Sean Landless

🔔In a Report From a Distant Border, I Glimpsed Our Brutal Future 👇 We are living through a brutal new era of realpolitik, where might equals right amid a frenzy of global jockeying. This world has been very good to Saudi Arabia... Once in a while, some single thing manages to encapsulate all that feels terrible about our world today. For me, this week, it was a bone-chilling report from @hrw documenting how Saudi border guards had killed hundreds — perhaps thousands — of Ethiopians seeking to cross from Yemen into Saudi Arabia. A 14-year-old girl named Hamdiya described waking up after an attack: “I could feel people sleeping around me. I realized what I thought were people sleeping around me were actually dead bodies.” There were bloodied corpses all around her. Another survivor, a 17-year-old boy, described being forced by Saudi guards to rape two girls after another man who had been asked to do the same was executed for refusing. These are defenseless children, unarmed people fleeing a savage conflict and relentless poverty, hoping for some chance at a life free of violence and want in one of the richest countries in the world. In these reports from a remote corner of a distant desert, I saw a glimpse of the unrelenting cruelty that is our future. First, let’s talk about Saudi Arabia. In 2018, ... If taking a bone saw to a famous dissident resulted in just a few months of cold shoulders, only to be replaced with state dinners, diplomatic talks and a booming sports industry, how much do we really expect the world to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for killing hundreds of nameless war refugees in the sandy reaches along its southern border? Meanwhile, the Saudis are making efforts to improve their country’s name recognition and reputation around the world. Human rights organizations refer to these kinds of moves as “sportswashing.” ... By @lpolgreen👇 nytimes.com/2023/08/24/opi…