The Foreign Service Journal, December 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2020 15 50 Years Ago Commonplace Thoughts on Home Leave H ome leave is peculiar to diplomats. It is the coming home between stays abroad, the time of finding out that home is alien, and the last embassy is home. It is the time of recognizing that America has moved ahead and left you behind, even while you have moved ahead and left America behind. It is the seeing of the familiar through eyes grown foreign. It is the thrill of being back among kin, and the shock of finding that old ties go slack. It is a sus- pension between rediscovery and rejection. Home leave is a floating. Home leave is the time you cannot get home. … Coming back to Washington is like coming back to a house and finding all the furniture changed, or coming back to a hometown and finding Main Street the same but all the old familiar people gone. To think about home leave without thinking about the technical impossibility of the thing is most difficult. I mean the moving around of a whole family without the means to do it comfortably, squeezing into places not big enough physically or spiritually, putting everyone out, feeling so homeless that the term home leave becomes a sour joke. But in this sense home leave is a microcosm of the diplomatic life, which on the surface cannot be done, or at least cannot be done without frequent disaster. Yet some people do it. Home leave makes us aware of the high opportunity of the diplomatic life and the usually sad realization of it. Our friends envy us the opportunity, and we mourn how sadly we fall short. If both the chance and the missing of it are somehow grand, I suppose we had better not complain. —Jack Perry, former newspaperman and Foreign Service officer, excerpted from an article of the same title in the December 1970 FSJ. Rep. Michael T. McCaul (R-Texas), shared Engel’s outrage, accusing Pack of ignor- ing “the will of Congress” and refusing to answer “basic questions” the committee has asked him in other matters. On Oct. 27, Voice of America reported that Pack was using his powers as chief executive to roll back the “firewall” rule that protects VOA and other U.S.-funded news networks from editorial interfer- ence. Republican and Democratic law- makers were sharply critical of the move. Democracy Under Lockdown T he COVID-19 pandemic has weak- ened democracy around the world, “providing cover for governments to disrupt elections, silence critics and the press, and undermine the accountability needed to protect human rights as well as public health,” states an Oct. 2 Freedom House report, “Democracy Under Lock- down.” Since the pandemic began, democ- racy and human rights have weakened in 80 countries, the report finds: “Govern- ments have responded by engaging in abuses of power, silencing their critics, and weakening or shuttering important institutions, often undermining the very systems of accountability needed to pro- tect public health.” The report found that democracy has become weaker in 80 countries since the start of the pandemic, while remaining about the same in 111 countries. Democ- racy has become stronger in only one country, according to Freedom House. (We asked. It’s Malawi.) Some of the worst effects have been seen in struggling democracies and highly repressive states. “What began as a worldwide health crisis has become part of the global crisis for democracy,” said Michael J. Abramowitz, president of Freedom House. “Governments in every part of the world have abused their powers in the name of public health, seizing the opportunity to undermine democracy and human rights.” “The new COVID-era laws and prac- tices will be hard to reverse,” added Sarah Repucci, vice president for research and analysis at Freedom House and a coauthor of the report. “The harm to fundamental human rights will last long beyond the pandemic.” Country experts identified four major democracy problems related to the pan- demic: lack of government transparency regarding information about the corona- virus; corruption; lack of protection for vulnerable populations; and governmen- tal abuses of power.