The Final Service

We're releasing our latest episode early this week in light of the recent tragedy in Buffalo. Please take care of yourselves.

 

The recent mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York left ten dead, three injured, and a city–and country–reeling. Within hours of the deadly attack, evidence emerged that the 18-year-old gunman’s crimes were racially motivated, explicitly targeting the area’s Black community.

 

Buffalo is the most recent in a string of high-profile acts of violence inspired by the “great replacement theory,” an extremist doctrine based on the unsubstantiated belief that non-white populations will “replace” and subjugate white majorities across the globe.

 

Once confined to the radical fringe, replacement theory has now entered mainstream conservative rhetoric, peddled by prominent right-wing figures like Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance, and shared in online networks from El Paso to Christchurch. On this week’s episode, Ray Suarez sits down with Daniel Byman, a counterterrorism expert and author of Spreading Hate: The Global Rise of White Supremacist Terrorism, to discuss the roots of the global white power movement, how extremism spreads, and what the mainstreaming of violence as a political tactic means for targeted communities–and democracy–in the world today.

 

Guests:

 

Daniel Byman, Senior Fellow at Brookings Institution and professor at Georgetown University

 

Host(s):

 

Ray Suarez, co-host of World Affairs

When the Biden administration announced that the United States would accept up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees, hundreds began to show up daily at the US-Mexico border. With a scarcity of appointments at US consulates in Europe, for those who could afford airfare, this circuitous route was their best option. “At the peak of it, there were over a thousand Ukrainian nationals,  enough to fill a shelter in Tijuana,” KPBS immigration reporter Gustavo Solis explained to Ray Suarez. “They would get picked up at the airport and volunteers would be ready. There was even a guy playing music for them – like a welcome party in Tijuana.” Then they would be processed the next day. As you might imagine, that streamlined process isn't the same for most other refugees seeking asylum in the United States. Depending on your country of origin, entering the US at the San Ysidro crossing between Tijuana and San Diego can be quite a bit more complicated...or even impossible.

Guest: Gustavo Solis, Investigative Border Reporter for KPBS

Host:  Ray Suarez, host of World Affairs

If you appreciate this episode and want to support the work we do, please consider making a donation to World Affairs. We cannot do this work without your help. Thank you.

As early as November 2021, the Biden administration began to declassify military intelligence about a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine and share it with the public. As declassified material poured in, the world watched the massive grinding gears of Russia's war machine creep towards Kyiv. Despite what seemed imminent—almost obvious—the White House and the State Department were under intense scrutiny. It wasn’t clear whether the strategy of opening the information floodgates would disrupt Moscow’s actions or provoke Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. On this week’s episode, Ray Suarez discusses President Biden’s Ukraine strategy with US State Department Counselor Derek Chollet. 

Guests:  Derek Chollet, Counselor of the United States Department of State

Host:  Ray Suarez, co-host of World Affairs

If you appreciate this episode and want to support the work we do, please consider making a donation to World Affairs. We cannot produce this program without your help. Thank you.

On February 9th, the U.S. Senate confirmed Chantale Wong as the U.S. Executive Director of the Asian Development Bank. On that day, she became the first LGBTQ person of color and the first "out" lesbian, to hold the rank of ambassador in the U.S. For the past 30 years, Ambassador Wong has spurned tradition and overcome challenges to forge her own trailblazing path, breaking barriers along the way. Her journey began in 1960, when at the age of six, her grandmother smuggled her out of Shanghai, and has included a thirty year career in public service, including stops at San Francisco's Public Utilities Commission, NASA, the Treasury Department and a brief stint as photographer for the late Congressman John Lewis. During this Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, we celebrated the life and career of Chantale Wong at a live event on May 3, 2022. This is an excerpt of her conversation with Dean Fealk.

Guest: Ambassador Chantale Wong, U.S. Executive Director, Asia Development Bank

Host:  Dean Fealk, World Affairs trustee and co-managing partner at DLA Piper.

If you appreciate this episode and want to support the work we do, please consider making a donation to World Affairs. We cannot do this work without your help. Thank you.

After a thirty year civil war, Sri Lanka rebuilt its economy, with the help of foreign investment. But when the pandemic forced the small island nation to shut its borders, things began to unravel. Now, the war in Ukraine and skyrocketing food and fuel prices are pushing the country into deeper economic turmoil, political unrest, and violence.  

 

Today, Sri Lanka owes a staggering $50 billion to regional neighbors, like China, and international lending institutions, like the World Bank. And it isn’t the only country in this situation. Ray Suarez talks with Washington Post’s Gerry Shih, and Asanga Abeyagoonasekera, a Sri Lankan geopolitical analyst, to understand why–and how–nations like Sri Lanka accumulate foreign debt, what it means for everyday citizens …and why it can be so hard to pay back.

 

Guests: 

 

Gerry Shih, India bureau chief, Washington Post 

 

Asanga Abeyagoonasekera, senior fellow at the Millenium Project

 

Host: 

 

Ray Suarez, co-host of WorldAffairs

"At the end of the day, he believed it would be too great a gift to the regime—too great a gift to Putin—if he stayed away."

Daniel Roher is the award-winning director behind "Navalny," a film that documents Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny's journey from Germany to a Russian jail. Roher was given unprecedented access to Alexei Navalny while he was in Berlin recovering from an attempted assasination, searching for the Russian agents who tried to poison him, and eventually returning to Russia where he was inevitably imprisoned. 

"Navalny" offers an intimate portrait of the man intent on undoing Vladimir Putin and his ongoing search for justice. The film premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and is now streaming on HBO Max.

Guest:  

Daniel Roher, documentary filmmaker and director of "Navalny"

Host: 

Ray Suarez, co-host of WorldAffairs

For the last century, Finland has walked a diplomatic tightrope between East and West. A former Russian imperial holding and Soviet target, the independent nordic nation boasts a free market economy, EU membership, and regional defense partnerships. Yet, Finland has previously stopped short of formally joining NATO, the West’s major military alliance–maintaining a pragmatic policy of forced neutrality along its 800-mile border with Russia. That is, until Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine.

How does a country survive the threat of Russian aggression? Ray Suarez talks with Henri Vanhanen, advisor to the Finnish National Coalition Party, about his country’s recent pivot toward NATO membership–both in parliament and the polls–and what it could mean for the future of international security. 

Featuring:

Henri Vanhanen, foreign policy and EU advisor for the Finland National Coalition Party

Ray Suarez, co-host of WorldAffairs

Finland 101, by Ray Suarez

Maybe you’ve noticed how often Finland comes up during the Ukraine coverage, and wondered why? Here’s a quick little history…a thousand pages in a few seconds.

For centuries, the Finns have had to thread their way, as a people, through the conflicts of other big powers in their part of the world. Ethnically and linguistically distinct…they’re not their Swedish neighbors to the west or their Russian neighbors to the east…but they had to fend off both to remain themselves.

For centuries Finland was fought for, or fought over, by Russians and Swedes. As the 20thcentury began, Finland was part of Czarist Russia…then the Czar abdicated and the Empire collapsed. The Finns flirted with Communism, and with monarchy, before becoming a republic with a new president in 1919.

Josef Stalin wanted Finland back for the USSR. The Soviets invaded, shortly after the Nazis bulldozed Poland in 1939. The Finns fought back ferociously. They inflicted heavy casualties. The Soviets eventually recognized Finland’s independence, signed a peace treaty, and permanently seized about a tenth of Finland’s territory, incorporating it into the USSR.

The Finns would remain independent, somewhat free of Soviet domination after the Second World War, but that freedom came at a cost. Finland gave up more territory, and population, and diplomatic freedom of movement. The country lived in a gray area between east and west during the Cold War. Its status even got a dismissive name…Finlandization, used to describe a forced neutrality, an expensive freedom. 

Finland had a market economy, democratically elected governments, freedom of speech, and growing prosperity….all the while staying aloof from the expanding European Union, and certainly NATO, the western military alliance.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, much as Czarist Russia did, Finland had an escape hatch… denounced its earlier treaties, joined the EU, adopted the Euro, but remained outside NATO, sharing an eight hundred mile border with the Russian Federation.

When the British government handed Hong Kong over to China in 1997, it was with China’s promise that Hong Kong’s relative autonomy would be preserved, under the framework known as “one country, two systems.” But in recent years, China has cracked down on the region’s freedoms, especially freedom of press. One example is the 2020 arrest of media mogul Jimmy Lai, founder of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, who helped catalyze an opposition movement. In 2021 Lai was arrested again, and sentenced to 13 months in jail for participating in a vigil marking the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

 

On this week’s episode of WorldAffairs, World Affairs CEO Philip Yun talks with Mark Clifford, who was the director of Apple Daily’s parent company at the time of Lai’s arrest. Clifford, a journalist, activist, and president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong, has a new book, Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: What China’s Crackdown Reveals About its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere.

 

Guests:  

 

Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong, journalist, activist 

 

 

Host: 

 

Philip W. Yun, President and CEO, WorldAffairs

Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt’s “Pillar of Shame,” a 26-foot copper-cased monument to the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, stood for nearly a quarter century outside the student union at Hong Kong University. The tower-like statue of human faces contorted by suffering was installed in 1997, just before the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China. In December 2021, under cover of darkness, the university removed the statue. It’s a move many say is an overt attempt to suppress the memory of the brutal crackdown—and part of a broader effort by China to erase Hong Kong’s history of independence. On this week’s episode, we hear from Galschiøt, the sculptor who built the “Pillar of Shame.” Then, Ray Suarez talks with former NPR Beijing correspondent Louisa Lim about China’s brazen efforts to stamp out free speech in Hong Kong, the city she grew up in. Lim shares the experiences she chronicled in her new book Indelible City, an emotional eyewitness account of the pro-democracy protests and a reflection on Hong Kong’s identity.

 

Guests:  

Jens Galschiøt, Danish sculptor

Louisa Lim, author of  “Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong” 

Host: 

Ray Suarez, co-host WorldAffairs

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, we are confronted daily with images of atrocities. But what constitutes proof of a war crime in the digital age? It’s a question a new generation of experts is answering. In December, the United Nations Human Rights Office teamed up with lawyers at UC Berkeley to release a new set of legal guidelines for gathering and verifying war crimes. The “Berkeley Protocol” establishes norms for authenticating open source and social media evidence of human rights violations, and it stands to usher in a new era for punishing those who commit these horrors. In the past, war crimes were proven with extensive witness testimony and conventional forensic evidence, often gathered slowly and well after the fact  by government agencies. Now, researchers can use an array of digital tools, including social media videos, satellite imagery, and geolocation, in real time. By codifying professional standards in the field, the Berkeley Protocol aims to shore up the admissibility of digital evidence in court and could change the future of prosecuting these heinous crimes.   

On this week’s episode of WorldAffairs, Ray Suarez talks with Alexa Koenig, executive director of the Human Rights Center and Investigations Lab at Berkeley Law, which has been at the forefront of this new legal frontier in human rights.