex web of illicit commerce that JNIM uses to finance its insurgency. Members are involved in gold mining in Burkina Faso and Mali, according to experts and a former member of the group. Others engineer massive cattle-rustling schemes, including in Ghana, run kidnapping networks or are involved in smuggling drugs and motorcycles.

Analysts say an increasingly large share of JNIM’s funding comes from the taxes levied on communities in Mali and Burkina Faso. Solidifying its base of operations has allowed the group to devote more resources to attacks in Benin, said Andrew Lebovich, a research fellow with the Clingendael Institute.

An ambush last month in the far north of the country killed 54 soldiers, the military said. Soldiers were caught off guard, according to a Benin military official: “It is hard to track their movement,” the official said.

JNIM is now actively recruiting in Benin, according to the official and experts. In the country’s far north, recruiters now openly present themselves to local leaders, as they did when they first moved into parts of Burkina Faso and Mali.

The group’s weapons come largely from the government forces it has defeated, according to a recent report by Conflict Armament Research. There have been so many of those defeats that JNIM has been able to amass a formidable arsenal of machine guns, drones and antiaircraft weaponry — and has demonstrated it can deploy them to deadly effect.

The looming threat

Last month, JNIM took control of Djibo, a regional capital in northern Burkina Faso — killing scores of soldiers and civilians and holding the city from 5 a.m. to 2 p.m. Fighters posed for pictures on the streets and in government offices, including under a photo of Traoré, and vowed they were coming for the young president.

At a recent U.S.-led military training in Tamale, in northern Ghana — a stand-alone Africom exercise spared from the Trump administration’s regional cuts — soldiers from Ghana, Benin and Ivory Coast said the images from Djibo circulated in their WhatsApp groups. JNIM is now top of mind across the region.

“They’re more violent, more organized and have more means,” said a military official from Ivory Coast. “They wanted to spread Islam at first, but now it seems like they want to get all the way to the sea.”

That theory was echoed by a U.S. official, who said the group sees its expansion as a kind of “manifest destiny,” and appears to be pushing for a route to the Atlantic, which would dramatically increase the reach of its smuggling networks.

Ghana, a nation of 33 million still seen as a bright spot of stability and democracy in West Africa, has not been attacked yet by JNIM. But officials from neighboring countries have told their Ghanaian counterparts to be on guard. Already, regional officials and experts said, JNIM is using Ghana to restock its supplies and rest its fighters after assaults in Burkina Faso.

Along the countries’ shared border, which is marked by narrow, sandy footpaths and potholed roads, a group of Ghanaian immigration officers are doing their best to patrol but said they need more resources.

Sixteen officers are tasked with guarding the 10-mile border. They can often hear the echo of gunshots on the other side. “Burkinabes cross every day, and they tell us what is happening there,” said Gabriel Afful, one of the officers.

Was he nervous about the future? Afful simply nodded.

Blanco Ramos reported from Madrid. Ayamga Bawa Fatawu and Ahmed Jeeri contributed to this report.

Trump Terminates Program Tracking Mass Abductions Of Ukrainian Children

President Donald Trump scolds Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during their contentious Oval Office meeting on Feb. 28. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

BY JOHN HUDSON

WASHINGTON (THE WASHINGTON POST) -- The Trump administration has terminated a U.S.-funded initiative that documents alleged Russian war crimes, including a sensitive database detailing the mass deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia, according to U.S. officials familiar with the directive and documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The move has barred the transmission of evidence to prosecutors pursuing multiple criminal cases, including the International Criminal Court’s landmark indictment of Russian President Vladimir Putin for what it has called the “unlawful transfer” of children from occupied areas of Ukraine, U.S. officials said.

Researchers and experts involved in the initiative, spearheaded by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, were informed last month that the State Department had quietly terminated their contract — one of thousands eliminated at the behest of Trump appointee Peter Marocco and the U.S. DOGE Service, the budget-slashing arm of tech billionaire Elon Musk.

At that time, the researchers lost access to a trove of information, including satellite imagery and biometric data tracking the identities and locations of as many as 35,000 children from Ukraine.

Most alarming to U.S. lawmakers briefed on the matter is the suspected deletion of the research lab’s database amid the scramble to comply with the administration’s termination notice — an action likely to set back efforts to find the missing children and hold to account those responsible for their abduction.

“We have reason to believe that the data from the repository has been permanently deleted,” a group of lawmakers led by Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) warned in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. “If true, this would have devastating consequences.”

“This vital resource cannot be lost,” says a copy of the letter, obtained by The Post.

Another fear, lawmakers say, is that if the database were relocated rather than deleted, its contents now may be compromised and the digital forensic evidence inadmissible in court.

A State Department spokesperson confirmed that funding for the initiative had been terminated but refused to answer whether the data had been deleted or compromised, referring “any questions” to MITRE, the nongovernmental organization that manages the initiative’s database.

When contacted, MITRE also refused to answer questions about the database’s status, referring questions back to the “Dept. of State.”

A Yale University spokesperson confirmed that funding for the database has been “discontinued” but would not say if the database remains intact.

Researchers who have spent years collecting and synthesizing data for the initiative, known as the Conflict Observatory, say the stakes are high.

“The Trump administration, through either its incompetence or its intent, has now cast doubt on the validity of three years and $26 million of taxpayer-funded war crimes evidence,” said a researcher on the project who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

There are implications also for President Donald Trump’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said any agreement to stop the fighting must include Russia’s return of missing Ukrainian children and accountability for those responsible for their abduction. Rubio also recently told reporters that the return of the children would be an important issue to “unravel.”

Trump and Putin on Tuesday held a call to discuss a ceasefire proposal and efforts to restore U.S.-Russia relations. Since returning to office, Trump has taken a critical view of Zelensky, calling him a “dictator” and accusing him of starting the conflict despite Russia’s role in initiating hostilities.

The Observatory, overseen by the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, began researching alleged Russian war crimes in May 2022, months after the war began. Yale’s work with the Observatory produced 13 public reports on Russia’s actions during its invasion of Ukraine and contributed to six ICC indictments against Russian officials, including Putin.

Former secretary of state Antony Blinken hailed the Observatory as a critical resource to “capture and shine a light on open-source evidence of Russia-perpetrated war crimes and other atrocities being committed in Ukraine.”

In 2023, ICC judges issued an arrest warrant for Putin and the country’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, saying the two bore individual responsibility for the war crimes of “unlawful deportation” and “unlawful transfer” of children from occupied areas of Ukraine.

The move was largely symbolic since Russia, like the United States, does not accept the ICC’s jurisdiction. But the warrant has created difficulties for Putin traveling to countries that cooperate with the court. It also gave credence to Ukraine’s long-standing claims that Russia has carried out the removal of thousands of children from Ukrainian territory.

The forced relocation of Ukrainian children to Russia or deeper into Russian-controlled territory has become one of the most fraught issues over the past three years of the war. In 2022, Putin issued a decree making it quicker and easier for Russians to adopt Ukrainian children. Lvova-Belova is among the Russians who have adopted a Ukrainian child since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Russia has long insisted it is moving children out of front-line areas to protect them, often sending them to summer camps in occupied Crimea or coastal regions of Russia. Ukraine describes the process of moving children to Russia as an attempt to erase their Ukrainian identity and indoctrinate them with Russian ideologies.

The Observatory’s repository includes detailed dossiers, photos, names and other metadata related to children from Ukraine being adopted and fostered by Russia. Researchers believe the dossiers will be critical for returning the children.

The repository was in the process of being transferred to Europol, a European Union law enforcement agency, to assist law enforcement agencies inside and outside Ukraine in the prosecution of crimes. But the Trump administration’s termination of the program last month blocked the data transfer before it could be completed.

“This data is absolutely crucial to Ukraine’s efforts to return their children home,” wrote a group of U.S. lawmakers, including Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin (Maryland), Jim McGovern (Massachusetts), Nikema Williams (Georgia), Tom Suozzi (New York) and others.

The lawmakers said the Observatory provides an “essential service” that “does not require the transfer of weapons or cash to Ukraine.”

“We must, immediately, resume the work to help Ukraine bring these children home,” they said.

Even if the funding to the Observatory is restored, the integrity of its data repository remains in question.

In some cases, the Observatory found evidence that Ukrainian children were present in Russia from information on Russian websites. The data was meticulously collected so that it could be used as evidence, even if the names of children and information were later deleted from the Russian websites.

“Capturing the version of a digital artifact’s metadata at the time it was deemed relevant to an alleged crime is the basis of being able to admit it in a court of law,” said the researcher.

During a listening session with State Department employees last month, Marocco, the official in charge of foreign assistance, cited the $13 million spent on the Yale-led initiative as an example of “waste,” according to notes taken by a meeting attendee and obtained by The Post.

Termination of the program, reported earlier by news outlets the i Paper and the New Republic, comes as the Trump administration seeks to improve relations with Moscow in the hopes of ending the war in Ukraine, which has killed and injured hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the conflict and cost the U.S. billions of dollars in support for Kyiv.

To accelerate his bid for a ceasefire, Trump has dispatched his senior envoy, Steve Witkoff, to Russia multiple times and approved early-stage talks with Russian officials in Saudi Arabia several weeks ago.

Trump’s Justice Department also recently decided to withdraw the United States from a multinational group designed to hold officials in Russia, Belarus, North Korea and Iran responsible for crimes in Ukraine, the New York Times reported.

While Trump’s supporters have backed his diplomatic push, his termination of the Observatory has disturbed some of his political allies, including conservative Christian organizations that have called for the administration to reverse its decision.

“The abduction of children strikes a nerve that I hope will help awaken more Americans to the horrors of the Russian invasion and occupation of parts of Ukraine,” Galen Carey, vice president of government relations at the National Association of Evangelicals, told The Post. “I hope, too, that the funding cutoff will be seen as a mistake and quickly corrected.”

Washington Post’s Turnaround On Its Opinion Pages Is Returning Journalism To Its Partisan Roots − But Without The Principles

BY JOSEPH JONES

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF MEDIA

ETHICS AND LAW AT REED COLLEGE
OF MEDIA, WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY

Jeff Bezos, the world’s third-richest person and owner of The Washington Post, announced in February 2025 significant changes to the editorial pages of his Pulitzer-Prize winning newspaper.

The editorial section, also called the opinion section, is where editors and contributors with a deep and broad understanding of the latest news offer their analysis of the day’s issues. This content is distinct from the fact-based news reporting of the outlet’s everyday journalists.

Both kinds of content serve the public interest. Journalists report news to inform the public, while editors and opinion writers analyze and explain news, putting facts into a larger context to aid understanding.

At the Post, instead of news editors making independent decisions on what to write and the perspectives they should take, Bezos tweeted, “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

Opinion and analysis in the Post was thus going to limit itself to one particular viewpoint.

As a journalism historian, I analyze how journalism has changed over time. Over the years, the purpose, practices and forms of journalism have evolved.

Bezos’ decision harks back to an earlier time when editors and owners were the same person, and newspapers offered a specific interpretation of the world, not just a neutral report.

Informed opinions and analysis

While editorial writers and opinion columnists offer their opinions, these views are still expected to be grounded in journalistic principles, building from verifiable facts and comprehensively considering context to offer well-reasoned analysis.

Many of today’s news editors and journalists stake their professional reputations on their obligation to truth, independent of special interests or particular ideologies. They pride themselves on reporting and explaining the news without fear or favor.

After Bezos’ announcement, editorial page editor and veteran journalist David Shipley resigned from his position. Shipley told his staff he was stepping down “after reflection on how I can best move forward in the profession that I love.”

Journalists and media critics from across the political spectrum read Bezos’ editorial policy change as going against the tradition of a paper that long prided itself on editorial independence in the name of public service. Historically, the newspaper’s opinion section offered a range of views on a variety of issues.

Limiting the newspaper’s opinion section to a single viewpoint, critics argue, doesn’t seem to align with the Post’s slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” as it stifles public discussion and purposefully turns off some of the lights.

Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron told the Guardian, “If you’re trying to advance the cause of democracy, then you allow for public debate, which is what democracy is all about.”

Putting all of this in historical context can help illuminate Bezos’ decision as well as the current state of American media.

Opinionated early American journalism

At the nation’s founding, the very first newspapers were highly partisan, supporting and receiving much of their funding from particular political parties and government subsidies. Newspapers were small operations where editors, owners, writers and typesetters were usually all the same person.

As the country and its political direction were just forming, these editor-owners felt a public obligation and duty to stake out a clear political position. There were no standards of journalistic neutrality; editor-owners framed news reports, wrote columns and published other people’s opinions based on their own particular viewpoints.

Editors wrote passionately, using language that suggested the fate of the nation was at stake. They were also principled and willing to criticize their own parties if they thought it warranted. And because they were transparent about their views, readers responded by gravitating to their preferred newspapers. Consequently, the number of newspapers in the U.S. increased from 35 in 1783 to 1,200 by 1833. Historians have thus argued that the early United States was a “nation of newspaper readers.”

Unlike modern notions of journalistic impartiality, if a newspaper didn’t support a political party or remained neutral, it was dismissed by readers as either lacking morals or being too stupid to form an opinion.

As newspapers of the early republic developed from reporting recycled news from other sources to guiding public discussion, the editorial thus emerged as a short opinion essay separate from reports on local speeches or foreign news.

Fact-based journalism and informed analysis

For various reasons, the partisan press gave way to a journalism that attempted wider appeal. By 1900, many news outlets aimed for impartiality and neutrality.

By the 1920s, most journalists embraced the ideals of objectivity, the notion that journalists should only report facts.

Interestingly, this led to a growth in editorials, opinion columns and news analysis.

Opinion columns written by journalists provided interpretive frameworks for readers to understand the meaning of news events. One such journalist-commentator was Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), a political analyst who wrote a number of influential columns, including a piece infamously viewed as a catalyst for Japanese internment during World War II.

Such content provided journalists a means to show their independence from the powerful. Journalists could commit themselves to truth and verifiable facts while still asserting their independent role to contextualize news, explain its implications and guide the conversations necessary for democracy.

Research has shown that such opinion-based news content can influence what citizens and media outlets prioritize as important, as well as how policymakers approach certain issues.

Today, especially with the increase in partisan television, radio and internet outlets, there is no shortage of opinion-based news and analysis.

As long as people stay empathetic and open to others with different experiences, this is not inherently bad for democracy. Problems arise, however, when opinionated news outweighs fact-based reporting and people begin to mistrust all reporting they do not agree with, a psychological phenomenon known as confirmation bias.

In today’s digital world, everyone can broadcast or publish their opinion, whereas fact-based reporting takes time and resources. While news analysis and thoughtful opinion can generate important social conversations and help citizens understand news, too much opinion that isn’t grounded in facts can also lead to a general atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion. This spells trouble for the good-faith understanding, open dialogue and mutual trust so vital to democracy.

Profiting from polarization

Polling data suggests Americans are more divided than ever.

Perhaps Washington Post owner Bezos is simply responding to the public’s documented preference for partisanship over truth or to the profitability of partisan news.

But as a matter of context, there is a difference between the principled partisans of the early republic, the professional analysts of the 20th century, and an owner who demands his media outlet’s opinions should be limited to his preferences.

When he purchased The Washington Post in 2013, Bezos said the newspaper would not change and that “the paper’s duty will remain to its reader and not to the private interests of its owners.”

In this latest move, he has signaled that his private interest is a priority, at least for the editorial section. This limits the perspectives the Post-reading public can encounter and restricts the free marketplace of ideas. So when a Post journalist of 40 years wrote a column opposing Bezos’ editorial decision, her bosses refused to publish it.

Apparently, light criticism was not a “personal liberty” afforded a longtime employee. With her beloved employer not even willing to discuss the column – discussion being the cornerstone of deliberative democracy – the veteran journalist resigned.

In the current media environment, organizations and people who don’t participate in news production or share its values can purchase journalistic outlets and alter their standards and practices. As a result, principled journalists may decide to leave rather than compromise their mission of public service.

Ultimately, Bezos is being transparent. It is thus up to the American people to decide on the kind of journalism and pursuit of truth they desire. It’s worth noting that tens of thousands of canceled subscriptions have already begun to make that decision clear.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

In ‘Citizen,’ Bill Clinton Gives His Side Of The Story

BY JONATHAN ALTER, WASHINGTON POST

“I couldn’t sleep for two years after the [2016] election. I was so angry, I wasn’t fit to be around,” Bill Clinton writes with rare self-awareness in his new memoir. “I apologize to all those who endured my outbursts of rage which lasted for years and bothered or bored people who thought it pointless to rehash things that couldn’t be changed.”

“Citizen” subordinates the rage to reason, and the rehash includes many ingredients that have been ignored or intentionally distorted by critics on both the left and right. We hear his side of the story on such topics as the controversial crime and welfare bills, the Wall Street deregulation of the 1990s and the Clinton Foundation, which has been dogged by questions. Although the book is full of humble and not-so-humble brags, the authentic Clinton comes through: smart, charming and — most of the time — convincing. This is the most unvarnished view we will probably get of a former president, now 78, who doesn’t care if you think he’s too wonky about his good deeds and too defensive when trying to set the record straight.

It’s not surprising that Clinton is still furious at former FBI director James B. Comey for insisting during the 2016 campaign that Hillary Clinton had been “extremely careless” in handling her emails and for briefly announcing a new investigation of her just before the election. He makes a good case that the New York Times embarrassed itself by getting in bed with a right-wing muckraker (author Peter Schweizer) and grossly over-covering the emails story. Clinton argues persuasively that a combination of Comey, the Times and Russian meddling cost Hillary her six-point lead in late October and gave the world President Donald Trump.

But 2016 is only one of many things that still tick Clinton off. He’s annoyed that he was pressed on NBC News to apologize personally — instead of generally — to Monica Lewinsky (whose good works he praises); eager to confirm that he never visited Jeffrey Epstein’s island and, contrary to rumors, never ditched his Secret Service detail or staff when traveling on Epstein’s plane in 2002 and 2003; and scathing about Republicans changing their tunes after hiding behind their desks on Jan. 6, 2021. “Trump asked them the question we’ve all heard in bad jokes,” he writes. “‘Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?’ Those who looked to Trump and said, ‘You, Master,’ lived to fight another day.”

But mostly the former president focuses on the positive. In his first interview after leaving office in 2001, he told me that he planned to use his “convening power” to make a better world. And he has. Even when he fails, he’s determined to “get caught trying,” his apt description of his postpresidential approach.

But where Jimmy Carter is lionized for his post-presidency, Clinton has been more often maligned. That’s partly because, unlike Carter, he has done well financially (thanks to paid speeches) while doing good, and partly because of debunked charges that the Clinton Global Initiative was just a cover for using Hillary’s position as the early 2008 front-runner and, later, as secretary of state to rake in cash. The messy distractions have obscured Clinton’s talent for forging partnerships that save and improve millions of lives.

This inspiring story began after a 2001 earthquake killed some 20,000 people in India, the first of several natural disasters that brought out the best in Clinton. He helped establish the American India Foundation, which built houses, schools and hospitals, created job training programs and became a template for his role as a kind of global coordinator in chief. After both the 2004 Christmastime tsunami in South Asia and, just months later, Hurricane Katrina in the United States, Clinton joined with former president George H.W. Bush in spearheading U.N. relief efforts. The two men, who had squared off in the 1992 election, formed an unusual bond.

In 2010, a huge earthquake killed some 200,000 people and destroyed much of Haiti, where the Clintons had gone on their honeymoon 35 years earlier. As president, Clinton almost invaded it. After the quake, still fascinated by the place, Clinton made 38 trips there. Despite corruption, cronyism and government incapacity there, he’s proud of what he and others accomplished: “Donald Trump was wrong; there are no ‘s__hole’ countries.” And Clinton hasn’t forgotten about the Trump campaign incorrectly claiming that he and Hillary were somehow involved in the suicide of a former Haitian government official.

Clinton’s discursive style reads in places like a warmhearted Wikipedia. But the brief digressions — on things such as the problems of the Puerto Rican electric utility system and the caloric content of beverage options in high school cafeterias — are usually welcome. Although we don’t get much irony — and never have with Clinton — it’s fun to hear how Stephen Colbert taught him to use social media, and sad to read that he cried for a half-hour after hearing of the death of Paul Farmer, the renowned humanitarian physician who helped build a hospital in Rwanda, where Clinton worked hard to atone for sitting on his hands during the genocide there when he was president.

Clinton’s greatest achievement since leaving the White House has been his successful effort to reduce the extremely high cost of antiretroviral AIDS medications, which eventually turned HIV from a death sentence into a chronic disease. Under the leadership of Clinton and Ira Magaziner, the Clinton Health Access Initiative worked with drug companies and some 125 countries to push the generic price of treatment down to 37 cents a day, setting the stage for foundations and government programs to begin pouring big money into saving millions of lives. Soon, the Clintons took what they learned and applied it to other health policy and environmental challenges.

Clinton didn’t invent the idea of requiring attendees at fancy nonprofit conferences to make specific commitments instead of just yakking. But, starting in 2005, he used that structure to help change global philanthropy. I remember being struck by how few reporters joined me in covering the Clinton Global Initiative, which takes place in New York every September. Some in the press were suspicious of conflicts of interest, particularly when Russian oligarchs began posing as philanthropists, an episode Clinton skips in the book. But CGI was more than on the level. Clinton reports that more than 3,600 commitments (on such things as water purification packets, micro-lending and clean cookstoves) improved the lives of roughly 500 million people in 180 countries.

Jonathan Alter is the author of “American Reckoning: Inside Trump’s Trial—and My Own.”

He Didn’t Know What A Sonnet Was. Now He’s Won A Major Poetry Prize.

Ajibola Tolase has won this year’s Cave Canem Prize. His debut collection of poetry, “2,000 Blacks,” will be published in the fall. (Courtesy of Cave Canem)

BY SOPHIA NGUYEN

Sitting in class on his first day at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Ajibola Tolase thought: I don’t stand a chance in this room.

He wanted badly to be a poet, but it was instantly obvious, he said, that “I had no education in poetry.” The other students in his master of fine arts program had gone to Stanford, Harvard, the University of Chicago, studying English or something like it. Tolase had a statistics degree from the Federal University of Agriculture in Abeokuta, Nigeria. The culture shock, he said over a recent Zoom call, was nearly as stark as the cold. (“It’s not even freezing yet!” Midwesterners informed him cheerfully that fall.)

“When they talk, they know things. When we’re reading books, they have terms to describe things,” Tolase, 29, recalled of his classmates. “‘Anaphora.’ I had not heard the word ‘anaphora’ before. Our first assignment was to write in blank verse. At that time, I had not written in any meter. I’m like, ‘First I have to figure out what iambic pentameter is.’”

Five years later, Tolase has been awarded the Cave Canem Prize, putting him in a storied literary lineage. The Cave Canem fellowship, founded in 1996 to nurture Black poetry, boasts a network that includes the winners of six Pulitzers and five National Book Awards. This prize alone has launched the careers of two U.S. poets laureate: Tracy K. Smith and Natasha Trethewey. By winning it, Tolase has also secured publication for his debut collection: The University of Pittsburgh Press will release “2,000 Blacks” in the fall.

Tolase grew up working-class in Ibadan, Nigeria, the son of a teacher and a government accountant. “There was no wealth at all,” he said. “There was barely any income, in fact.” At age 10, he was sent to government boarding school, where room and board were free, but he was bullied for being the shortest kid in class. His parents switched him to a different, wealthier school, where he was spared any bullying but had little in common with his classmates. He took to writing poems, sticking around his literature classroom during lunch breaks.

From there, he jokes, came a string of failures and reinventions. He wanted to be an engineer, but his exam scores were too low. He reluctantly studied statistics and wasn’t much good at it. He started a literary press with some friends, which foundered. Like many young Nigerians, he struggled to find work; nearly a quarter of the country’s population was unemployed. He tried joining the navy — no dice. So he applied for an entry-level position at a bank in Lagos and to two poetry programs in the United States. (He couldn’t afford the application fees for more schools.)

“My parents wanted me out of the house,” said Tolase. So when he did get that banking job, “I just lied to them.”

Luckily, he got into the University of Wisconsin at Madison that spring and landed in the United States in summer 2019. He learned what a sonnet was, and the difference between a Petrarchan one and a Shakespearean one. But as he graduated and headed to a fellowship at Stanford, he also got a parallel education in the forces that had shaped his world.

The Bay Area’s wealth disparity was so stark, he said, that a thought began to sink in: “You are in this room because someone chose that you’re going to be the one that’ll come into this room.”

This led him to exploring ideas about access and its denial, and about the flow of resources between Africa and the West over the centuries, from the transatlantic slave trade to migration patterns today. This theme recurs in the poems that make up “2,000 Blacks,” as in the first part of a sequence titled “Refuge Sonnets”:

I step into the new world and people stare at me. They want
to ask how I arrived here, and if it’s true I brought desert sand
with me, but they are afraid I don’t speak clearly or they are afraid
I’ll ask the same of them. “Who is your father? What did he do?”
So, we avoid each other. I live in their imagination as the wild man
who has crossed the Sahara to take from their bequeathal. This might be
why they drown me, even if they don’t, I’ll still avoid water.

The other current running through the collection is more personal: Several poems sketch out the life story of Tolase’s father, who during tumultuous periods lived outside their family home. These poems were attempts to understand his father’s anger, Tolase said: “Naturally he will read the book. I hope he doesn’t think about it as a judgment.”

Asked whether he’s spending the time, pre-publication, steeling himself for some tough talks, Tolase sounded amused and dismissive: “We are Africans. We don’t have difficult conversations with parents. You want closure with your father? Your father doesn’t want closure with you.”

For now, as a creative-writing fellow at Colgate University, he relishes giving his own students assignments designed to teach them form and meter and how to scan lines of verse: “I have fun watching them suffer through it.”

----------WASHINGTON POST

U.S. Struggles For Influence In West Africa As Military Juntas Rise

Leader of Mali's ruling junta Lt. Col. Assimi Goïta, center, attends an independence day military parade in Bamako, Mali, on Sept. 22, 2022. Mali’s military junta leader on Jan. 6, 2023, pardoned 49 soldiers from neighboring Ivory Coast who were convicted of undermining Mali’s state security and conspiracy against the government. (AP File)

BY RACHEL CHASON AND MICHAEL BRNBAUM

NIAMEY, NIGER (WASHINGTON POST) — U.S. officials are waging urgent diplomatic efforts in West Africa, searching during public tours and private meetings for ways to partner with military governments in a region where violence wrought by Islamic extremists is soaring and Russia’s influence is expanding.

But the officials have struggled at times to articulate what that partnership would look like, especially since the types of assistance the U.S. government can legally provide has been curtailed after the ousting of democratically elected governments by soldiers in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, according to interviews with a dozen current and former U.S. officials, analysts and activists.

The stakes are especially high in Niger, where the United States has deployed more than 1,000 soldiers and operates a drone base that officials say is vital for surveillance of extremist groups in the Sahel region, which runs across Africa just below the Sahara Desert.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Molly Phee, the State Department’s top official for African affairs, said she did not mince words when she traveled to Niamey, Niger’s capital, in December to negotiate with Niger’s prime minister and other cabinet members. Phee said that she urged Niger’s junta to rebuild its relations with other countries, particularly with the regional bloc of West African states known as the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, which is seen as an ally in efforts to restore democracy in the region. And she stressed that U.S. assistance would remain suspended until Niger sets a timeline for restoring democracy.

“We made the choice as stark and clear as we could,” Phee recalled.

But in the two months since that meeting, Niger has largely moved in the opposite direction. The government has yet to announce a timeline for holding elections and continues to detain the democratically elected President Mohamed Bazoum under house arrest.

Niger exited ECOWAS last month after nearly 50 years along with Mali and Burkina Faso, and they created their own Alliance of Sahel States, deepening the rift in West Africa between the three military-led nations and those with democratically elected presidents. On Sunday, an official with ECOWAS announced that sanctions against Niger had been lifted, marking a softening of the bloc’s position as it pushes for the three nations to rescind their decision.

Meanwhile, Russia continues to make gains in the region. Phee’s visit to Niger came just after Russia’s deputy defense minister, Yunus-bek Yevkurov, signed new security agreements with the junta. In Burkina Faso, more than 100 Russian soldiers with Africa Corps — headed by Yevkurov and described by Russian officials as the successor group to the Wagner mercenary group — have arrived in the past two months. In Mali, analysts estimate that more than 1,000 Russian soldiers, initially with Wagner and now with the Africa Corps, are fighting alongside Malian forces against separatists and Islamic extremists.

During a trip last month that included stops in Ivory Coast and Nigeria, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters that the State Department was “intensely focused on challenges to security in the region, in the Sahel.” He warned regional countries of the consequences of deepening ties with Russia, noting that those that worked with Wagner have seen problems “get manifestly worse and worse and worse.”

Gen. Michael E. Langley, who heads U.S. military operations in Africa, said in an interview that it would be up to policymakers to determine how much of a Russian presence in Niger could be countenanced before the United States adjusts its troop presence.

While the United States is pushing to continue its operations in Niger, Langley said the Defense Department is also “exploring its options” for new security agreements with other West African countries, including Ghana, Togo, Benin and the Ivory Coast. He noted they are starting to see violence in the Sahel “metastasize over their borders.” The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the United States was holding preliminary talks about positioning American reconnaissance drones at airfields in Ghana, Ivory Coast and Benin.

The air base in northern Niger, which was built six years ago for $110 million, has been vital for monitoring extremist groups connected to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, which have increasingly made Africa, rather than the Middle East, their main theater, Langley said. Since the Niger coup in July, activity at the base has been limited to surveillance for protection of U.S. forces.

Langley warned that if the United States closed the drone base, the move would be “impactful” in Niger and the region, and for the United States’ broader counterterrorism strategy. “If we can’t see, we can’t sense,” he said. “If we lose our footprint in the Sahel, that will degrade our ability to do active watching and warning, including for homeland defense.”

J. Peter Pham, a former U.S. special envoy for the Sahel region, said the United States is hamstrung in negotiations with African countries, especially those run by military juntas, because it cannot offer as much as Russia in security support, including weapons and personnel on the ground.

“It is sort of like the doctor that diagnoses you with the disease but then refuses to write the prescription,” said Pham. “If we are not willing to write the script or give the drug, then we can’t really complain about the patient who goes to someone else who does dispense a remedy, however noxious.”

When soldiers in Mali ousted their president in 2020, the first in the recent spate of coups in the Sahel, the U.S. State Department immediately froze security assistance. But Pham said he remained in close communication with Mali’s military leaders, including meeting monthly with interim president Assimi Goïta.

Pham, who left his post in 2021 and has not been replaced, said the relationship between the United States and Mali deteriorated in part because of a State Department decision in 2021 to block the sale of a transponder for an unarmed transport plane sought by the Malian government. This effectively killed the purchase, Pham said, leading Mali to look at aircraft offered by Russia. Later that year, Pham noted, Wagner soldiers arrived in the country, and Malian officials became increasingly isolationist, asking the French military — which for years been running counterterrorism operations in Mali — to leave in 2022 and the United Nations to close its mission last year.

The United States then shifted its diplomatic focus to Burkina Faso, which experienced two coups in 2022 but was seen then as more amenable than Mali to setting a timeline for restoring democracy and less interested in working with Russia. A delegation from the White House, Pentagon and State Department that visited Burkina Faso in October warned President Ibrahim Traoré that working with Wagner would constitute a red line.

Senior officials at the State Department and Pentagon were pushing as recently as last summer for a nonlethal security assistance package for Burkina Faso’s military, arguing that the threat posed by the Islamist insurgency required action despite concerns about human rights violations by its military and allied militia forces. But such plans appeared to stall following the Niger coup.

Then, last month, a contingent of 100 members of Russia’s Africa Corps deployed to Burkina Faso to “ensure the safety of the country’s leader, Ibrahim Traoré, and the Burkinabe people from terrorist attacks,” with another 200 military personnel from Russia to arrive soon, according to the group. Traoré said last month in an interview with journalist Alain Foka that Russians were providing training and equipment but were not yet fighting on the ground, although they would if necessary.

Without naming the United States, Traoré criticized countries that claim to be friends of Burkina Faso but say they cannot sell lethal weapons. “Where is the friendship?” he asked. With Russia, he added, there are no restrictions on arms sales, and it sells Burkinabe soldiers “whatever we want.”

In Niger, some residents said the benefits of the American military presence has never been clear, while they can see that the Russians have helped Mali take back territory from rebels. “We want the Russians to come,” said Maria Saley, an activist in Niamey. “We are waiting for them, waiting for them eagerly.”

Until the coup, Niger had been the bright spot in the region, with democratic rule and effective military cooperation with France and the United States.

A few weeks before Niger’s military leaders took power, Langley was at a conference in National Harbor, just outside D.C., with the U.S.-trained Nigerien Gen. Moussa Barmou. At that time, Langley recalled, Barmou was espousing “his commitment to democracy and civilian governance and counterterrorism.”

But on July 26, Barmou was among the coup leaders. “It was very much a surprise to me that this happened,” Langley said.

Barbra Streisand’s Memoir Is Long And Dishy. Here Are The Highlights.

 

BY LOUIS BAYNARD

In ‘My Name Is Barbra,’ the singer and actress opens up about her life before and since becoming a star'

In case you haven’t heard, Barbra Streisand’s memoir, decades in the making, has just landed like a meteorite in a bookstore near you. It is 970 pages long. (The audiobook is 48 hours.) I have spent the past several days reading it, so perhaps you don’t have to, though there is a lot to love in it (for everyone but Mandy Patinkin and some others). Here are some thoughts and highlights plucked from the sprawl.

Books that are (just) longer than ‘My Name Is Barbra’

“A la récherche du temps perdu,” by Marcel Proust.
“Atlas Shrugged,” by Ayn Rand.
“Battlefield Earth,” by L. Ron Hubbard.
“Infinite Jest,” by David Foster Wallace.

Why ‘My Name Is Barbra’ is so long

Because (a) she has a heap more cultural mileage than Britney Spears, who, at 41, just brought out the season’s other big pop-star memoir, and because (b) she came up alongside Bob Dylan and the Beatles, when America was getting its rock-and-roll on, and she was all Broadway and Great American Songbook, and (c) it should never have worked, but it did, and (d) she wound up being the only recording artist to have a No. 1 album across six consecutive decades, and (e) along the way, she became one of our biggest movie stars and … see, if I need to explain the relevance of this doorstop, it’s probably not for you in the first place.

Nor is it for you if you voted for Donald Trump (“a one-man weapon of mass destruction”) or recoil at extended Clinton-family anecdotes (“That’s when I bumped into Hillary’s mom”) or lack a certain curiosity about how “The Prince of Tides” was made. Also, you must let Barbra brag on herself, not directly but in the form of an ongoing fount of testimonials from the many people who have been touched by her, and you are one of them, because, when it comes to loving Barbra, you are, to quote the title of her biggest-selling album, guilty. And you are wondering how, given her well-documented perfectionism and her official status as lone author, she even allowed this book to get out in the world. Because surely she’s already calling it back?

Origin story

This, too, is known to you if you love Barbra. She was an impoverished product of the Brooklyn projects. Her father, a gentle teacher, died when she was 15 months old. On the rebound, her mother married a loutish car salesman with the Dickensian last name of Kind. Also Dickensian: Barbra’s only doll growing up was a hot-water bottle wrapped in a knitted wool sweater. She grew up essentially unparented, no rules or expectations, worked as a cashier at a Chinese restaurant, took acting classes, graduated from high school, then sprinted for Manhattan to make a name for herself. “I have to become famous,” she remembers thinking in her tiny third-floor walk-up, “so I can get somebody else to make my bed.”

No 10,000-hour rule for Babs

Streisand performed without distinction in her high school choir and left in the middle of her first and only singing lesson. She never learned to read music. When friends persuaded her to sing in a local talent contest, she didn’t labor over her instrument for 10,000 hours; she simply unpacked it for a waiting public. Listening now to her live recordings from the Bon Soir, the Greenwich Village nightclub that launched her, it’s astonishing to find one of popular music’s supreme voices already in full flower at age 20: range, passion, control, color, dynamic variety, pinpoint intonation, an uninterrupted continuum between head and chest voice. You’d think singing was the easiest thing in the world.

In 1964, at 21, she was the commanding lead in a Broadway musical. At 25, she was bringing that same musical, “Funny Girl,” to the screen in one of the most assured film debuts ever. (She split the best actress Oscar with Katharine Hepburn.) “I had a vision,” she writes, “and sometimes I think I willed it all into coming true.”

Things you might not have known

She went to high school with Bobby Fischer. (“He wasn’t very friendly.”) She grew her nails long so she’d never have to type. She suffers from chronic tinnitus. She never cared for her given name, so she shaved off an “a,” but she held on to her last name because “how would my old friends know it was me, once I became famous?” It still infuriates her that people don’t pronounce that name correctly. It’s STRY-sand, and it’s “sand” as in beach. If you loved her, you would know this.

Barbra and Judy

Streisand’s 1963 guest spot on “The Judy Garland Show” is one of the most storied crossings in show-business lore. Watch it just for Barbra’s superb take on “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” (perhaps her greatest live performance) and for the contrapuntal joining (Garland’s idea) of their signature songs, “Get Happy” and “Happy Days are Here Again.” The affection between the two women is real; the differences couldn’t be starker. Judy is a chain of nerve endings: warmth, hilarity, anxiety, touch. (“She never let go of me until the end of the song,” Streisand recalls.) Barbra is a study in self-possession: She could be making this same sound in an empty room.

They embody the two paths available to huge talents. One leads outward toward ecstatic connection and, ultimately, annihilation; the other inward, toward mystery and preservation and, ultimately, solipsism. “You will learn and you will love,” Tennessee Williams wrote of Streisand, “but you will not get close.” And this is perhaps why Streisand — like Madonna — has been so preeminently a survivor. She has always kept some part of herself for herself.

That has its risks, too. The vulnerability and sensuality that characterize her early film work ebb away through the years, and you feel, in her close descriptions of making a movie like “Yentl,” how deeply she welcomes the power and omniscience that directing brings her. “I like to be in control,” she writes, and even if you don’t love her, you know that about her.

What Barbra wants …

She asked Stephen Sondheim to rewrite whole lyrics for her, and he complied. The day before her 1998 wedding to James Brolin, she asked the major news networks not to fly helicopters over her house, and they complied. When she found out Siri was saying her name wrong, she called Apple CEO Tim Cook and asked him to fix it, and he complied.

Things she’s still second-guessing

Why is her hair in “Funny Girl” so big? Why didn’t director Sydney Pollack take away her handkerchief during the big crying scene in “The Way We Were”? (“I can’t believe how long my hand is in front of my face.”) Why didn’t she sing the movie’s title song at the Oscars? Why weren’t there more reaction shots in the final number of “A Star Is Born”? What about those two scenes cut from “Yentl”?

Keep ’em in stitches

Beatnik kook was her earliest persona, and her intuitive comic timing still makes “Funny Girl” a genuinely funny experience. Yet early interviewers struggled to get anything amusing out of her, and the humor of “What’s Up, Doc?” seems to have eluded her, though she is charming in it. She admits that jokes have to be explained to her, and “I don’t think most things are funny.” In short, she has always been dead serious, and that quality carries into her political discourse, which occupies the same large chunks of the book as it has in her life.

People who come off well

First husband Elliott Gould (though he gambled).
Jerome Robbins (a horror to others but beloved of Barbra).
Donna Summer. (“She was a doll.”)
Pat Conroy (“dear friend,” “great writer”).
Every cinematographer who said yes.

People who don’t

Agent Sue Mengers, who turned down roles without permission.
Richard Gere, who turned down the chance to be her “Yentl” co-star.
Actual “Yentl” co-star Mandy Patinkin, who allegedly told her, “I thought we were going to have an affair.”

Every cinematographer who said no.

Men in her life

Pierre Trudeau. (“My brain was in love, but not my body.”)
Ryan O’Neal. (“I think I was too serious.”)
Warren Beatty. (“Did I sleep with Warren? I kind of remember. I guess I did. Probably once.”)
Don Johnson. (“Fun while it lasted.”)
Andre Agassi. (“He was very in the moment, with that deep animal groan as he hit the ball.”)

Movies she turned down

“Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.”
The Jane Fonda trinity of “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”; “Klute”; and “Julia.”

Movies she wishes she’d turned down

“Hello, Dolly!”
“For Pete’s Sake.”
“All Night Long.” (Deeply underrated, if you ask me.)

Things rich and famous people get to say

“Whoopi Goldberg kindly lent me her bus and drivers ...”
“Pierre Cardin gave a party for us at Maxim’s ...”
“My friend Donna Karan and I went up to Deepak Chopra’s institute in Massachusetts for a retreat ...”
“As the pilot was revving up the engines and getting ready to taxi out, I called, ‘Stop the plane!’ I had ordered scones with fresh strawberries and clotted cream as a treat for everyone, and the scones had arrived but not the cream.”

“Apparently no one brings a dog to the White House, but I didn’t know that.”

Do you know how wonderful you are?

That question was posed to her at the Bon Soir by lyricist and future bestie Marilyn Bergman, and the book, as if to reassure Streisand, keeps rushing in with new testimonials; but, to cite another of her songs, when is enough enough? Maybe now we should speak of Barbra’s mom: an avid amateur singer herself who offered her daughter no support or approval growing up, who blew off the opening night of “Funny Girl” and missed no opportunity to bring her child down a peg. And if she hadn’t? “You get great art only from mutilated egos,” Camille Paglia once said. “Only mutilated egos are obsessive enough.” From here it’s a short step to young Streisand: “I always knew it was all or nothing for me. I had to go right to the top or into another profession.”

The gift

We like to think that, if people are really good at something, they’ll want to keep doing it because it brings the world joy. Not Streisand, who treats singing like the job it has always been. “I don’t sing at home,” she writes, “I don’t sing in the shower, and I don’t sing at parties.” She goes on tour when she wants to buy a painting. The book’s most surprising chapter details her rather passionate (though unconsummated) friendship with Marlon Brando, who despised and slighted his own gift. “We should have done more when we were younger,” he tells her, had a lot of sex, “had children. Go kiss yourself in the mirror for me.”

Barbra and her gay men

We were there from the start, weren’t we? At least one of her earliest mentors was gay. The Lion, where she won her first talent contest, was a gay bar, though it took her a second to figure it out. The boys who flocked to see her at the Bon Soir were gay, and so is a solid proportion of her concert audiences, as she well knows. We’re all out there listening, watching — and reading her book, even through all its fatuities. What do we find in her that we don’t find anywhere else? Are we hoping that when we finally open our mouths, something will come out, some music, that the world can’t help but love?

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE

How German Artists Helped The Nation Remake Itself After Hitler

BY MICHAEL DIRDA

Following the destruction of Adolf Hitler’s totalitarian Third Reich, how did Germany manage to remake itself into a democratic nation? In “After the Nazis: The Story of Culture in West Germany,” the historian Michael H. Kater contends that the arts deserve much of the credit. Kater’s new book — the latest among his many distinguished studies of 20th-century German culture and politics — focuses on West Germany, more formally the Federal Republic of Germany, between 1945 and 1990, the year when it was reunited with East Germany after the fall of the latter’s communist government. During these years, the FRG needed to rebuild its cities, political system and economy while also confronting — or sometimes refusing to confront — vestiges of Hitler’s National Socialism.

That today’s Germany is so highly respected — even as it navigates continued threats from 21st-century forms of racism and fascist ideology — can be largely attributed, Kater says, to the novelists, artists, critics, musicians, dramatists, journalists and filmmakers who refused to allow the nation to minimize, excuse or forget the Holocaust.

Throughout, the German-born Kater pulls no punches. Chapter 1 begins this way:

“On Tuesday, May 1, 1945, I was drying a small collection of Hitler stamps on the windowsill of my grandfather’s house in a small village near Bremen. … All of seven years old, I had been looking forward to joining the Hitler Youth like the older neighborhood boys whom I played with and admired. … Hitler’s portrait — a lithograph, black on white — hung in our dining room. Sitting underneath it, I loved listening to the march music on the radio, drumming to it on the tabletop.”

That day, however, the music was interrupted by a voice somberly announcing: “Our Führer Adolf Hitler has fallen in the defense of Berlin. Heil Hitler!” This was followed by the singing of the national anthem, “Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles.” Kater remembers being utterly bewildered.

After Germany’s surrender to the Allies, some 250,000 die-hard Nazis were initially placed in internment camps. As Kater recalls: “When I was allowed to visit a friend of my mother’s in Hanover in 1948, her husband, a former SS medical officer just returned from a British internment camp, put me and his children in a car. He took us to the railway station and pointed to some miserable-looking, badly dressed people hurrying to and fro. ‘See, those are Jews,’ he said to us, ‘filthy vermin. Unfortunately we did not remove enough of them.’ He was entirely unrepentant.”

Over the next 500 pages, Kater, a professor emeritus at Canada’s York University, repeatedly demonstrates that such antisemitism long persisted among many Germans. Programs of “denazification” were halfhearted, and numerous former Nazis easily obscured their past as they segued into positions of influence and power in the new Federal Republic. Many ordinary people retained their admiration, even reverence, for the führer. According to Kater, “As late as the mid 1950s, 42 percent of all Germans thought Hitler to have been one of the greatest German statesmen, had he not started the war.”

While the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi elite were taking place in 1945 and 1946, conservative German newspapers and media maintained that Hitler and his lieutenants were alone responsible for the Holocaust. Few recognized the culpability of the nation as a whole. Instead they pointed out that all of Germany had suffered. Surely, these pundits argued, Germans and Jews were both victims of the Nazi regime.

As Kater shows, all these comforting lies, moral equivocations and delusions were gradually exposed and dismantled by the postwar era’s cultural intelligentsia, largely through works of art and investigative reporting. But it took a long time. As Kater writes, “By the mid-1950s, covering the past up in silence was helping Germans to concentrate on the economic and social reconstruction of the country and forget their guilt, even though … this was morally questionable and futile in the long run.”

In the 1950s and the two following decades, artists led the attack on that willed amnesia. Rather than accept the complacency and conspicuous consumption brought about by West Germany’s “economic miracle,” they probed the society’s sore spots, questioned their families about what they had done or not done during the war, reopened the old wounds. Every sort of authoritarianism or censorship was utterly rejected as fascistic. While the elders yearned for art that was safe, traditional and nonconfrontational, the young weren’t going to let that happen.

Over the course of his book, Kater discusses the celebrated Gruppe 47 collective of writers, the new German cinema, experimental music, the dadaist “happenings” of the Fluxus movement, controversial plays and TV series. The 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s were the heyday of writers Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass (both Nobel laureates), as well as Ingeborg Bachmann, Martin Walser and the young Hans Magnus Enzensberger. The world-famous composers Hans Werner Henze and Karlheinz Stockhausen explored atonal and electronic music. Avant-garde filmmakers included Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Few artists were more innovative, not to say outrageous, than Joseph Beuys or his slightly more sedate colleagues Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer. In these years, Wieland Wagner restaged his grandfather Richard Wagner’s operas, stressing their universality instead of Teutonic grandiosity, and Rolf Hochhuth’s searing play “The Deputy” exposed the connections between the Vatican and the Third Reich.

By the 1960s, intellectuals regularly morphed into political activists. One highly esteemed journalist, Ulrike Meinhof, remade herself into the leader of the Red Army terrorist group known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang. As Kater writes, Meinhof and “all members of the terrorist units were incensed by the presence of former National Socialists in the Federal Republic’s political and industrial, social and educational structures.” The group kidnapped, and eventually killed, the rich industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer because of his “stellar Nazi record: Hitler Youth, Nazi student administrator, and SS.”

As a survey of West German culture, “After the Nazis” also discusses the spurious Hitler diaries; reflects on the popular but tacitly exculpatory TV series “Heimat” (“Homeland”), which tracks a small-town German family during the Nazi era; touches on the emerging women’s movement; and devotes several pages to the horrific mistreatment of the Turkish and East European “guest workers” who were essential to Germany’s “economic miracle.”

While Kater rightly extols the artists and intellectuals who both “helped Germany to defeat the spirit of Nazism” and acted as contrarian gadflies during the tenures of Chancellors Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt, as well as other political leaders, his book’s last chapter sounds a more disturbing note. Kater writes that by the late 1970s and 1980s, the momentum of change had started to slow: “As Nazi threats faded into the background, however, so did West Germany’s cultural scene begin to lose some of its former urgency, indeed quality, and the once innovative writers, artists and musicians came to resemble pillars of society.” Some conservative scholars now wanted “to relativize and historicize the Third Reich” — to liken it to other historic phenomena — “and thereby lift the moral stain.” In this view, the Holocaust wasn’t “unique”; there had been plenty of similar atrocities in the world’s past. Incredibly, the historian Ernst Nolte asserted that in Auschwitz, “not just Jews but also hard-working SS guards weighed down by their heavy burden could properly be regarded as ‘victims.’” Around this time, Nazi tokens and memorabilia grew fashionable among young people: The hip took to wearing swastikas on their jeans. Hans-Jurgen Syberberg’s 1977 epic, “Our Hitler,” as this Wagnerian experimental film is called in English, sympathetically mythologized its subject.

So, as illuminating as “After the Nazis” is, I wish Kater had continued his account past 1990 to show us more fully the development of today’s German nation. Might he be at work on a follow-up volume? Whatever the case, this book’s coda does mention, albeit only in passing, a certain chemical physicist with a doctorate from Leipzig named Angela Merkel.

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Kerry Washington’s Memoir Reveals A Major Family Secret

But ‘Thicker than Water’ is more sincere than sensational

BY SABRINA FORD

Nights were tough for a young Kerry Washington. At 7 years old she started having panic attacks. Once, while she was in bed, attempting to fend off an episode, the familiar sound of her parents arguing flowed from the other room. Reaching a breaking point, Washington ran out, faced her parents and yelled at them to stop.

“I can count on one hand the number of times that I have seen my mother cry,” the actress writes in her new memoir, “Thicker Than Water.” “This was the second.”

The next morning, Washington’s mother smiled as she made breakfast, as if nothing had happened. It was a familiar scene for the only child who describes her experience growing up as playing the role of “good girl” for parents intent on projecting a picture-perfect image to their daughter and the outside world.

The family history informing this dynamic is complex and specific to Washington, but Black Gen Xers and millennials — those of us born to parents who came of age during the civil rights era — might find the holding of secrets to protect family from social scrutiny or personal shame particularly relatable. (Anyone raised by one or more Black women of that generation knows there is no greater sin than embarrassing them.)

At the heart of “Thicker Than Water” is the story of a daughter who loved and felt loved by her parents but yearned for genuine connection inside a facade. She didn’t fully understand where that yearning might have come from until she agreed, at age 41, to appear on Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s series “Finding Your Roots.” Only then did her parents admit that she had been conceived using a sperm donor — that her father wasn’t biologically related to her. The news was a shock, but even Washington seems surprised at how well she took it, managing to comfort her parents as they struggled to divulge a secret they had planned to keep forever. “Dad,” Washington recalls saying. “Dad. I knew what he needed to hear: ‘Nothing is going to change between us. This won’t impact our love.’”

But this revelation is a relatively minor part of a memoir that is really the story of an artist leaning into the emotional truths of the characters she built, because she never fully trusted her own.

Maybe that explains her impressive success. Washington, 46, was raised in the Bronx and began acting as a young teen with a local educational theater group. After starring in her breakout film, 2001’s oft-memed teen drama “Save the Last Dance,” she would go on to co-star in Oscar-winning films (“Ray,” “The Last King of Scotland”), headline Broadway plays (David Mamet’s “Race”) and, most famously, embody Olivia Pope on the ABC drama “Scandal.” That series, which aired for seven seasons, was culturally significant not only because it was the first network drama led by a Black woman in four decades but also because Olivia Pope was a messy, flawed Black female protagonist — an anomaly when it premiered in 2012.

“Every day, I would get out of bed and head to set, and it felt like swimming out into a body of water that I could not control. I knew my job was to get on top of the waves and ride them, but I was in the storm that comes with rising fame,” Washington writes of the dizzying early days of “Scandal,” when her celebrity grew and her friend circle shrank. “Rehearsed as I was in the performance of perfection, I tried to keep my struggles mostly private, below the surface of the waves.”

As she looks back at her career, Washington completely avoids the familiar beats of celebrity memoir — the name drops, the gossip, the reveals. Instead, she focuses on the work of acting, which she first viewed as a job when she was a teenager looking for a means to contribute to the high cost of her private-school education. She considers the media frenzy that accompanied “Scandal,” and her ascent to becoming a household name, more of an annoyance than anything else, a consequence of being good at her job. Rather than revel in fame, she relishes a title that her cousin bestowed upon her: “the longshoreman of acting.” That name “has a special resonance for me,” she writes, “because our grandfather was a longshoreman on the docks of Lower Manhattan. He died in 1953 in the middle of a nor’easter. I like to think that I’d go into any storm to get the work done, too.”

At times, reading “Thicker” feels like a tease, as Washington glosses over intriguing episodes without divulging the whole story. For instance, she devotes only a few paragraphs to the wild period in high school when she was staying out all night, hooking up, getting lit on whiskey sours and attending Manhattan parties like the fabled Soul Kitchen. What was it like being a kid roaming free in adult spaces in the 1990s, before cellphones and location tracking were commonplace? Who were the characters she encountered? What was the DJ spinning? Where’s that memoir?

Instead, Washington illuminates a very narrow and specific slice of her life — avoiding the sensational in favor of the sincere — and the result is very affecting. The secrets aired here, revolving around Washington and her family, may not be particularly salacious or earth-shattering, but they are crucial in helping the author make sense of herself, her place in her family and her connection to her craft.

Sabrina Ford is a Los Angeles-based culture writer and researcher.

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