Author: Alex Norbrook (Page 2 of 2)

I found Nuremburg equal parts entertaining and disorienting. It was slightly tiresome to watch the triumph of law over fascism, of American spirit over German rigidity and Soviet buffonery. But more than that, the film didn’t seem to want to introduce us to the actual nuances of the accusations being applied to the defendants, the identity of many those defendants, or even the procedure of the trial itself. We don’t know what a crime of aggression is other than that it involves some kind of invasion, or the difference between that and a crime against peace or against humanity. Indeed, most of the film focused on what would presumably fall under the “crimes against humanity” charge, yet that connection is never entirely specified: what makes up a crime against humanity, and what is required to prove that charge? Leaving the answer to this question vague didn’t help the film in my opinion. Furthermore, the film didn’t spend too much time on the other crimes on which the Nazi leadership was charged, leaving it unclear when we were hearing evidence that could point to, say, a crime against peace versus another crime. The lack of differentiation made the film feel at times like it was showing us an undifferentiated litany of horrors that would somehow be horrific enough to conjure a guilty verdict on whatever happened to be the charge. In these cases, specificity matters, and I found this lacking in the film itself. 

Further, we only get one small scene with the defense lawyer actually examining a witness, and the non-major defendants blur together so that we don’t see the nuances of their cases. This was disappointing first for plot reasons, as when the verdicts are read, we see the horror in the faces of Nazis of whom we do not remember or were never told the identity. But more importantly, I also think the obscuring of the less snappy parts of the trial had the effect of evading some of the central questions of the case. Because of these factors, we couldn’t really evaluate Goering’s statement that “Justice has absolutely nothing to do with this trial.” I was struck not by the fact that the director may have left the question up to the viewer (though I would be surprised if they did given the overall moralizing tone of the film), but rather by the fact that we simply didn’t see enough of the court proceedings to be able to answer that question for ourselves. Given that Goering’s statement cut to the heart of the legitimacy of international law at the time, I think I would have liked more empirical and intellectual meat on the bones of that statement.

Germany hosts Europe’s largest Palestinian refugee population, but it has not welcomed that population with open arms. The Israel-Hamas war has further complicated the situation for incoming Palestinian refugees. I hope to report on these bureaucratic difficulties by telling the story of the people who have learned to navigate them as part of a broader story about the Palestinian community in Berlin. In doing so, I also plan to write about Germany’s ongoing crackdown on Palestinian dissent, including by threatening deportation, due to the country’s support for Israel.

Approximately 100,000-200,000 Palestinians live in Germany, although that figure is virtually impossible to verify because the government does not recognize Palestinian as a state and therefore does not collect data on the Palestinian population. Instead, Palestinians are frequently classified under “unclarified nationality,” which denies them “freedom of movement, access to education and healthcare, and the right to work,” according to one article. Granted “Duldung,” or “toleration” permits, refugees are barred from the naturalization process and are at higher risk of deportation. Indeed, because Palestinians are administered under the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA), the German government does not consider them refugees and therefore has created a separate, less accommodating asylum application process for them. Many Palestinians also come from refugee camps in Syria, and this secondary migration adds additional complications in the eyes of German bureaucracy.  The government has therefore limited economic opportunities for Palestinians and put them in an arduous if not vulnerable legal situation. 

After October 7, the situation has worsened. The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees “deprioritized” asylum applicants from the Gaza Strip in January 2024, referencing “uncertainty” in the situation on the ground in Gaza, before resuming applications in July of this year. This decision blocked Palestinians from entering the country. Furthermore, with UNWRA banned by Israel and struggling to fulfill its obligations toward Palestinian refugees, lawyers and legal scholars have begun to question the legal justification for Germany denying those refugees the regular asylum process. 

Meanwhile, the Palestinian community in Berlin lives a precarious existence. Some individuals have recently faced deportation because they were granted international protection status in other countries. The community as a whole has suffered from “intensified state surveillance and police crackdowns.” Indeed, the activist community has been hardest hit, with pro-Palestine demonstrations facing severe repression. The German government has revoked the refugee status of activists and arrested individuals walking near pro-Palestine protests for “looking Palestinian.” 

I propose to connect the uniquely challenging asylum process for Palestinian migrants with the current hostile environment toward migrant activists from the community. I hope to do this by speaking with individuals from different waves of Palestinian immigration, with a special focus on more recent arrivals.

To tell the activism side of the story, I hope to interview Zaid Abdulnasser, a refugee and former head of Samidoun Berlin, an activist group that Germany banned in 2023. I also want to talk to current and former Palestinian students to learn more about the student experience and its relation to activism. Finally, I would like to interview Palestinian politicians such as Ramsis Kilani, a former Der Linke member who was expelled from the party because of his statements on the Israel-Hamas war, and Samira Tanana, a Green MP who is vice chair of Palestinian community center Al-Huleh. 

Questions for AfD reps:

1. What would be your ideal immigration policy?
2. What are your thoughts on Germany’s demographic decline and what to do about it? 
3. What are some of AfD’s policies that receive less media attention than you would like? 
4. How do you connect with younger voters?

The word “painstaking” stuck out to me from the Bellingcat article we read this week for how well it fit the work performed by open source journalists. The problem they face is not necessarily a lack of data, but an abundance of data in raw and scattered forms that must all be gathered and cross-referenced to piece together a coherent narrative. The details involved in this process can be as small as the size of the floor tiles in a Syrian prison or as large as an area of desert and farmland that can be seen from space. Refining these data requires a very particular type of patience, diligence, and even obsession that I’m not sure many people possess. Most importantly, though, it takes time – HRW’s piece on the Ukrainian train station strike was released no less than 10 months after the strike happened. This time allowed HRW to put together a seemingly bulletproof account of the strike, not only describing what happened but also directly making the case that what happened was a war crime—and doing so in a forceful piece of writing. Here, as with any other piece of long-term reporting, time augments the force of the argument but also leads one to imagine what the reporters could have done with that time instead. Not everything can be analyzed with such scrutiny as the bombing of the train station, which leads me to wonder how HRW decided on this case over others. What about this case made them feel it was worth studying? Was it the severity of the crime? The availability of information? If not all war crimes can be fully examined and entered into evidence for legal cases, why do some get studied and others don’t?

Many of the pieces on open source reporting were bullish on the method. In particular, they enthused about the way that “citizen journalists and lone investigators” were leading the charge in developing open source reporting, because the tools required to do this reporting are accessible to anyone, anywhere—and because governments and mainstream outlets were slow to pick up the techniques that lay users were developing at “light speed” (Bellingcat). Yet there is definitely a darker side to this dynamic that other pieces this week mentioned: citizen journalists are doing the work because no one else is able to. Bellingcat, one of the principal open source journalism outlets, relies on volunteer labor, with reporters squeezing hours of research into a day already occupied by a full-time job and even childrearing in some cases. It didn’t seem to be able to pay these diligent journalists for their time. Meanwhile, commentators in the documentary and other sources lamented in the inability for mainstream outlets to fund this kind of work, as they face shrinking budgets and dwindling subscriber bases. Therefore, although this is a story of intrepid and plucky researchers, it’s also a story of a media landscape that only allows this research to be done by those individuals. Open source reporting in this model relies on agility and precarity at the same time. How long until unpaid volunteers lose interest or capacity, and stop working for Bellingcat? Is the solution to find more people to take their place?

Mikhail’s The Beekeeper was a totally arresting piece of writing. Putting aside the horrific accounts and shattering poetry of the book, I was curious about how it portrayed the role of information within this conflict. 

We see firsthand the consequences of lacking information. Villagers such as Elias, not knowing the state of the conflict and being unable to assess the chance of danger to themselves, wavered on whether to leave their house or stay and wait out the conflict; when deciding to leave, Elias was then confronted with the decision of which direction to travel in to reach the top of the safe mountain (e.g. 83). Whether or not to trust Daesh officials often depended on more information than villages had; they were told never to trust the fighters, but when they showed up and made promises, local individuals seemed unable to do anything but take them at their word, even when doing so led to their death. At its most extreme, this appears to be the outcome of a lack of information, which compounds on lack of political or military power that left localities totally merciless at the hands of Daesh. 

The information made available with cell phones seems to be a powerful mediating force through the chapters we read. Women are bought and sold via Telegram, and then escape by obtaining access to cell phones that they can use to call for outside help. The internet creates the platform for a universal medium of exchange for slavery: physical markets act as secondary mechanisms as Daesh fighters first encounter women through their cell phones from wherever they are. At the same time, it also acts as a universal means of escape from that system, rendering space relatively meaningless once internet connection is established. If one is lucky, one can enter an internet cafe down the street and find a way to arrange one’s escape. And, of course, satellite imagery available through GIS systems serve as an open-access tool for Abdullah to plan how to free captive women, even when he cannot visit the places of captivity themselves. This de-territorializing of terror and liberation makes boundaries in this book feel strangely open considering the circumstances: in theory, and in practice in some of the cases we read about, an avenue to freedom exists even within enemy territory by walking out on the street and making a call. I suppose this underscores the lack of Daesh’s control of the area, but I do think technology in this case acted as an additional destabilizing force. 

On another note, I both grated at and appreciated Mikhail’s restraint at providing context. We are so often taught to ensure that the reader is never lost, that they must be told all the context needed to understand the story and be oriented at all times. The book doesn’t spell out events such as the Iran-Iraq war, or even the history behind Daesh’s invasion, putting the responsibility on the reader to put in the work to research gaps in their knowledge on their own. The reader almost had to earn the right to understand the context behind the stories of the book in their full complexity, and they gained the motivation to make this effort by the emotional intensity of its prose. This approach does have the downside of breaking immersion, and I would like to discuss how to evaluate this tradeoff more in class.

PRINCETON—Germany’s refugee population decreased in the first half of this year, from roughly 3.55 million 2024 to 3.50 million, according to government statistics released by Die Linke (The Left Party) last Friday.

Germany has not recorded a decline in refugee populations since 2011.

The decrease is likely the result of a conflicting set of immigration policies enacted over the past few years that has opened a path to citizenship for some and closed that path to others, augmented by changes in migration flows that have affected Germany’s refugee groups.

This shifting landscape has perhaps most affected refugees from Syria, who make up one of the largest refugee group in Germany. Fleeing war and autocracy, these individuals began to arrive in Germany in the mid-2010s after then-Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed them to come.

Up until recently, Germany’s government implemented policies to support these migrants and integrate them into German society. Among these policies was an overhaul of the citizenship process in 2024, which allowed refugees to apply for naturalization five years after their arrival to Germany, replacing the previous eight-year requirement. According to Hannah Alarian, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida, this policy has opened the door for far more refugees to apply for citizenship, including Syrians.

Indeed, in the past six months, 83,150 Syrians, including many refugees, obtained German citizenship, as reported by Deutsche Welle.

Once refugees are granted citizenship, the German government no longer includes them in refugee statistics. “This is a quite effective way of reducing [refugee] numbers,” said Benjamin Etzold, a migration scholar and Senior Researcher at the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies.

Still more Syrian refugees have voluntarily left Germany and returned to their home country since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in December 2024, according to Alarian. Ertzold argues that this trend has also contributed to Germany’s latest refugee count.

Yet the decline in national refugee numbers may also come from the German coalition government’s recent crackdown on immigration. Bolstering border security and ramping up migrant deportations, the government has attempted to limit entries and send a negative signal to prospective migrants.

Indeed, after a 50% drop in asylum applications was reported occurred in the first six months of 2025, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, a member of the center-right Christian Social Union (CSU), claimed this reduction was due to his government’s policies.

The coalition government has also targeted Ukrainian refugees residing in Germany, seeking to divert these refugees to other countries. After Ukrainian refugees began to claim benefits from the Bürgergeld, Germany’s state unemployment plan, the ruling parties made a plan to replace access to the Bürgergeld with the Asylum Seekers’ Benefits Act payment, which provides fewer benefits. Additional plans include eliminating the fast-track citizenship pathway for skilled immigrants.

However, critics have claimed that these punitive policies rarely meet their intended objective of reducing migration. “They only make journeys more difficult or dangerous, more costly for people,” Etzold said.

If anything, they may have encouraged refugees to seek citizenship for protection. “People are also afraid of losing rights and their status and being forced to return eventually,” Etzold said.

Analysts predict these factors will continue in the coming years, as the conservative coalition government continues to restrict migration.

“This is really concerning for the people on the ground,” Alarian added. “I think they get lost a lot in this conversation.”

Azmat Khan’s Times pieces were done with the rigor of a social scientist, the care of a social worker, and the grit and determination of a professional reporter in her element. Khan had a tall order ahead of her. Not only did she have to demonstrate that the U.S. military was making errors that killed hundreds of civilians, but she also sought to prove that its disregard for Afghan lives was systemic in nature, as demonstrated through specific patterns of abuse that resoundingly discredited the military’s efforts to minimize its mistakes. This required an exceedingly thorough and systematic effort to document as many cases as possible, informed and supported by FOIAd evidence and additional documents. The logistical undertaking alone impressed me, and I wonder what interactions she had with academics to bolster the legitimacy of her methods. 

If anything, I felt as if the format of a feature piece, however longform, was almost a discredit to the evidence that Khan collected for the story itself. Synthesizing the information into a different format, such as a report or a legal case, may have given more force to the quantitative data that Khan disperses through the article (e.g. “The Pentagon says x percentage of civilians were killed in this way, but the Times found that it was actually a much higher y percent.”). The breathing room of appendices or footnotes could allow Khan to make the case not only with scattered quantitative data points mixed with devastating individual testimonies, but also with the sheer volume of evidence that Khan could only allude to in the abstract throughout the articles. To be sure: the piece in the Times wasn’t intended to be comprehensive, as its purpose was to address a wider public that would not have the time or patience to comb through all of Khan’s findings. Perhaps I’m just let down that Khan wasn’t able to demonstrate the full extent of her work, even if that wasn’t the point of her piece. Letting data points go to waste is never satisfying.

On another note, I thought that a fleeting moment in Khan’s second piece could have been emphasized to a greater extent. She devotes the first couple of grafs of section 8 in her second piece to arguing that, much as the rules of war provide psychological comfort to warriors because they would feel like they are abiding by some kind of morality, those rules also make people believe that the wars their country wages are just. This argument gets to the heart of the issue, in my opinion, taking it beyond the standard accountability journalism that the rest of the pieces seems to engage in (e.g., the airstrike model hid the true civilian death toll, legitimized the “expanded use” of drone strikes, lacked any kind of accountability or investigations into wrongdoings, etc.) by mobilizing that accountability angle to raise a much more fundamental question about the nature of war: what myths or narratives do we create that allow us to feel justified in putting innocent lives in danger? The role of technology and the narrative of precision, as she effectively argues, are significant answers to this question. I would have liked this claim to be more strongly articulated throughout the pieces.

I felt at once compelled and really put off by A Faith Under Siege. It took me until about halfway through the documentary to realize that I was very much not among its target audience. Disseminating a pro-Ukraine message through appealing to Christianity while also directly criticizing Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Margorie Taylor Greene, the documentary seems best suited for a conservative Christian (male) who watches Fox News uncritically and opposes American spending on Ukraine (I say male audience given that the documentary’s protagonists were all men and its interviewees were also almost exclusively male). Someone who might be susceptible to Christian’s evaluation of Tucker Carlson: favorable,“except that he has got some things that aren’t true.”

As a result, although the spontaneous prayer circles that the protagonists convened or the talk about demons in Ukraine were jarring to me, I could see them being a way to build trust or credibility among this audience. The film introduces us to the protagonists themselves only very briefly, mentioning their faith and a little bit about their background before throwing us into Ukraine with them: this background could be sufficiently relatable (or at least more relatable) to Christians of similar backgrounds, but I struggled to resonate with their stories given my own background—and the sparse details they presented didn’t help with that. One of the “protagonists” was a man from an idyllic ski town in Colorado about whom we know virtually nothing except that he felt a religious calling to go to Ukraine. Aside from not feeling too invested in his emotional transformation with these sparse details with which I didn’t connect much, his story also made me question how he got involved in the project in the first place, which threw me out of the story a little bit. Yet I could see this documentary having a pretty forceful impact on a conservative Christian who doesn’t know much about Ukraine. The Colorado character’s speech to his congregation toward the end of the documentary seemed to also be directed at the documentary viewer themself: its intended audience may find the argument more persuasive by imaging themself among the congregation to whom he spoke. 

Furthermore, I finished the film unsatisfied with some of the simplified narratives that the documentary crafted. On the one hand, the statement that “This is good versus evil. There’s not a grey area here” feels accurate for the most part, but on the other hand, presenting one side as good merely because the other seems evil can hide important nuances (e.g. stories of traumatized Ukrainian soldiers returning home and becoming domestic abusers, etc.). Apart from this good-evil dualism, some other narratives made me want to do more digging. For example, the film stated that  Russia’s population decline was the only factor behind it abducting Ukrainian children. Evidence does seem to support this being a major rationale, but other such reasons include using abducted children as bargaining chips and as propaganda for the war effort (which the film did successfully demonstrate). At the same time, given the documentary’s statement that the cause of declining birth rates was because so many pregnancies ended in abortion, and given the fact that the number of abducted children pales in comparison to the annual birth rate of the country, I wonder to what extent the prominence of the birth rate explanation correlates to an implicit anti-abortion message (again, this would probably be evidence that a conservative Christian audience could get behind).

The phenomenon of the breakdown of shared facts—and indeed shared reality—in the American polity calls to my mind Hannah Arendt’s writings on truth in politics. Arendt writes that factual truth is so dangerous to tyrants because it has a kind of coercive power that prevents them from obtaining a monopoly on power in a given community: the existence of a factual truth arises outside of the political realm and is not based on political consensus, thus generating an independent sphere of influence that the tyrant cannot erode. Responding to this “stubbornness” of truth, despots seek to transform what is a fact into a kind of opinion–and thereby to muddy the distinction between what actually happened and what ought to have happened. They can do this because facts are no more “self-evident” than competing opinions about them: there is no intrinsic logic that can explain them as if they were, say, a mathematical equation. This is where the tellers of lies possess an advantage over the tellers of truth: once the former group renders truth into merely an opinion, they can create an alternative set of opinions (“alternative facts,” if you will) that can appeal much more strongly to their desired political community than actual factual truth. 

I don’t think the Trump administration has read much Arendt, but it’s clear from the readings this week that they’re taking advantage of the media ecosystem that has become more fragmented than ever over the past couple of decades. As Hughes writes, the “idea of shared facts” has been dissolved, and “it is much harder to have anything like a single national conversation about an issue. We are having all of these separate conversations in separate formats on separate platforms, sometimes talking past each other, often not even hearing each other.” Losing a shared set of facts means that we are left with entirely separate and polarized conversations that do not feel particularly obliged to base their opinions on reality. Indeed, Hughes points out that there still is some level of reporting going on by mainstream outlets, but then an “army of podcasters and content creators and YouTubers and TikTok influencers” takes that news and tries to integrate it into the opinions that they have been empowered to disseminate. Although Hughes seems to imply that it is a good thing that reporting can get disseminated to the public by being “mediated through many other people distributing their insights,” it still means that someone can shop around for the set of facts to which they wish to be exposed, and dismissing facts disseminated on other platforms as mere opinion. 

Trump and his administration seem to have attenuated this dynamic. I was struck by the audacity of his actions against traditional news outlets—particularly his baseless lawsuit against 60 Minutes. Despite Helmore pointing out that he lacked “any serious evidence” of bias in the show, he still went ahead with the lawsuit: the lack of grounding for his case didn’t matter, because the opinion–and story–he could create to demonize the show could be more convincing to his base than reality itself. Perhaps in a court of law his lack of factual basis would be a liability, but he could take advantage of the fact that his fight was in the political realm–which, as Arendt points out, relies on common consensus into which the coercion of stubborn, factual truth intrudes–to exact the concessions he sought. In this case study, we see Arendt’s warning come through: “the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.” It didn’t matter to Trump’s base whether or not his attacks were informed by evidence. Perhaps those attacks could create their own “evidence”: why would the president attack a news outlet unless he knew it was guilty? But perhaps they didn’t care one way or the other about Trump’s evidence: they just wanted the result he sought.