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The Current Transcript for May 26, 2021

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

SALMAN RUSHDIE: We are just who we are. Human nature is what it is. Back in 1665 people were doing exactly what people have been doing during this plague year. I don't know whether that's comforting or not, but it seems as a species, we haven't grown up very much since the 17th century.

MATT GALLOWAY: Salman Rushdie has some experience with confinement. He lived under a fatwa from Iran's ayatollah for years, and he's an author, a profession that requires plenty of time alone. None of that, though, prepared him for this pandemic. In 30 minutes, the Booker Prize winning novelist is here to talk about surviving covid our need for stories and his late, great friend, Carrie Fisher. Also this morning, can the Canadian military truly be reformed in the midst of a crisis of sexual harassment and assault? Those leading the forces said yes in our interview yesterday. Julie Lalonde isn't so sure. The women's rights advocate has trained people within the armed forces and she's here with her perspective in an hour. Plus:

VOICE: We don't know what's happening to Ramon. He could be interrogated by KGB. He may be tortured. Now as an enemy of [inaudible]. We are dealing with the harshest regime in Europe.

MG: The chilling effect of Belarus forcing a jetliner to land to grab one of the strongest critics of that country's leader. But as reopening beckons for many provinces we start in Manitoba. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Calls for stricter measures as Manitoba battles 3rd wave

Guests: Dr. Eric Jacobsohn, Melanie MacKinnon, Christopher Adams

MG: While British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec trade off talking about reopening plans, other provinces still in the throes of covid's third wave are looking at even longer lockdowns. That is the case in Manitoba, where the test positivity rate is the highest in North America. Nearly 14 percent of Manitobans being tested are testing positive for covid ICUs are overcapacity and that has some doctors calling for stricter lockdown measures. Eric Jacobsohn is one of them. He's an ICU doctor and a professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Manitoba. He's in Winnipeg. Doctor, good morning.

ERIC JACOBSOHN: Good morning, Matt.

MG: What are you seeing in your ICU that makes you think the province needs tighter restrictions when it comes to activity right now?

EJ: Well, I think you've mentioned it. We've got a positivity rate in the provinces that is unenviable, shall we say, depending on what day you look at. We were up to 600 odd cases per day last week. Which perspective wise is six thousand cases would be the case in Ontario. Right. And our ICU capacity, which is normally about 70 to 73 beds for the province, will be up to 145, I believe, by the end of the day, or about 140 odd, and of which probably the vast majority of the patients are covid. So it's catastrophic. Again, you translate those numbers into Ontario numbers that I think you'd be close to nine hundred patients in the ICU, we're over 80 already and we've sent over 15 patients to Ontario. So it's catastrophic.

MG: What is and isn't open right now in Manitoba in terms of what you can do?

EJ: Things have been pretty... you're not allowed to have anybody out at your house and not allowed to walk outdoors, and that's all new. You're not allowed to congregate in parks or anything like but that's only new in the last week. Malls are still open, although it reduced, as it is non-essential stores are open. So now, in the absence of really knowing where the virus is spreading, you know, you can take targeted measures to reduce exposure if you really know where the cases are coming from. But that's a bit of a black box in Manitoba. We don't know the data. We don't know if public health knows the data if the government actually knows the data. It's not shared. There is at least a perspective from many of the front line Doc's that these patients are coming in and saying, I did what I was meant to do, but I probably got sick at work and there's been a lot of discussion about whether these large numbers of patients... it just doesn't mechanistically make sense that these are people getting it generally in the backyard. And frankly, are Manitobans that different from the rest of Canadians that we would have these disastrous numbers. That doesn't make any sense. It must be that the nexus of these outbreaks are somewhere that's not being reported or nobody knows.

MG: Is there a sense of inevitability around this? I mean, in Ontario and other provinces, there were high rates of covid. There were concerns around, you know, essential workplaces. ICUs were overloaded. There were slow steps taken in some provinces to bring in further lockdowns. Is there a sense in Manitoba that you saw this coming?

EJ: Yeah, it's quite sad that, you know, the rest of the country or most of the country, at least our Western and Eastern neighbours, were in trouble. Right. And so it was clear that it was going to be part of this onslaught. And there's many people who believe that it was wishful thinking that we were going to avoid the third wave. And it's given us the dubious distinction, dubious distinction of being the highest per capita covid infection rate, not only in Canada, in North America. I mean, this is just an embarrassment and the public narrative has shifted very much to, well, you have yourselves to blame. You didn't listen to us. And again, really, Manitobans aren't that different to the rest of North America that they are so fundamentally against following rules doesn't make sense.

MG: Doctor, stay with us. I want to bring in Melanie MacKinnon to our conversation. She's head of the Indigenous Institute of Health and Healing at the University of Manitoba, part of the First Nations Pandemic Response Coordination Team. Melanie. Good morning to you.

MELANIE MACKINNON: Good morning, Matt. Thanks for having me.

MG: Thank you for being here. What are you seeing when it comes to the number of indigenous people in hospital during this third wave?

MM: Well, as Dr. Jacobsohn has mentioned we are seeing, you know, alarming numbers, we are seeing more people in hospital and ICU at younger ages and severity of illness. We are also seeing a difference between the on Reserve and the off Reserve population and seeing that severity of illness and hospitalisations and ICU admissions are actually happening at a median age, much younger in the off Reserve context then the on Reserve. And, you know, there's probably lots of variables or contributing factors to that. But certainly one of them would be access to vaccine or slower access to vaccine. To be clear, we were able to roll out a pretty significant on Reserve vaccine campaign, 18 plus over the last number of weeks and months. But unfortunately, in our urban or off Reserve context, we were comparable to the provincial eligibility with a 20 year caveat for our age cohort for younger but still we weren't quick enough. And that's unfortunate.

MG: The premier has said that vaccinations are the key to getting out of this crisis. Take a listen to Brian Pallister.

BRIAN PALLISTER: As of last week, approximately 70 percent of individuals hospitalised with covid-19 in the province of Manitoba have not been vaccinated. And that is not because of a lack of available spots or an opportunity to be vaccinated, our vaccine team has made vaccines available to everyone in every age category.

MG: Melanie MacKinnon, how big of an issue is vaccine hesitancy within the indigenous community?

MM: Well, we've certainly seen some hesitancy, but, you know, I would like to also understand that with respect to accessibility, whether it's either supply or low barrier clinics where we can improve access to vaccines, there's lots of different variables to hesitancy. And I don't think it's just a matter of what people are seeing or hearing on social media or in the public or traditional media. There you know, sometimes it really is an access concern.

MG: What are the biggest challenges in getting vaccines to members of the community who in particular are off Reserve?

MM: Well, you know it's really interesting, as we open the urban indigenous six clinics in partnership with the province and our urban and indigenous partners the last couple of weeks, so maybe going on our fourth week now. I was really, really surprised to see how many elders were coming to the clinics that were eligible months ago. And so when we talk to them about why they didn't have a vaccine yet, they talked about, they didn't feel like they can go to the super site. They felt it was too far away. They felt it was too big or simply that they couldn't get the paperwork done because they couldn't print off an informed consent and have it signed. So I think it's really important to understand our communications, our messaging, where we're welcoming people and looking at different strategies and tools, whether it's communication or whether it's transportation, just to improve access and uptake.

MG: What needs to be done? I want to bring the doctor back in a moment. But given what you've just said, Melanie, what needs to be done to ensure that the vaccine gets to those people who need to get it, but who may not because of the structural barriers that you're talking about, may not be able to get to the super centres?

MM: Well, I think we've been focussing on the vaccine promotion from an education perspective, and that needs to continue with a very, very safe vaccine. We also need to look at innovative approaches. We need to challenge our perspectives as to, kind of program design and ensure that we're meeting people where they're at and be as creative as possible while being as safe as possible as providers ensuring that we improve access to vaccines.

MG: Dr. Jacobsohn, are vaccines the way to get Manitoba out of the crisis it finds itself in?

EJ: No, you can't vaccinate yourself out of this crisis. Vaccines are obviously a phenomenal way of preventing infection. You just have to look at those countries that have had successful vaccine campaigns, including what's happening in the United States. But we're in the middle of the battle here. We're dealing with patients who are acutely ill or are going to come to the ICU in seven to 10 days. And those are the one and a half percent of the number of patients that I've had in the last 10 days. So we're in the air for the next two to three weeks. And that's what the stress of the health care system is. Vaccines are obviously important for two to three months down the line, will it have the effect? But, no we can't vaccinate ourselves out of this catastrophe that we're in. The next few weeks, to a couple of months and then, of course, as the effects of the vaccine take hold, we would hopefully be able to reboot our healthcare system and start caring for, never mind, the only the covid patients. The tens of thousands of patients who have had to have care deferred relate to their non covid and chronic illnesses.

MG: The premier has said that it's not the rules that, you know, need to be put into place. It's that people aren't following those rules. What do you make of that, doctor?

EJ: Yeah, I mean, we all saw that and had tremendous national press. And again, I think that... I'm not sure that it's wise or very good to be blaming those who got ill. However, I keep coming back to the issue of are Manitobans so fundamentally different from other Canadians and other North Americans where the spike in activity has not been in the magnitude that is in Manitoba. Which gets us back to the question, are we doing something differently from a public health perspective that we're missing a number of cases? I don't believe Manitobans are so against following the rules compared to the rest of Canadians. There must be a mechanistic issue in the background regarding where the cases are being, where the cases are happening.

MG: Melanir MacKinnon just briefly, what do you want to see happen now to address the crisis that you both have been talking about?

MM: Well, like my colleagues, I would like to see further restrictions, you know, to Dr. Jacobsohn's point, you know, it's really unfortunate. But last week I knew over six family, friends and colleagues that were in hospital that were younger than me. And I'm just 50, including some of their own children in the hospital. These are individuals that, you know, abide by the rules. They literally just go out to get groceries. I think there's more community acquisition than we think. And I worry that, you know, most of us are following the rules and we're still at high, high risk. I would like to see more restrictions in place.

MG: I appreciate speaking with you both. And wish you both the best of luck. Thank you.

BOTH: Thank you.

MG: Dr. Eric Jacobsohn, ICU physician at Winnipeg Health Services Centre and St. Boniface Hospital in Manitoba. Melanie MacKinnon is head of the Indigenous Institute of Health and Healing at the University of Manitoba and part of the First Nation's Pandemic Response Coordination Team. The chief provincial public health officer for Manitoba, Brent Roussin, was not available to speak with us this morning. We did ask to speak as well with the premier, Brian Pallister. We did not hear back. Yesterday the premier extended the current restrictions to the end of this week and pointed, as we heard, the finger at Manitobans who are not following the rules. Christopher Adams is an adjunct professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba. Christopher, good morning to you.

CHRISTOPHER ADAMS: Hi Matt, it's nice to be on your show.

MG: Great to have you here. You just heard the doctor saying that he doesn't believe, you know, Manitobans are any different than other Canadians when it comes to this virus and how it spreads. There are also calls for stricter lockdown measures. Why, given all of that, do you think the premier is resisting those calls thus far?

CA: Well, you know, he's resisted a lot of things, the doctors had been calling in Manitoba for shutdowns quite a long time ago. And so I think that right now we're looking at a government that has sort of played two sides of the fence. That is one side allowing businesses to operate to some extent and also shutting down when the crisis was really high. We did have a long weekend in which everybody had to stay home, but you could see people out in parks sitting far apart and chatting. But, you know, yesterday I was downtown in Winnipeg and there seemed to be normal traffic downtown. I was in a doctor's office. We were spaced, one set apart from each other. But regardless, everybody was looking quite worried about being in a crowded sitting room area. So we haven't really gone into a full lockdown compared to what the doctors have been calling for.

MG: What do you make of the premier blaming Manitobans for not following the rules that are in place right now?

CA: Well, you know, that's been sort of the way of operating since the pandemic hit over a year ago when we first went into the pandemic in March and April last year, the premier was saying, you know, report if you see people breaking the laws. We see the premier criticising journalists. In fact, just a few days ago, he had a press conference in which near the end he said, I listened to health officials, not political columnists and the free press. So there's a sense in terms of a combativeness by the premier. I think he's feeling somewhat cornered. He's, in a way, a victim of this crisis right now. And his polling numbers are very, very low. He's also during the past year, he's wanted to blame the prime minister, early on when the vaccinations were being delivered, that it was just a squirt gun delivery of these vaccinations. And he's just this past weekend complained about the president of the United States not responding to a letter he sent calling for permission to have access to vaccines across the American border. So there just seems to be a bit of a blame game going on all around.

MG: Tell me more about how his leadership has been viewed in Manitoba over the past 15 months. I mean, people might remember the teary press conference he gave, what, just around the end of the year when he said that he was the Grinch, he was stealing Christmas from people and people paid attention to that across the country.

CA: I think it did get national news. I think a lot of Manitobans weren't terribly impressed with that press conference. The people I've spoken to. Early on in the pandemic because in many ways he was expressing concerns about public spending. He was concerned about public service unions. There is a sense in which there is not a coming forward as the leader of our community, unlike Doug Ford, who actually received quite a lot of accolades early on, Brian Pallister did not receive those accolades in the polling done by local polling firms, as well as the Angus Reid Institute. So, early on and right through the year, he's had problems in the public opinion polling. And just last March, pro research that does the polling for the Winnipeg Free Press was showing the NDP ahead by 20 points in Winnipeg, where the majority of seats are located. So I think there are a lot of people inside the progressive conservative government who are very concerned that they might not survive the next election, which is two years from now.

MG: Are you expecting him to take further action and bring in the restrictions that doctors like Dr. Jacobsohn and others are calling for? I mean, Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, many provinces across this country are putting out detailed plans of how they're going to reopen and what life is going to be like in the next few weeks and months. So what sort of pressure is he under to change course?

CA: Well, I think that's the ICUs, being overloaded, flying people to other provinces for care. I think it's a crisis that he's got to be further and further developing a response for lockdown. We've had our schools were just closed a week ago. Our public schools in Manitoba and I think there's still shopping going on. I would see a continuance of what was seen as just a Victoria day long weekend shutdown. I foresee this expanding through the next number of weeks. We aren't seeing a radical number of new cases declining. And the system's overwhelmed, as we've heard Dr. Jacobsohn talking about.

MG: So the mall would stay open?

CA: Yeah, you know, I think they probably will. But, you know, remember, I'm a political scientist, not a health official or a provincial government planner. But we do see a small amount of shopping still going on in the city. We see heavy traffic going on in Winnipeg and surrounding areas. So there isn't a sense that we're all completely hunkered down in our homes.

MG: Chris, good to talk to you. I wish you the best as your province makes its way through this third wave. Thank you.

CA: Thanks, Matt. Take care

MG: And you. Chris Adams, adjunct professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba. He's in Winnipeg. You're welcome to get in touch. If you are from that province. How are you feeling about the way that this third wave has unfolded and the leadership that has guided you through this pandemic? You can email us thecurrent@cbc.ca. Your CBC News is next and then:

SALMAN RUSHDIE: In every novel that I've written, I have failed to have anything other than an Indian central character. That identity, the boy from Bombay. You know, those are the eyes through which I see the world. But it is a dark place right now.

MG: The boy from Bombay who became a knight and a Booker Prize winner, Salman Rushdie, is here to talk about the pandemic, India and his unlikely friendship with Carrie Fisher. That's coming up in six minutes. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One. Stay with us.

[Music: Theme]

Salman Rushdie on why we return to stories to make sense of the world

Guest: Salman Rushdie

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MG: Still to come, outrageous, illegal and completely unacceptable is how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau characterise the actions of the Belarusian leader yesterday. In little over 30 minutes, journalist Anne Applebaum is here to talk about what Alexander Lukashenko did and what should happen next. But first, why novelists may be better equipped than others to live through this long pandemic.

[Music: Theme]

MG: He survived a fatwa on his life by the late Iranian leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and now he has survived a bout of covid-19. He's been knighted and shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times and won it in 1981 for his book Midnight's Children. Salman Rushdie has had an incredible career in literature. His new book is called Languages of Truth: Essays 2003 Through 2020. Salman Rushdie, good morning.

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Hello, how are you?

MG: Great. How are you?

SR: I'm pretty well, thank you.

MG: I asked this question in part because you did come down with covid early on in this pandemic.

SR: I did. I was one of the very early victims of this terrible plague, and I got it in March of last year. I have no idea how I got it or where I got it. But at that time, you know, none of us even knew how to be careful. I mean, we hadn't really learned what the disease required of us. So more and more as the as the horrific numbers pile up, I understand how fortunate I was because I didn't have the worst of it. Essentially, I didn't have any breathing difficulties. That was the thing that was putting people in hospital and onto ventilators. And so I was able to simply, as my GP recommended to tough it out at home.

MG: Were you a good patient?

SR: No, I'm a lousy patient. I mean, I'm a lousy patient if I've got a cold. Yeah, I complain a lot. I moan, a lot. I'm really no fun to look after.

MG: I mean, as you say, you got this and it's early on where nobody really knows what exactly is happening. How did your view of the illness change as the death toll started to grow and as you watched that death toll grow?

SR: None of us understood exactly how lethal this thing was going to be. And in the United States, it was... one's feelings were made worse by the sense that the disease would be enormously badly mishandled, that for a long time, the administration was really denying that it was a problem that said it was just going to disappear. And then there was, frankly, a lot of untruth about the numbers and a refusal to pay attention to the doctors and the scientists. And all of that made things really much worse than they need have been. And in a way, that kind of scenario is now playing out again on an even bigger scale in India, where once again, the government has mishandled the situation dreadfully by a kind of overconfidence, by believing that they've beaten the problem when they hadn't at all.

MG: You write in the book that you were surprised by how many people said to you, well, of course, you're used to being in a lockdown because you were under the fatwa. What did you make of that, of people saying that to you?

SR: I just said, you know, It doesn't feel the same at all because that was a thing that happened to an individual while the world proceeded on its way. This was a thing happening to all of us. You know, I think to everybody it's sort of, I guess, the difference between somebody being threatened in the public square and an avalanche descending and destroying the town. One thing doesn't feel like the other. I mean, I think writers in many ways are familiar with solitude because in order to write a book, you need to be good at being on your own. So I think maybe novelists had some training in how to conduct yourself when you're when you're by yourself. I just think the force of the event overwhelmed everybody. And it certainly for a while overwhelmed me. I mean, I was really not able to work very much. You know, also the other thing people said, oh, well, this must be a great time for you because you've got lots of time to write, you know? And I thought, yeah, you know, half a million people are dead, but it's a great time to be a novelist, you know? So it felt sort of like Wrong-headed, that idea. And in fact, I... something happened which has not happened to me for a long time, which is that I began in abandoned projects. I started two different projects and wrote quite a lot, sort of 70, 80 pages of each of them and then thought, you know, this is dreadful. And just put it aside, it took me a while before I was able to, you know, to find something to do, which I thought was not dreadful.

MG: There's this idea that we're going to come out of this period and it will be different, that we will have taken what we learned over the last 14 months and refashion society and be better on the other side of it.

SR: I don't think that's going to happen. I think we are who we are. I mean, one of the interesting things I've been teaching a little bit, you know, online in the spring semester and one of the books that I got my graduate students at NYU to read was Daniel Defoe's, Journal of the Plague Year, which was about the Great Plague of London and 1665. And one of the things that strikes you in almost every page of that book is how the way people behaved in the 17th centuries, exactly the way in which they behave now, there were some people who behaved really well and locked down and know sequestered themselves and in many cases survived. They were other people who refused to do that, said it was an intrusion on their freedom. And many of them died. And there were all kinds of quacks peddling crazy cures. There were falsifications of the official statistics. And it just showed me that we are just who we are. Human nature is what it is back in 1665 people were doing exactly what people have been doing during this plague year. And I don't know whether that's comforting or not, but it seems as a species, we haven't grown up very much since the 17th century.

MG: How do you process what's happening in India right now?

SR: I mean, this is beyond words, really, because the level of the horror is... it's far greater than the official numbers suggest. And in fact, there's strong reason to believe that the real figures may be up to 10 times as big as the figures that have been given. And there are now more cases in India than in the rest of the world put together. And much of this is happening to the poorest people in the country. Some of the rich are getting on private planes and skedaddling but, the poor are dying in the streets. The scenes of horror of bodies floating down the Ganges, of people unable to bury their dead, you know, or cremate them. It's beyond words, really, you know and I've been spending a lot of time talking to friends all over the country, and I haven't talked to a single person who has not lost somebody. People are just struck dumb. There's nothing to do except try to live each day. And a lot of this has to do with government mishandling because they decided that they had defeated the coronavirus and it was over, you know, and so they allowed huge mass gatherings and it exploded again. And it seems particularly galling that at this particular moment, the Indian government is in the process of demolishing the heart of New Delhi in order to build ugly new buildings at a cost of somewhere between two and four billion dollars at a time when the country is in crisis. So that money would vaccinate the entire population of India. And the idea that that's not the priority saving people's lives is not the priority with this kind of vanity project. I mean, it's... I don't know. I don't have the words for it.

MG: You write in the book that there's a battle underway for the soul of India. What do you mean by that?

SR: People of my generation, the generation that was the first independent generation, we were persuaded by the founding fathers, by Nehru and Gandhi and the others, that the way to keep the country healthy as a society and to prevent interreligious conflict of the sort that had bedevilled the partition, when so many people were killed, was to keep the country secular, to take religion away from the Constitution and away from the running of the state, because the moment religion got in there it would it would create discord. And that's how the country ran from 1947, from independence in 1947 until about the mid 70s, and at that time they began the phenomenon which is now known as Hindu nationalism, where the rise of a politics which said, no, this is a Hindu majority country and that should be enshrined in the Constitution and Hinduism is more important than everything else and in a way, other people would be second class citizens and the present government, which has a colossal majority and has won a number of elections. It's made these views very popular, it's embarked on the project of demolishing the country that came to independence in 1947. They don't quite have the majority yet to rewrite the Constitution, but they want to. They are rewriting the history books in order to to praise Hindu culture and diminish other contributions. And it's also become a very authoritarian country where it moves very rapidly and very unpleasantly against opponents, people who speak out against it. So you have a curious mixture of religious extremism, authoritarian rule and incompetence. Incompetence, an inability to save the lives of the population. That's a bad combination.

MG: It's been 40 years since Midnight's Children came out. And you've said that in some ways. And this is, I guess, going back to what you were just saying. In some ways, that you don't recognize the country that you wrote about, that the country that you wrote about is not the same country now. What is your relationship with India like now?

SR: As you would have heard from what I've just been saying, it's a combination of love and despair.

MG: Yeah.

SR: I mean, I love it very deeply, you know, and it has a deeper power over my imagination than anything else. I mean, in every novel that I've written, I have failed to have anything other than an Indian central character. Never managed to do it. I've often thought I should have a go at doing it... somehow, never managed it. And so what I'm saying is, I guess that identity, the boy from Bombay, you know, is still... those are the eyes through which I see the world. And so that will always be the case. But it is a dark place right now. And as I say, I have been speaking to people from all over the country, different friends in different places. And their despair, their anguish really has been very upsetting to hear.

MG: Do you ever go back to that novel, to Midnight's Children?

SR: I mean, I guess the last time I went back to it in any serious way was when I was working with Deepa Mehta on the film adaptation, you know, and I actually hadn't read it through since I wrote it, you know, until we started making that film. And, you know, the feeling you have about your early work is peculiar because there are moments that I would be reading it. And I'd think, oh, that's pretty good, who wrote that? and there were other moments when I would think, you know, not so much. Maybe if I was doing it now, I might not do that, that way. But, you know, you have to let your books go. There's no point even imagining that you can do anything to them. After all these years. There's one or two writers have tried to rewrite work of theirs, and it's never a good idea. What I feel is when I'm writing a novel. A lot of it is held in my head. I mean, no matter how many notes and charts and things I've got, a lot of it is held in my head. The web of the novel, you know, is held in my head. And there's a certain point when you finish the book when that goes away, you know that web in the head is no longer there. And after that, it's absolutely fatal to try to fiddle with it, you know, because it's like trying to perform brain surgery blindfolded. And so it just has to be what it is, you know, warts and all. One of my favourite lines of literary criticism is the American critic Randall Jerrel once said a novel is a long piece of writing that has something wrong with it. I think that's true. But you can't when you're writing that, when you're writing 100,000, I mean, Midnight's Children is over 200,000 words long. You know, they can't all be perfect, you know, you just have to get it as close to that as you can and then live with it.

MG: There is a lot in this new collection of essays and writing about truth and about courage and about authors that you admire and people that you wish you had the opportunity to meet, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. There is also a great essay about one of your friends.

[Sound Clip: Carrie Fisher "Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope".]

MG: That of course, is Carrie Fisher, Princess Leia. How Salman Rushdie did you come to meet Carrie Fisher?

SR: Well, it was a little accident in media land. I was asked to be on a late night talk show in London, the host being Ruby Wax, and the other guest was Carrie, and we'd never met before. Of course, I was a colossal Star Wars fan and therefore colossal Carrie Fisher fan. And to my surprise, she turned out to be a bit of a Salman Rushdie fan that read at least one or two of my books. And we have... but beyond that, we just hit it off. You know, something about her sense of humour just got to me immediately. And we just became by the end of the show, we were friends and continued to be, and got closer and closer over the years, even though we lived far away from each other. You know, she was mostly in California, although she travelled a fair bit. And I was mostly first in London and then in New York, so but whenever we got together, it was very close. And she was very lovable, Carrie, because she was, on the one hand, hilarious and on the other hand, brilliant. But she was also very kind of, vulnerable, you know, because she had difficulties, you know, she had a quite serious bipolar condition and she treated it, to my horror, with with electroconvulsive therapy when I said to her, why would you do that yourself? She insisted that it really helped, but she would leave these ridiculous... her voicemail message was kind of ridiculous, it said hello, leave a message, leave your name and phone number. And because I've just had ECT, I probably won't remember who you are. So tell me something about yourself. So she used comedy as a way of confronting the difficulty in her life and with great courage, she would... I mean, as well as the movies, she would go around giving lectures and talks about being bipolar and about the difficulties of mental trouble. And these talks were simultaneously very naked and open and very funny. And she was a remarkable person.

MG: And she remembered that speech word for word from Star Wars.

SR: Oh, yeah. This was one of the great moments of my life that I had. I ended up somehow having dinner with her and Ewan McGregor, who was also very awestruck, by the way. And Ewan said to her, you know, the speech that comes out of the Droid, the speech that comes out of R2D2 do you remember it? She said, I mean, I can't use the rude word, but of course, I f-ing remember it and Ewan said, well, can you do it for us? And she went to full princess mode like that with a flip of a sweatshirt. She was completely in character and she did the whole speech full on and Ewan and said, I'm never going to forget this. I just had Princess Leia doing this speech for me. It was a great moment at the hilarious ending that she ended by saying, Help us, Obi Wan Kenobi, you're our only hope. And she said, because if you listen to the film, where the tape gets cut off before she finishes the word hope.

MG: Oh, amazing.

SR: So she actually says you're our only hope. Anyway, this was characteristic of her and I loved her. She became a close family friend. You know, she became very close to both my sons and yeah, I miss her. I also had the bizarre... of seeing her on the last... what was the last night of her life. She was passing through London before Christmas. And I was there to see my family and she summoned me to her hotel. You didn't argue with the princess when she told you to come over. So I went and I had a very nice evening with her at this hotel in London. And I remember thinking how well she seemed. You know, I'd seen Carrie in good and bad states. So, when I heard the next day that she was on this plane to L.A. and she'd had this seizure, it seemed impossible because she had seemed so well 24 hours before. So, yeah, it was awful. So I did spend the last evening of her sentient life with her.

MG: I want to ask you about writing and just about how we interpret fiction right now. I mean, one of the things you say in the book is that publishers will say to you that we live in this age of non-fiction, but people will turn to fiction when we come out of a moment like this, when we're in the midst of something to try to to put it in place and try to offer some perspective. Why do you think we do that? Why do we turn to literature to make sense of the world that we're living in?

SR: I think it's partly because, you know, we are all dreaming creatures. We all have some kind of fantasy life going on inside our heads, however incoherent it may be. And these things, which are kind of organised and coherent, imagined tales, I think correspond to something very deep inside human nature, you know, and also at a time when the world is in turmoil, when it's changing very fast, when your own assumptions about the world seem no longer to fit, the world doesn't seem to make sense to us anymore suddenly, because of the way in which it's changing, because through literature, we can be sure in many other ways of thinking, other ways of imagining the world, you know. In a way, it helps us to deal with the fact that we have to reimagine the world, you know, as it changes.

MG: How do you go about then creating fiction that in some ways is even more interesting than the wild world that we're living in right now?

SR: I wish I could answer that question, really. I mean, if I knew the answer to that question, I'd have written a lot more books.

MG: Yeah and you've written a lot of books already.

SR: I actually like the period when I don't have a book to write when I've finished the book and it's gone. And I'm trying to think of what next because it's a very free form period, where I work just as hard. I sit there every day and I see what's in my head and fool around on the page, you know, write fragments of things and throw them away and try something else. And every day I look at what I did the previous day and most of it is garbage and I get rid of it and then do another day's garbage. But somehow in that period of completely free thought, what happens to me after a while is that something starts sticking. You know, I wake up in the morning, I still have in my head something that was in my head yesterday and at a certain point, I have to ask myself, why is that in my head? Why is that sticking? What is it about that, that is interesting to me? And out of that questioning, usually that's where the books come from. So it's not even entirely a conscious process. You know, some of it is just letting your mind run and see what sticks.

MG: We will go back to books of yours as readers. Again and again, I mean, what are you going back to, what will you return to try to offer that that kind of grounding and that perspective?

SR: Well, you know, as you can see from the essays, in Language of Truth, I have a really long, abiding interest in mythology and the most ancient stories because I think stories don't survive by accident if something has survived for thousands of years or even hundreds of years. There's something really valuable there. That's why it survived, something that people have found very valuable, you know, and I often find them very instructional and helpful, you know. So, for example, when I was writing The Ground Beneath Her Feet, I was thinking a lot about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Now, the thing about that story is that you can actually tell the whole story in about 100 words. You know, it's very compressed. And yet there's so much in there that you can unpack that into a 500 page novel. And what I thought about it is that at the heart of that story, it's like there's a little triangle. And at the points of the triangle that there is art, love and death. And depending how you turn the triangle. You could make it mean that love through the agency of art is able to overcome death, or if you turn it another way, it can say the death in spite of art will destroy love. And these are just the most profound things about our lives. The deepest stories, you know, are there. And so, for instance, one of the things I've just done in this lock-down period, bizarrely, at a moment when all the theatres in the world are shut. I've written my first play and not only is it a play, but it's about Helen of Troy. And not only is it about Helen of Troy, but it's in verse. And there's nowhere to put it. So that's where I'm stuck, I'm stuck now with a play that there's nowhere to perform. But that's. I mean, again, my going back to very old stories in order to see what they have to say to us now.

MG: Can you ever imagine losing that hunger to write? I mean, you're early 70s, you've written this library of books.

SR: I fear it is the onset. I think many writers have that sense that when they finish a book, they think, oh, well, this is the last one. You know, there's nothing left in the shelf, you know. And I often have that feeling after finishing a book. That, you know, I'm just done, you know, there's nothing else in my head. So far something else is always showed up. Let's hope it does. I mean, I hope it does, I don't know if anybody else hopes it does, but I certainly hope it goes on doing so.

MG: It's kind of like a magic act. I mean, you don't want to think too much about it in some ways.

SR: Yeah. I mean, it doesn't come, writing doesn't entirely come from a rational process. And when it does, it sometimes feels to willed. If you tell yourself I must write a book about the pandemic, you know, what usually happens is not a very good book about the pandemic. And sometimes the books, which are about events like that, are written much later. I mean, War and Peace is written, I think, more than 50 years after Napoleon's Russian campaign. And yet now we think of it as the greatest novel written about that time. But it took half a century to show up. So it may be that the novel about the pandemic will be somewhere down the line. You know, I mean, even I was mentioning Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, well, the plague was in 1665 when he was five years old. He wrote it in 1722 pretending that he'd been there. So he wrote actually more than 50 years later. And now it feels like almost the definitive book about the Great Plague. So what I'm saying is it's usually not intelligent to push yourself to write something because you feel that that's what you ought to write. You have to see what comes to you that insists on being written and that you can't avoid writing.

MG: We look forward to whatever it is that you produce next. And I'm sure I mean, theatres will open, so your play will make it onto some sort of stage at some point in time.

SR: I'm hoping. We're working on it. You know, I'm lucky in that I have a very good producer who wants to do it and a very good director who wants to direct it. So we're in the process of looking for a theatre.

MG: Excellent. In the meantime, it's a real pleasure to talk to you. Salman Rushdie, thank you very much.

SR: Thank you.

MG: Salman Rushdie's new book is Languages of Truth Essays, 2003 through 2020. Coming up after your regional update:

WAYNE EYRE: We need to take a look at our training, our leader selection, our professional development writ large to ensure that we are getting to the right aspects of our culture, changed to address the exclusionary aspects of our culture that has harmed so many.

MG: That's from my exclusive interview with the acting chief of the defence staff. Women's rights advocate Julie Lalonde says on Twitter that that interview gave her feelings. We'll hear of some of them when she joins me coming up in 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

Julie Lalonde on rooting out sexual misconduct in the military and international outcry over detention of journalist in Belarus

Guests: Julie Lalonde, Anne Applebaum

MG: Hi, I'm Matt Galloway, you're listening to The Current.

WAYNE EYRE: We're at this point where we're having a reckoning with our past. And the real tragedy here is we've got some alleged victims who have been carrying the weight of what happened some time ago and now feeling free to come forward, which is good to achieve some closure. So we're working our way through this. It's going to take some time to re-establish that trust and credibility with our people as we reconcile what has happened over the course of decades.

MG: That was Canada's acting chief of defence staff, Lieutenant General Wayne Eyre from our exclusive interview yesterday. What has happened over the course of decades in the Canadian military has been hundreds of allegations of sexual misconduct and sexual violence and a culture of silence around this issue. Also in that interview, Wayne Eyre and the deputy minister of the Department of National Defence, Jody Thomas, spoke about the plan to address all of this. Julie Lalonde is a women's rights advocate and public educator who also trains people within the Canadian Forces and the Department of National Defence. And she witnessed that military culture firsthand when she was subject to verbal abuse as she tried to deliver a lecture on sexual violence to cadets at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, in 2014. Julie, good morning.

JULIE LALONDE: Good morning.

MG: You heard our interview yesterday with the acting chief of the defence staff, Lieutenant General Wayne Eyre and the deputy minister, Jody Thomas. Based on what you heard. Do you feel that they will be able to change the culture in the military with the approach that they are taking?

JL: No, I don't I don't think the military is well positioned today to be able to do the necessary Soul-Searching and overhaul that is needed to eradicate sexual violence from the Canadian armed forces. But what does give me hope is the public attention, not just the media representation, but just the conversations happening with everyday Canadians. I'm hearing from lots of different people who are shaking their heads and saying, what the heck is going on in the military? And I think that outrage is what's going to put the fire under their feet to really get the CAF moving in the right direction.

MG: Tell me more about that. Why do you feel that despite the public outrage, but also, you know, the flood of people coming forward saying that they experienced sexual violence, sexual harassment, sexual assault in the military, that the military now is not ready to truly take this on in a meaningful way?

JL: There's a few reasons for that. First, I think people need to have a true historical look at this conversation. I mean, the media first blew this up in 1990 in a McLeans piece, we had work by [inaudible]. We've had I mean, we've had so many opportunities in this country to talk about this in a fulsome way. And those opportunities were missed. And even when you look at the Justice Deschamps report that started in 2014 but went public in 2015, that was at the height of Canadians having a very intense heightened conversation on sexual violence from the Ghomeshi story to the Dalhousie dentistry students. We were having kind of our own me too moment in Canada in 2015 when the Justice Deschamps report came down and the military still didn't act. And so I'm not convinced that the folks there understand the depth of the problem. And for me, that was confirmed by the amount of times that the acting CDS, pardon me, used the word alleged yesterday several times in relation to abstract stories, not specific stories. And that might sound kind of inside baseball or a little bit semantic, but I think it says quite a bit about the lens through which they're looking at this work, which is still in a very defensive liability sense, rather than just stepping back and saying, look, we screwed up and we know there are people who are suffering and who do not feel comfortable. They don't trust us right now. And let's build up that trust. But I can tell you that when you speak at it from a perspective of walking on eggshells because you don't want to get in trouble legally, that doesn't tell me you have the right attitude.

MG: I want to play one more thing from the interview. This, again, is the Lieutenant General Wayne Eyre.

WAYNE EYRE: So we have failed as an institution to properly address this over the course of the last few decades. We absolutely have to embrace external recommendations and not be defensive about this. We need to own this and view this as an opportunity to truly change our organisation.

MG: So Julie Lalonde in some ways that speaks to that idea of defensiveness. But knowing what you know, we asked this yesterday to the acting CDS and to the deputy minister, why is the culture in the military so difficult to change?

JL: Well, I mean, it's simple to me at best, the military has 18 percent representation from women. We know the Canadian armed forces is overwhelmingly white as well. So we know there are real issues of racism within the military. So, I mean, it's a very white, very masculine, very heterosexual environment. And we know I mean, history has shown us that when that is the case, when women or people of colour try to integrate into those spaces, there is a lot of resistance and there is a lot of reminders that you are here because we allow you to be. The idea that it's a privilege and that if you step out of line or you get too mouthy, we will remind you that you are here because we're allowing you to be here. I mean, that's very clearly the vibe. And I know that because I do a lot of seemingly controversial work around sexual violence and nothing brings me more threats and more hate mail than when I talk about masculinity in the Canadian armed forces.

MG: What happened in 2014? Just tell us briefly when you spoke at RMC in Kingston, Ontario, what happened there?

JL: So I was invited to train all of the cadets on bystander intervention and sexual violence, and instead I was brutally harassed, I was openly mocked. I was told "I didn't listen to you because you're a woman and a civilian". I was told women are asking to be raped. This is a joke. You hate men. And then worse than that, when I filed a complaint, they actually filed a complaint against me and accused me of saying all men are rapists, which I mean, is such a ludicrous statement. Of course, I didn't say that. And then when the story became public, I received, I mean, hundreds, if not thousands of threatening messages, emails, tweets. And it was very clearly because people were... really felt like I was attacking the last place where men get to be men. And that's the key part of this conversation that everyone seems to be kind of skirting around. But it is the truth. I mean, this is an overwhelmingly masculine environment. There's nothing wrong with masculinity. But when you combine masculinity with our goal is to conquer and dominate and show up in other countries and show them how to live. I mean, that's a really toxic mixture, that, of course, is going to result in what we're seeing, which is not only sexual violence, but I mean, you know, we're seeing openly white supremacist people who are proud, you know, proud boys in the Canadian armed forces. This is a group that was recently designated a terrorist organisation. Like there's a lot that needs to be eradicated in the military.

MG: To your point, people have tried to address that culture before. In 2015, the former Supreme Court Justice Marie Deschamps released this scathing report about sexual misconduct in the forces. She talked about a sexualised culture within the armed forces. Yesterday, in our interview, the deputy minister, Jody Thomas, said the response to the report's recommendations fell short. Take a listen.

JODY THOMAS: I wasn't there when the report was received, but my observation would be that it was treated almost as a checklist. And I think it's time that we were just honest about that, and I think that as little was done as was possible to make it look like the report had been responded to without any real change.

MG: Does the fact that she has acknowledged that, that report was treated like a checklist give you the encouragement that this time things will be different?

JL: I think it gives me encouragement that the political will is different than it was when the Deschamps report came out, which was under a conservative government. So the political will has definitely changed in the right direction, and that's absolutely encouraging. But at the end of the day, this is a CAF problem that needs to be solved by the CAF. And if the highest ranking military of the Canadian armed forces right now is walking on eggshells when he's talking about this, acknowledging that he's been there for thirty seven years but can't recall a specific incident in which he would have acted differently. Again, it's not a matter of intent, and I think that's what's so misunderstood. I don't doubt that the people working on this file intend to do what's best, but they are not the experts on this issue.

MG: You mentioned the political culture, but also just the general social culture. I mean, Emma Phillips, who was legal counsel to Marie Deschamps, former Supreme Court justice for her review, told me on this program a couple of weeks ago that this is a different time. This is post Ghomeshi, this is post Harvey Weinstein. And me too. Does that context change things at all?

JL: I think it changes the the fact that Canadians are energized about seeing something happen. But again, I think it's important that we recognize that the justice Deschamps, our report happened in the smack dab middle of Canadians having a massive, massive conversation. Again, the Dalhousie dentistry conversation, the Deschamps report, but also. Yeah, like what happened with Ghomeshi, even folks on the Hill. I mean, that's when Trudeau, at the time before he was prime minister, had to fire two of his MPs because they had sexually harassed members of the NDP party. Right. Like we were having this conversation in 2015. And so that's why I don't really have a lot of patience for that line of reasoning, because we were absolutely in the depths of a very intense conversation about sexual violence. The Deschamps report did not come out of the blue. This was not the first time this was brought up. So I don't agree with that line of reasoning at all.

MG: Just before I let you go, both of our guests yesterday said that they believed that despite these allegations, despite what has been described as a sexualised culture within the military, that the Canadian armed forces, the military can be reformed, that that culture can be changed. Do you believe that it can be reformed?

JL: I think it can be reformed to a certain degree, but I don't think that there are the right places and people in place right now to see that happen. I'm not seeing the anger that I want to see. I want to see people, high ranking military members, offended and embarrassed to be complicit in this culture. And until I see that passion and that absolute commitment, I'm not going to be convinced that they're well positioned to do so. I think in my lifetime, perhaps. But the idea that we're going to turn the ship around in the next few months, because there's someone there who is saying he cares about this issue, that's incredibly naive.

MG: Julie, I'm glad to have the chance to talk to you. Thank you very much.

JL: Thanks for having me.

MG: Julie Lelonde is a women's rights advocate and a public educator.

[Music: calm beats music]

MG: You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One, my name is Matt Galloway.

MALE REPORTER: The man Belarus's regime essentially hijacked a commercial aircraft to get, appeared in a video from his jail tonight released on a pro-government social media site. In it, 26 year old journalist and activist Roman Protasevich says he's well and then appears to confess to organising protests against Belarus's government, a crime that could keep him in jail for years.

MG: A report by CBC News on the incredible and troubling story of a dissident journalist now in prison in Belarus. The idea that a commercial flight between European Union countries could be diverted by MiG fighters to Minsk has sent shockwaves across the continent and across the Atlantic. The EU has banned all flights to and from Belarus, and condemnation has come from both the U.S. and Canada. Yesterday, Belarus announced the closure of its embassy in this country. Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. Anne, good morning.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Good morning.

MG: What went through your mind when you heard the president of Belarus had apparently used his military to force down a passenger plane carrying one of his very public opponents when it flew over the airspace of his country?

AA: I would say my first reaction is, this is new and then my second reaction was actually, what am I saying? No, it's not new. This is really the escalation of a trend that we've seen growing for some time. It's sometimes called transnational repression. Think about the murder or attempted murder of Russians and Russian dissidents in London or in Solsbury. Think about the murder of a journalist in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Think about numerous incidents of kidnapping and killings of Iranian or Chinese dissidents who are outside the country or other forms of harassment of people who are outside the country. This is an extension of all of those autocratic practises which are becoming more common. Authoritarians now no longer see borders or passports or diplomatic regulations or now even the you know, even even the idea that there's something important and special about air traffic control, that air traffic control should be something apolitical, that people assume is there just to protect their safety and it's not there to trick them into a landing. Increasingly, they don't see these things as barriers to stopping or blocking their own dissidents.

MG: The president, we should mention, the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, spoke about this for the first time today, saying that he didn't know that the dissident was on the plane. Had he known he would have had the plane land in Belarus, but that he accused of Roman Protasevich of planning a blood rebellion. What do you make of the fact... I mean, do you believe that Alexander Lukashenko had no idea that this was unfolding?

AA: No. I mean, that's ridiculous. Everybody who was on the plane said that when it landed, there was no special rush to get the passengers off. Nobody was acting like there was really a bomb. There was some, you know, kind of, people pretended to search people's baggage, but not very seriously. And the only people that the police on the ground were interested in were Protasevich, this young journalist and his girlfriend, and they were taken away immediately. So there was no other reason for the plane to be taken down. And there's no special reason why we should listen to Lucashenko's analysis. He's lied consistently and repeatedly for many months... including, I should say, about the results of the last presidential election, which is which is the origin of this whole problem.

MG: I was going to say, tell me more about Protasevich and the work that he was doing and why Lukashenko would see him as such a thorn in his side.

AA: So Protasevich was one of a number of young and very talented young journalists and bloggers, most of whom are now outside the country, all of whom now are outside the country, who have been communicating with their countrymen using an app called Telegram. And the reason why they use it is because almost all other forms of independent media have been blocked in Belarus. But Telegram is still accessible because you can get it on your phone. And so even when the Internet is down and even when other sites are down, you can still have access to it. And partly because they are outside the country and people know they're outside of the country, people in Belarus have come to trust it. And they believe that... it's a blogging app so people put up information, they put up videos, they put up news, they put up, you know, they put up in ordinary pieces of journalism. But it also has been used to coordinate reaction, so to coordinate protests. Belarus protests, I should say, have been entirely peaceful. There is no evidence of violence whatsoever. The only violence against the protests has come from the police. Historically, Belarus was not a country where there was a lot of protest. It's been a dictatorship. But I mean, I think I can say a fairly benign one in the sense that there wasn't much violence up until very recently. But since the summer, since Lukashenko stood in election, since he almost certainly lost that election. He has arrested, beaten and actually murdered members of the opposition. You mentioned in your introduction the appearance on Belarussian television and on news media of videos of Protasevich, this arrested journalist and his girlfriend who are, who seem to have been beaten up and who seem to be reciting things they've been told to say. This is very Stalinist behaviour, to do forced confessions on television. So Protasevich was important because he was one of the people who was reaching the Belarussian public and because that public is now anti regime and Lukashenko knows it's anti regime, he knows he's unpopular, he knows people want him to go, and that's why he's accelerated the violence in the last several months.

MG: So having seen this unfold, what do you think I mean, and this goes back to, you know, you connecting, you know, this to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, to the kidnappings and killings of Iranian and Chinese citizens abroad. What do you think other authoritarian governments will be thinking as they watch something like this unfold?

AA: So they're watching to see what the Western reaction is, they're watching to see how seriously this is taken, they're watching to see whether this might become a new technique that they can use to capture some of the people who they would like to capture.

MG: A new technique being bringing down a plane to land as it flies over their airspace?

AA: Yes, bringing down a plane on false pretences as it flies over their airspace. Yes. I mean, you know, once these methods are used by one government, then it's perfectly possible that others will use them. I mean, we're now in a phase where autocrats very clearly are learning from one another. They learn from another how to use intimidation tactics. They've learnt tactics of disinformation from one another. They obviously watch one another. And also, I should say, more and more cooperate together. I mean, Belarus now, survives as an economy because of it's a very close relationship to Russia. The leader of Belarus, the Belarus regime is almost entirely dependent now on the Russians. But in the same way, you know, the Venezuelan regime is also dependent on help from Russia, China, Iran, the Iranians. You know, they go on thanks to their help from other autocrats. There is now, there are links, there are Connections. I mean, not in a conspiratorial way. I mean, none of it's secret. But they watch one another and cooperate with one another and are constantly looking for ways in which they can undermine the democracy rhetoric, the democracy ideas and ideals of the West and also ways in which they can discourage their own people and their own dissidents from using that same kind of language and from successfully convincing their own people that it's good.

MG: Given those close ties with Russia, do you think Vladimir Putin would have known in advance about the decision to force this plane down and grab Protasevich?

AA: It's highly possible the Russians did seem to be prepared very quickly with answers and justifications and explanations for the event, right. I mean, hours after it happened, the head of RT Russia today, the Russian backed broadcaster, almost immediately came out with a tweet and said how envious she was of Lukashenko, that he'd done this brave thing and what would an admirable job it was. And other Russians very quickly joined that chorus of Russian politicians and journalists. So it looks like they might have been prepared for this to happen. I mean, I don't have any other, I don't have any proof. But it also seems pretty doubtful, given his state of dependency right now, that Lukashenko has cut himself off from so many other sources of funding and support. It seems pretty unlikely that he would do something like this without being pretty sure Putin would approve one, obviously.

MG: Well, one of those explanations, it came from the Russian foreign ministry saying that the West has involved, been involved in similar tactics, talking about in 2013, a plane carrying Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, forced to land in Austria when it was denied airspace by France, Spain and Portugal because the United States suspected that Edward Snowden was on board. Is that a fair comparison?

AA: I mean, it's not on a number of levels. Number one, it wasn't a commercial airliner. Number two, there was no lying on the part of air traffic control. Nobody was giving false messages to a pilot telling me that a bomb was going off. Number three, nobody dragged Evo Morales off the plane, arrested him and beat him up and then made him make a confession in a prison. I don't really see that it's that similar. No.

MG: What should the West just in the last minute and a bit that we have, then what should the West do to ensure that this doesn't happen again? I mean, you know, Western countries, European countries have said that this is outrageous, that this is illegal, that they talk about sanctions. But beyond that, if you say, you know, the price that these countries are willing to pay clearly allows that behaviour to continue. What should those countries be doing then?

AA: So first of all, I do think that what the EU in particular has done in blocking air flights and blocking transport to Belarus is correct. And they did it quickly. And I think that was a good step. But look, in the longer term, we shouldn't be reacting constantly to these provocations as they build up. We need a much longer term strategy towards the autocratic world. And I would start with looking, looking for the money. People like Lukashenko, people like Putin keep their money or their colleagues and flunkies and cronies keep their money in our banks. They invest in our property markets. They have interests all over the world. This is one of the ways in which they've come to power and stayed in power. It's been documented by many people over many years. Cutting off that source of funding and doing so in a systematic and consistent way. This is the kind of thing we should be looking at and also we should be looking at much broader sanctions, not just, you know, sectoral sanctions, but who are the specific people involved? Who are the... beyond Lukashenko and beyond the immediate people around him. Who in the police, who in the air traffic control, who are the people responsible? And we should be naming them and sanctioning them as well.

MG: Anne Applebaum, great to speak with you, as always. Thank you very much.

AA: Thanks.

MG: Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. That is The Current for this Wednesday. Coming up next on CBC Radio One, it's Q. Thomas Rhett, Country music superstar speaking with Tom Power about a new album and growing up with a father who also happens to be a country music icon. You'll hear that conversation coming up in a few moments on CBC Radio One still with music, sort of, we were speaking with Salman Rushdie earlier. You think of Salman Rushdie, you may not think of Irish rock music, and yet perhaps you should. He's credited as the lyricist on a song by U2 from the year 2000 called The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the words taken from his novel of the same name. And we will leave you with that. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. We'll talk to you tomorrow.

[Music: The Ground Beneath Her Feet by U2]

Wednesday May 26, 2021 Full Transcript

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