A polarised post-truth year of protest and climate concerns
Developments in 2019 show a divided world where democracy is on the retreat and climate change is causing increasing havoc, writes Andrew Marshall
When US President Donald Trump stood up to address the United Nations General Assembly in September, he declared war on global values said and the future belongs to “patriots” – like himself.
“The future does not belong to the globalists. The future belongs to patriots,” Mr Trump told the UN – an organisation that emerged from the wreckage of devastating wars in the 20th century with the goal of promoting international consensus and cooperation.
In an increasingly interconnected world, facing problems that nations can only solve by working together – above all, the challenge of the climate crisis – Mr Trump’s message was that countries should focus on putting their own interests first.
One of the dominant global themes of 2019 was that the “patriots” are winning, with populist and nationalist leaders around the world gathering strength.
Despite widespread doubts about his competence and mental health, Mr Trump is widely tipped to win a second term in office in 2020.
Nationalist strongmen like Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines have entrenched their power.
GLOBAL PROTESTS
But movements fighting against dictatorship also dominated headlines this year.
The most extraordinary prodemocracy protests were in the former British colony of Hong Kong, where activists – and ordinary citizens – have maintained a months-long campaign against Beijing’s efforts to stifle their freedoms.
Mass protest movements also shook the regimes in Iraq, Chile, Lebanon, Bolivia and beyond.
2019 was the biggest year of global protest since 2011, when after a Tunisian vegetable seller set himself ablaze in protest at police harassment, the unprecedented ‘Arab Spring’ saw a succession of uprisings across the Middle East. But the Arab Spring failed to bring democracy to the region, and authoritarian regimes have gathered strength since then.
CHANGING TACTICS
For years, protest movements have utilised new technology – such as smartphones, social media and encrypted messaging. It was widely assumed the internet would help undermine dictatorships around the world.
Instead, governments have taken advantage of information overload and increasing polarisation to spread fake narratives. Many experts say we now live in a “post-truth” world where it has never been easier to access information, but where large numbers of people uncritically believe partisan sources, rather than trying to discover the facts.
Nations like Russia, China and Turkey have created their own English-language global channels to promote their own version of events to the world. Mr Putin’s Russia in particular has become notorious for spreading disinformation.
Authoritarian regimes have also become smarter at using technology against protesters – hacking phones and computers, using facial recognition software to track dissidents, and exploiting social media to spread disinformation.
In the US, Mr Trump’s frequently outrageous tweets are routinely debunked by factcheckers, but this does not seem to have dented his popularity among his support base.
But protest movements have changed too, most notably in Hong Kong where activists have defied Beijing by creating a movement with few known leaders, no formal organisation, and which is prepared to use violence – violating a longstanding axiom of activist movements that non-violence is crucial to defeating an authoritarian state.
GENOCIDE
The Hong Kong protests grabbed global attention, but another of the biggest stories of 2019 – also involving China’s authoritarian polices – was perhaps the most underreported of the year.
According to leaked documents, more than a million people from the Muslim Uighur community in the west of China are imprisoned in socalled “re-education camps” where inmates are locked up, indoctrinated and punished for any transgressions, as part of an effort to crush the risk of a Muslim group within China’s borders.
Beijing claims the camps in the western Xinjiang region offer voluntary education and training, but the overwhelming evidence suggests a vast systematic effort is under way to eradicate an ethnic group, although through mass inceration and indoctrination rather than outright genocide.
But the events of 2019 showed the lessons of the 20th century have yet to be learned, and around the world, genocides are still taking place.
One of the saddest spectacles of 2019 was Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for standingup for democracy in myanmar against the military junta who imprisoned her for years, going to the International Court of Justice at the Hague to contest charges that the regime had launched a murderous campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority in 2017, which forced up to a million people to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh.
Watching a former human rights heroine defending genocide symbolised the world
“Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up, and change is coming whether you like it or not”
GRETA THUNBERG
wide retreat from democracy that grew starker this year.
WAR AND CONFLICT
The threat of war still hangs over the world. The risk of a catastrophic conflict on the Korean peninsula remains high, with Mr Trump conducting high-stakes diplomacy on Twitter to negotiate with Pyongyang’s 35-year-old dictator Kim Jong Un.
In Yemen, an intractable conflict shows no signs of ending.
Meanwhile, the last holdouts of the Islamic State in Syria were defeated in 2019, and the organisation’s ruler, Abu Bakr al-baghdadi, was killed in a US special forces operation. But countries around the world remain on high alert for terrorist attacks, demonstrating that while the Islamic state no longer has a physical home, its extremist ideology still motivates thousands of people around the world. Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria risks further destabilising the region.
CLIMATE
The biggest crisis of the year – and probably of the century to come – was the environmental disaster engulfing the globe.
Wildfires in the Amazon in Brazil this year were the worst ever, and as 2019 came to an end, Australia had its hottest day in history and the city of Sydney was surrounded by devastating conflagrations.
The crisis mobilised protesters around the world, with the Extinction Rebellion movement sharing many of the tactics of the Hong Kong protesters.
A day before Mr Trump addressed the UN, teenage activist Greta Thunberg also spoke to the assembled diplomats and heads of state with a very different message.
She told them: “You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say, we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up, and change is coming whether you like it or not.”