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ALSO SEE: Ukraine's Top Allies Warn Russia About 'Dirty Bomb' Claims
ALSO SEE: 'Dirty Bomb' US Dismisses 'Transparently False'
Russian Claim That Ukraine Plans to Use Weapon
By groundlessly suggesting that Ukraine is preparing to use a “dirty bomb,” the Kremlin is testing the West—and potentially provoking a nuclear standoff.
Rationalization for Escalation?
Over the weekend, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu called his counterparts in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and—interestingly—Turkey. In these calls, Shoigu claimed that Ukraine is about to use a “dirty bomb,” which would ostensibly allow Russia to open the door to retaliation with nuclear weapons. Today, General Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian general staff, called his American and British counterparts to press the same case.
What is a dirty bomb, and what was the point in making this claim now?
A dirty bomb isn’t actually a nuclear bomb. It is, to use the clunky term professionals apply to it, a radiological dispersal device, which is just another way of saying that it is a conventional explosive wrapped around a lot of dangerous radioactive material. When the bomb explodes, it is not a nuclear detonation, but only the normal explosion of something like TNT or other munitions. The difference is that this conventional explosion spreads around a lot of radioactive material, poisoning anyone nearby and rendering the area highly dangerous—perhaps even impassable. The gunk inside a dirty bomb could be anything that is highly radioactive: nuclear reactor waste, the leftover pieces of a nuclear weapon, even radiological materials from a hospital.
This dirty-bomb charge could be part of the preparation for a Russian “false flag” operation, in which the Russians will explode their own dirty bomb, perhaps in the occupied territories of Ukraine or close to the Russian border; blame Ukraine; and then demand that Ukraine surrender or face nuclear retaliation. It could also be a way of trying to scare off Ukraine’s Western supporters with threats of escalation.
Let’s hope that this is just the Kremlin trying to engage in scare tactics. If, however, Putin and his circle are really considering a dirty-bomb provocation, it is likely because they would see such a plot as solving multiple problems at once. Russia would probably try to flip the script, and go from an aggressor likely guilty of multiple war crimes to the victim of a nuclear “event.” It might then issue an ultimatum to the Ukrainians that elevates the war to a nuclear crisis (which is probably the only way Moscow thinks it can win, now that the Russian army lies in pieces on the battlefield).
The Russians, in such a gambit, would likely be betting that a faked dirty bomb would alleviate the “first use” stain from any Russian decision to attack—or as they would almost certainly say in this scenario, “retaliate”—with a nuclear weapon. With nuclear weapons now in play, the West would have to decide just how much to commit to nuclear deterrence on behalf of Ukraine.
Why are the Russians now pushing this plot? I suspect the attempt to put nuclear issues back in play is rooted in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s realization that he has, yet again, humiliated himself in his harebrained scheming to prosecute a war he’s been losing since its first days. In particular, his attempt to conscript 300,000 Russian males has been a political disaster; some reports suggest that twice that number of Russians have already fled their country, and even Putin has admitted to “mistakes” and is winding back at least some of the mindless dragooning of his young men.
Thus, threatening this dirty-bomb ruse and risking subsequent escalation makes sense if you’re in a bunker under the Kremlin (which is why I think it’s Putin’s reasoning), but in reality, it is utterly unhinged and reckless.
For one thing, no one is going to believe the dirty-bomb story. The Americans, French, and British have already told the Russians as much. (We do not yet have a readout on the response from the Turks, but I cannot imagine they’re buying this fantasy any more than the other NATO allies.) That may not matter to Putin, who would probably care only that enough Russians believe it. But that plan, too, may backfire: One Russian-made dirty bomb followed by a nuclear crisis might panic the Russian public more than Putin expects.
And although the Russians may think that calling their nuclear attack a “second” use in retaliation will get them off the hook, it won’t. Putin is likely betting that the world will back off after some routine condemnations, but the story around the dirty bomb will collapse pretty quickly, and Russia will stand revealed as a nuclear aggressor, which might finally lead the rest of the world to the conclusion that this regime is an intolerable threat to global peace and security.
Putin could then find himself in a nuclear standoff with the West that neither he nor we want, but that will come anyway because of his own inability to foresee the consequences of his actions. (Ironically, one of the reasons the Russian president is in this mess is because he has a remarkable and completely unwarranted confidence in his ability to control events.) I do not want to speculate on how such a larger crisis could occur, but if the Russians choose this desperate path, there are multiple roads that could lead to a major East-West nuclear confrontation.
Putin, once again, is gambling with the lives of his own people and the world, and we can only hope that Moscow now understands—through warnings from Washington, London, Paris, and (ideally) Ankara—that we see through this attempted fraud, and that such escalation will only hasten Russia’s defeat and endanger the stability of the Russian nation itself.
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U.S. basketball player Brittney Griner looks on inside a defendants' cage before a court hearing in Khimki outside Moscow, Russia August 2, 2022. (photo: Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters)
Though the WNBA superstar and two-time Olympic gold medalist did "not expect any miracles" — as her lawyers, Maria Blagovolina and Alexander Boykov, said in a statement provided to Insider — she maintained some hope that the judges on the case would "hear the arguments of the defense and reduce the number of years" she'd have to spend in one of Russia's infamous penal colonies.
Instead, Griner's worst nightmare was reinforced; the courts upheld the initial nine-year sentence that everyone, from fellow sports superstars to US President Joe Biden, deemed "unacceptable."
"Brittney is very mentally strong and has a champion's character," Blagovolina and Boykov said in their joint statement. "However, she of course has her highs and lows as she is under an increasing amount of stress and has been separated from her loved ones for over eight months."
They added that while Griner was "prepared for the appeal," she was "very nervous" in the days leading up to the ruling.
The eight-time WNBA All-Star was first arrested in February, when customs agents at a Moscow airport found vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage. Ever since, Griner has been navigating an inconsistent Russian legal system known to be hostile towards Americans.
Her pre-trial detention was extended several times, and once she finally found herself in front of a judge, Griner came up against "a kangaroo court" less interested in justice than in bringing the state's "predetermined" outcome to fruition, sources told Insider ahead of the trial.
Though she pleaded guilty in an effort to secure leniency, the 6-foot-9 Phoenix Mercury star was sentenced to a near-maximum nine years at a Russian penal colony. She and her lawyers almost immediately appealed the decision, though legal experts told Insider the move was never likely to secure her freedom.
Griner's most promising pathway out of foreign custody involves a prisoner exchange between the White House and the Kremlin. Though the US has reportedly offered to swap notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout for the return of Griner and fellow American Paul Whelan, American government officials have maintained that they have yet to receive a serious counteroffer out of Moscow.
Understandably, Griner has not been in a good headspace in recent weeks as a result, her wife has said in recent interviews. The WNBA star recently celebrated her 32nd birthday inside a jail cell thousands of miles from home, and she understands that she's unlikely to leave Russia before the November 8 midterm elections back in the United States.
Though the timeline could take anywhere from weeks to months, according to her lawyers, Griner will now make her way to one of Russia's notoriously brutal penal colonies, where abuse is common, disease is rampant, and labor is forced.
In a statement released from National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan Tuesday morning, the White House committed to continue making "every effort to bring home Brittney as well as to support and advocate for other Americans detained in Russia, including fellow wrongful detainee Paul Whelan."
"President Biden has been very clear that Brittney should be released immediately," the statement read. "In recent weeks, the Biden-Harris Administration has continued to engage with Russia through every available channel.
"The President has demonstrated that he is willing to go to extraordinary lengths and make tough decisions to bring Americans home, as his Administration has done successfully from countries around the world."
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'Democracy can feel like a big and nebulous thing, while a more-expensive grocery bill is a tangible and immediate concern.' (photo: Jordan Tovin/SOPA Images)
While a whopping 71% of voters said that American democracy is at risk, just 7% named it as the most important issue in this election
But there’s something bigger going on here than just the usual political churn, or even the idea that voters are more motivated by pocketbook issues than amorphous ones like a potential future need for abortion. Voters are adapting to authoritarianism. And that doesn’t just portend a bad outcome for Democrats in November; it suggests America’s democratic future is at acute risk.
The American reaction to the supreme court’s radical decision on abortion rights is a telling hint of what’s to come. The court summarily taking away a fundamental, long-held, and oft-utilized civil right is incredibly uncommon; it hasn’t happened in my lifetime, or my mother’s lifetime. While most of the rest of the world is moving toward broader respect for human rights, including women’s rights, and expanding abortion alongside a greater embrace of democratic norms, the US is in league with only a tiny handful of nations in making abortions harder to get, and in newly criminalizing them. The nations that are cracking down on abortion rather than expanding abortion rights have one thing in common: a turn from democracy and toward authoritarian governance.
When the court overturned Roe v Wade, many Americans were initially incensed. Women registered to vote in astounding numbers. Significant majorities of Americans told pollsters that the court’s decision was flat-out wrong. The legitimacy of the court took such a huge hit that several of its justices made defensive statements about the value of their increasingly devalued institution. Pollsters noted a sharp turn: after dire predictions for Democrats, the party suddenly had an edge, thanks to an overreaching conservative court.
And Republicans were set back on their heels. The Dobbs decision was the result of decades of rightwing work and millions of dollars. The Republican party has made overturning Roe a singular goal. So it was interesting to see how they reacted when they finally got what they had always wanted: they went quiet. They avoided the topic. The standard Republican view on abortion – that it should be illegal nationwide – is overwhelmingly unpopular, so Republican politicians spent the summer and early fall trying to change the subject.
So what, then, explains this sharp swing back to Republican favorability?
Simply put, voters acclimated. The media is still covering the impact of rightwing anti-abortion laws, but not with the overwhelming force we saw in the initial weeks after Roe fell. After all, at some point the litany of horror stories – of women being refused care for miscarriages, of women being forced to carry doomed pregnancies to term, of women traveling thousands of miles for basic health care, of women getting septic infections, of women losing their uteruses, of child rape victims being forced into motherhood – blend into each other, sound like the same story over again, and become old news.
Human beings are remarkably adaptable. Often, this serves us well: it means we survive, even through horrifying circumstances. But it also means that we can learn to live in horrifying circumstances. Terrible laws that don’t affect most of us every day simply fade into the background as life ticks on. Terrible governments rarely target majorities of the population immediately and all at once. Instead, authoritarian states tend to start with those who have little power, as well as those who threaten the authoritarian’s power. For many conservative, highly religious authoritarian states, women are both a group with less economic power and political representation and a chief threat.
In the US, the women primarily hurt by Dobbs are those living in conservative states, and women with the fewest resources are hit hardest of all. This is not an accident. While all women in the US now live without full rights to our own bodies, and while the anti-abortion movement is coming for all of us, conservative politicians have targeted women with the least economic and political power first. A majority of American women may be angry about anti-abortion laws, but are not yet (or do not yet believe themselves to be) directly affected by them, and that is especially true for the Americans who have the greatest influence in the political and economic spheres – women and men alike.
The stripping of abortion rights is one clear indicator of America’s rising authoritarianism. And Americans know that we’re in trouble. Voters – especially Democratic and independent voters – are aware that democracy is under threat, and perhaps even that trust in free and fair elections, women’s rights, and America’s democratic institutions are on the ballot this November. While a whopping 71% of voters said that American democracy is at risk, however, just 7% named it as the most important issue in this election.
And that’s perhaps understandable. “Democracy” can feel like a big and nebulous thing, while a more expensive grocery bill is a tangible and immediate concern. And Democrats have been telling voters (correctly) that democracy has been at risk since Donald Trump began undermining it. They weren’t wrong to sound the alarm. But eventually even the loudest siren begins to sound like background noise.
There is also the simple fact that threats to American democracy will not be solved in 2022 alone.
What the US is experiencing is a pervasive problem with rising authoritarianism all over the world. Often, autocrats use democratic means to rise to power, and their takeover is a slow one, not an overnight coup. And once authoritarianism is entrenched, average citizens carry on – there may be an initial shock, but then life, for many people, evolves into a new normal.
We’re seeing this dynamic now when it comes to abortion. Over the next few years, we may see it on an even larger scale, and with democracy itself.
Armed with this new data, pundits, consultants and politicians themselves are telling Democrats to revamp their strategy: don’t focus on abortion so much, or focus on the economy more, or simply be prepared to lose in November. The beltway consensus seems to be that this is a messaging problem.
And certainly Democratic messaging could be better. But what we’re seeing isn’t just a problem of inadequate sloganeering or a focus on the wrong things. It’s another iteration of a longstanding pattern, forged by a combination of human nature and the canniness (and historical learnedness) of those who seek to use democratic processes for undemocratic aims.
How do you convince the frog in the slow-boiling pot not only that he’s in real danger, but that it’s going to take a while for the heat to come down? That’s not a question Democrats can answer with messaging alone – and not one they’re going to solve in a month.
Two armed and masked men wearing tactical gear surveilled a drop box outside the Maricopa County Juvenile Courthouse in Mesa on October 21, 2022. (photo: Maricopa Country Elections Department)
On Friday night, two armed and masked men wearing tactical gear were staked out near a drop box in Maricopa County.
On Friday night, two armed and masked men wearing tactical gear surveilled a drop box outside the Maricopa County Juvenile Court building in Mesa.
Maricopa County Election Department said that the police had been called, and that the armed individuals departed the scene.
However, in a statement to VICE News, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office said that after deputies responded, they “were able to determine that the individuals were not breaking any laws and were more than 75 feet away from the ballot box, as required by law.”
On Saturday night, at least one of the men returned to monitor the drop box again.
This time local sheriffs were captured on camera trying to intervene in a standoff between the armed individuals monitoring the drop boxes and those who came to observe the watchers.
The sheriff’s office did not respond to a request for comment about Saturday night’s incidents.
Maricopa County became ground zero for the efforts to overturn the 2020 election when the Senate sanctioned a bogus recount that eventually determined that President Joe Biden won by more votes than was originally thought. Now, as the midterms loom, Arizona is set to be one of the main flashpoints of the efforts to undermine democracy promoted and popularized by former President Donald Trump over the last two years.
In a joint statement posted online on Saturday, Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates and Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer condemned the drop box watchers.
“We are deeply concerned about the safety of individuals who are exercising their constitutional right to vote and who are lawfully taking their early ballot to a drop box," Gates and Richer stated.
This drop box is the same location where last week several voters reported being intimidated to the Arizona secretary of state, who referred the reports to the Department of Justice and the Arizona attorney general.
Multiple grassroots groups have emerged in recent months dedicated to monitoring drop box locations across the country. They have been inspired by the debunked conclusions of Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules election conspiracy film, as well as rhetoric from the GOP and Trump himself. One of the groups operating in Arizona is Clean Election USA, and their work has already been boosted by Trump via his Truth Social Account.
Meanwhile, officials in the local Democratic Party in Arizona reportedly received a letter from an anonymous group calling itself “Ben Sent Us,” threatening them with the release of their personal details.
“All video and picture of possible ballot, voting and dropbox fraud will be posted on the internet along with pictures of district attorneys, sheriffs and others that do not pursue investigations and charges on those committing election fraud….we will be locating your homes, your social media profiles and pictures and posting them online as well,” the letter’s author wrote, according to a copy obtained by a local activist group called the Indivisible Tucson Action Alliance.
The letter went on to state that “every judge refusing to sentence election fraud to the full extent of the law will be considered a traitor and dealt with accordingly, as will you.”
And yet, despite the rising tensions in Maricopa County, far-right GOP candidates are continuing to foment anger.
“We must watch all drop boxes because they do not have live cameras on them streaming to the public for people to ensure there is no fraud in the process,” Mark Finchem, the far-right GOP candidate running for secretary of state, tweeted on Sunday in response to criticism of the drop box monitoring.
In his tweet, Finchem linked to an article in the Gateway Pundit claiming that voters dropping off ballots were covering up their license plates because they were so-called “ballot mules.” The actual reason voters were doing this, according to local media reports, was because those monitoring the drop boxes had previously photographed the license plates of voters.
Finchem also failed to mention that the drop box watchers were also covering up their license plates to stop anyone identifying them.
Finchem is part of a QAnon-linked coalition of GOP candidates seeking to become the top election official in their state. All of these candidates, including Nevada secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant, Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, and Michigan secretary of state candidate Kristina Karamo, have claimed that they would not have certified the result of the 2020 presidential election and have hinted that they are likely to dispute future election results if they don’t go their way.
People carry signs during a 'Defund the Police' march in Seattle on August 5, 2020. (photo: Jason Redmond/AFP)
George Floyd’s caught-on-camera murder prompted massive social justice and police reform protests. But a spike in violent crime shifted the narrative around public safety.
Amid the pressure, elected officials pledged sweeping changes to how officers operate and how they’re overseen.
But two and a half years later, with violent crime increasing across the country, that momentum has seemingly stalled. In Washington, support for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would have created a national police misconduct registry among other measures, withered while lawmakers passed bipartisan legislation to invest in the police. A recent House bill would award local police departments $60 million annually for five years, with few of the kinds of accountability measures for cops that progressives had advocated.
Meanwhile, in New York City, home to the nation’s largest police force, Mayor Eric Adams pledged to recruit officers with the right temperament for the job, weeding out overly aggressive cops while taking on violent criminals. He has since staked his mayoralty on combating crime, empowering the police to pursue a range of functions, from sweeping homeless encampments to relaunching a controversial plainclothes anti-crime unit, which had only recently been disbanded over criticisms that it disproportionately targeted Black and Latino New Yorkers and was involved in many police killings.
To make sense of these shifts, I called Elizabeth Glazer, one of New York’s leading experts on criminal justice. For more than two decades, she’s been working in law enforcement and policymaking circles, first as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, where she leveraged federal racketeering laws to put shooters and their enablers behind bars, then as a government official, including the deputy secretary for public safety under New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Most recently, she served as the director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice during the Bill de Blasio administration.
This year, Glazer founded Vital City, a nonprofit dedicated to offering practical solutions to public safety problems. The endeavor is something of a call for a rebirth of civic mindedness, drawing on research that shows how communities can both be safer and feel safer if the whole of city government — not just the police — acts, including cleaning up vacant lots, turning on street lights and employing young people during the summer.
We discussed police reform post-Floyd, the role of the cops and the shifting narrative around public safety amid rising levels of crime. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
From your perch, what does the legislative inaction around the police reform agenda say about the ground-level movement that was spurred by Floyd’s murder? What happened?
Two things happened: One, there’s a kind of built-in conservatism about the importance of maintaining the police. As a country, we are afraid to change policing because we are so firmly attached to the view that it is only the police that can keep us safe.
The second thing is, the movement coincided with rocketing rates of increase in shootings. Suddenly, scary violence really erupted in ways we hadn’t seen in many years. And our reflex when crime happens is, “Call the police,” not, “Make sure you have enough summer youth employment.” That bolstered the reluctance to make changes.
But I think the other thing is that “defund the police” was really a lost opportunity. It sort of had this toxic messaging. So it was viewed as an existential threat to police departments. But in fact, it might’ve been an enormous opportunity if police departments didn’t view it that way. It could have been a chance for them to begin to reshape their roles in a way that focused on their core strengths and to begin to give back to other professionals the responsibility to deal with the homeless, those with mental illness and all these other areas where their authority had kind of expanded into.
I’ve always thought that some of the reformers and even the police union would have some common ground, especially when it comes to defining what the job of the cop is.
In fact, cops have often said: “We don’t want to be social workers. That’s not our job.” So it does seem like there’s an opportunity. But we don’t start from that point because I think there’s a sense from the profession that they are under attack and underappreciated. And if you say, ‘Do less,’ it feels like yet a further attack, as opposed to, ‘How can we support you to do what you do best?’ What’s happened is that the police department, as it accretes more and more functions, occupies a very prominent role among the city agencies. But actually we’re a civilian government, we have civilian heads whose job, really, is to ensure the police are part of an integrated civic approach, ensuring that communities thrive.
You’ve been making this argument for years. Why should policymakers listen today?
The police are great at solving crimes. And that is something that only they can do, and, really, that is what they should do.
But the line between who is police and who is government more broadly has become more and more blurred, so what you see is police really taking over all kinds of civic services. In New York City, the Police Department is funded to the tune of millions of dollars to construct community centers and do community programming. They have an employment program. They do graffiti removal. They do mentoring. They have a beekeeper. All of these are civic services. Why are the police doing it?
We seem to have gotten into this strange Rube Goldberg situation, in which the police, as a stated matter, are saying, “We’re doing it in order to build trust with the community.” But it’s really a backward way of doing it and ultimately, I think, ineffective because it is hard to make friends when it is an unequal relationship. It is hard to say: “Play basketball with me. By the way, I have a gun.” Or, “By the way, on another day I may be arresting you and your friends.” It’s just the way things are constructed. But the police can build respect by solving cases. And I think neighborhoods rely upon them, and have respect for them, when they do that job they can do so excellently.
In 1999, you wrote a piece for National Affairs that argued law enforcement needed to take a broader approach to crime reduction instead of focusing on arrests and one-off prosecutions. Today, 23 years later, do you feel as though the more things have changed, the more they are the same?
I think the frustration I was expressing then was that there didn’t seem to be a connection between going back in and arresting people over and over again and saying, “OK, well now a bunch of people who have been killing other people in the neighborhood have been arrested. Before another group steps in to fill the void, is there something else that can be done?” Who has that panoramic view?
A civilian needs to be the one who has that panoramic view, that civilian being the mayor, who oversees all the different services that are produced for the benefit of a city’s citizens and weaves them together toward one goal, which is supporting the well-being of New Yorkers. The police are an important part of that, but they are not the most important part, and they are not the point of the spear. They are a civic service that needs to be coordinated and synchronized with all these other efforts, focused on neighborhoods in need and working alongside their colleagues in housing, parks, employment and all the other things that keep us safe.
At the same time, when you think about this service of last resort, meaning the criminal justice system, it’s much more than just the city. Somebody also needs to coordinate that, and it needs to be someone who has enough gravitas and connections to have players who do not report to them be willing to think together and act together for a common goal.
Is there any recognition in the Adams administration that maybe the police don’t need to be as omnipresent in every aspect of city life? Or is that point lost on them?
I mean, certainly the mayor’s campaign rhetoric was very much about dealing with upstream issues. He famously quoted Bishop [Desmond] Tutu about making sure people don’t “fall into the river.” And he’s been a big proponent on summer youth employment. The difficulty is, it’s unclear what the plan is and how it all fits together. And then, even to the extent that one thing or another is announced, how are those things doing? And do they connect to anything else that’s being done?
How do you advise policymakers who are navigating the new terrain here when politicians weaponize crime stats for political ends? Yes, crime is up, but in truth there are some neighborhoods that are feeling it disproportionately.
Crime is now and always has been highly, highly concentrated, particularly violent crime. If you look at the neighborhoods that suffered the most number of shootings today and 30 years ago, they’re almost identical. Many fewer shootings now, but still, they lead the city. And right across the board, every social distress is borne in these neighborhoods, including poor health outcomes and high unemployment. So we’re seeing the durability of place.
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Iranian protesters set fire to property while marching down a street on October 1, 2022 in Tehran, Iran. (photo: AP)
Sociologist Chahla Chafiq was a 25-year-old Marxist activist during the 1979 Iranian revolution. Now in exile in France, she looks back on the tensions between socialism, feminism, and anti-imperialism that have roiled Iran’s opposition politics for decades.
Liza Featherstone
Can you talk about how you got involved in left politics as a student, in the years leading up to the revolution?
Chahla Chafiq
Like the teenagers we’re seeing in Iran now, I first joined the student movements in high school, in the years before the revolution. I was an avid reader and interested in the sociopolitical aspects of what was happening. When I was a university student, about three years before the revolution, I was studying sociology and again joined the student movements. At the time, there were civil liberties in terms of what you could wear and what music you could listen to. But there was no political freedom, to organize or be part of a political movement.
Since we were not able to have political meetings, [organizing] would often happen in the context of sports, or we would go hiking in the mountains, and that’s where we would discuss what we were reading. When texts were banned, we would get them from underground channels. And the way that we were able to read and study these was to get together in private places in small groups, but only with people that we were sure of, that we could trust.
Right before the revolution, I became part of a circle of Marxist-Leninists and joined a left student organization. There were so many groups underground, and once the revolution started, they all came out. They were all attracting a lot of members from the student movements. There was the Tudeh party, which was the classic pro-Soviet party, and there was Fedayeen, an urban guerilla party more similar to the Cuban leftist movement. Fedayeen was also pro-Soviet but maybe not as aligned as Tudeh. My group was close to a third party, Line Three, which was the independent left. We believed that the Soviets were an imperialist force, so that’s why we were not pro-Soviet.
There were so many different parties. There was also the Mujahedin [People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran], which mixed a Muslim line in with the leftism. But our group was nonreligious.
Liza Featherstone
What was the relationship between these left groups and the religious groups?
Chahla Chafiq
Before the revolution, there was rivalry within factions in the Mujahedin, and there was even some violence. The Marxist branch of the group wanted to get rid of the religious thinking, and they actually killed some of the religious members. Then it became a more Marxist party. And then, when the revolution had started, they reached consensus around some issues. Many political activists got out of prison, and that’s when the more Muslim thinkers started to come back and take over that tendency. And they constituted the party as it grew during the revolution. It grew quickly.
The Mujahedin had a lot more membership among the high school and university students. But the other leftist groups did have some influence. It’s very complicated! But the Mujahedin party we know today is the continuation of that history.
After the revolution began moving forward, Tudeh supported Khomeini. Fedayeen split into a number of different groups. When they started to break up, most of their members went and supported the Tudeh line and thus supported Khomeini also. Those leftists supported the imams because they thought that was the anti-imperialist line.
Khomeini didn’t use the word “anti-imperialism.” He talked about “Big Satan” and “Small Satan.” The Big Satan was the United States. The Small Satan was Europe. The leftists who went toward him translated that as anti-imperialism in their minds. In their minds.
Chafiq emphasizes this last point, raising her eyebrows and speaking in English to ensure that I get it.
My group was independent. We were not supporting Khomeini or his line or his discourse, but we were not clear on it, either.
One thing that the whole Iranian left agreed upon was this anti-Western, anti-imperialist line. It was the most important thing.
Once Khomeini returned from exile, they were starting to censor and ban a lot of newspapers and other writing. The left groups had been taking to the streets to protest that. But at that moment, everyone who supported Khomeini considered all these leftist groups as their number-one enemy and wanted to get rid of them. It was not mutual for the Left. The Left still considered the number-one enemy not to be Khomeini but the West!
Something that I consider the biggest error was that, from the beginning, none of these groups were attentive to the place of women and feminism, because feminism for us meant Western feminism. It was an idea that came from the West. Since the left groups were all, across the board, anti-Western, feminism was something that they did not consider putting forward. This was a big error.
Soon after Khomeini came back, on March 8, 1979, women took to the streets for an International Women’s Day march against the imposition of the veil. Many leftist groups saw them as suspect. The American feminist writer Kate Millet, who wrote a book about her visit to Iran, was attacked not only by Iranian leftists but also by the Left in the United States. Because she supported the demonstration of the women against the veil, people said, “What right do you have, from what position are you speaking? We’re anti-imperialists.”
That was the ambience at the time.
Ideas of human rights and civil rights and all of this — the general idea of rights — were not so important because they considered that socialism would fix all those problems.
This [inattentiveness to feminism and to human rights] was not just in the leftist groups, but also in the [liberal] pro-democracy groups. They, too, thought it was not a priority to focus on those issues because they would be fixed when the rest of the things were fixed.
Liza Featherstone
Did the Left at the time believe that Khomeini was going to deliver socialism?
Chahla Chafiq
They never thought that Khomeini would bring socialism. They thought that he was just one step toward the socialist state they wanted to bring. They were aligned behind him because he represented this anti-Western anti-imperialism. The other thing was that they didn’t think that this mullah and other mullahs standing with him would be able to form a power structure that could hold. They thought that he would have some power, and then he would leave. And that’s when the Left would bring themselves together and create their own power structures. It would be like a transition period, like in the Russian Revolution.
It is even worse than the sort of authoritarianism of the Shah. Even though there was some censorship, some expression was allowed — whereas this system is completely totalitarian. There are zero liberties and complete censorship. In my book The New Islamist Man (or Person), I describe how, through these different methods and especially the political prison, they installed this fascist system.
Nobody had the slightest idea of what an Islamist power structure could be, using fascism and killing people to keep its power.
Iran created a model for the new Islamist person that would exist in this new society. And the first victims were the Muslims themselves. They were either killed or reformed into this model that the regime had created.
It’s through this system that they created — which started also with the veil — what is called the “morality police.” The system was implemented especially in prison, a place where they have total control, like a laboratory of what they could try. Especially this idea of confession and repenting, which is still used, but was especially used against these political prisoners, as a way of breaking and controlling their minds.
The Shah had his secret police, but you knew who they were. You could recognize them. Whereas Khomeini said, we are going to create a secret police of thirty million, which was more or less the whole population. He created these Islamist surveillance presences everywhere, in every place of work and every place of study within the whole society. This is how they’ve been able to keep the power for more than forty years.
The new generation hasn’t made these mistakes because they’ve grown up in and lived through this Islamism that was so foreign to my generation. So they know exactly what they’re fighting against.
An important part of this huge mistake [during the revolution] was the confusion around Khomeini as a religious leader. What many people missed was that he was not just religious. He had a political religious ideology that he wanted to impose. Khomeini had this whole theory of religion taking power over society, through the Sharia laws, the Islamic laws. There was confusion about this among the left groups in Iran, and overseas, too.
It’s important to note that the student movements outside of Iran were very powerful back then. Every year the Confederation of Iranian Students was sending messages of support to Khomeini — and these were leftist groups. And yet Khomeini never hid his views or his thoughts. In the 1960s, during what we call the White Revolution, the Shah’s regime was doing show reforms, like giving women the right to vote. (It was absurd because the right to vote in a monarchy, where you can’t really pick your leader, makes no sense.)
But at that time, Khomeini attacked this idea of giving the women the right to vote, saying that women are supposed to stay at home. It was a misogynistic attack, but none of the left groups took it seriously, or even criticized him for that. He was always who he was. All the opposition groups were happy with him because he was radically against the Shah.
There were these Muslim opposition figures in the West who were close to Khomeini and were translating everything that he was saying but filtering out some of the stuff. But that doesn’t explain his support from the Iranian public, which was listening and reading his words in Farsi. So they should have known what he was saying. He was not hiding his ideas. There’s a common misconception that he was lying and got people to believe him. But we must take responsibility.
We lied to ourselves.
Liza Featherstone
You’ve said that as a Marxist, during the Revolution, along with your left comrades at the time, you didn’t think that issues like the veil were important, because they were not materialist. What experiences or observations changed your mind?
Chahla Chafiq
It has a lot to do with trauma. Once Khomeini was installed and this new power structure was emerging, I had to go into hiding because I was on a blacklist, and they were looking for me. At the same time, they were beginning to impose the veil. So I was going out still without a veil, but these guys with Kalashnikovs that were now working for the regime were stopping the women on the street and saying, “Put it on, put it on, put it on.” At this moment, I started to ask, “How could we not have known that it would be like this?”
After that, when I was in exile, reflecting on that, I realized what had happened and how it had happened. And that’s when I realized that I needed to write about these issues to deal with these multiple layers of trauma that came from that time. I was so close to so many people that were massacred in the prisons; this has to do with an error that I was also a part of.
At this point in our conversation, Bani Khoshnoudi, our translator, begins to cry. After a few moments, we continue.
So it has become important for me to write about what happened. And to be able to put forward the fact that the woman question was so central to all of this. To reflect on that memory, to reflect on what had taken place, what the mistakes were, what the actions were, and the repercussions. I take up this whole issue of the veil, the woman question and the mistakes in a new book called Rendez-vous Iranien avec Simone de Beauvoir. In 1979, a global delegation of feminists sponsored by Simone de Beauvoir traveled to Iran to support the women’s movement there. I only realized how important that was later when I was in France. In French, a rendezvous is a meeting or an appointment. I write about how I missed the appointment with Simone de Beauvoir, but today’s youth are not missing it. But they are losing their lives.
Liza Featherstone
It seems like you’re hopeful about the young people’s movement right now. What do you think can happen? What might happen?
Chahla Chafiq
I’m hopeful because in the last ten years, we’ve witnessed many, many dissident movements happening within the country that are becoming more and more radical, mostly around economic issues. Wages, working conditions, inflation, and all this; retirement, teachers. It’s happening in many different sectors, but each time they’re becoming more confrontational. Bus drivers, too; I mean, it’s a long list. The slogans and demands are becoming more and more radical. And they’re now converging and attacking the head.
It’s important that now the essential slogan that’s uniting everyone is “Woman, Life, Freedom.” Because this regime’s vertebrae have been women’s oppression. It starts from there, and they also oppress every other sector of society. The regime’s patriarchal system also oppresses men. So that’s why everyone right now is united, coming to consciousness of this shared problem. We don’t know how long this is going to take, but we do know that it’s the beginning of the end.
Liza Featherstone
Yes. The oil workers are on strike in solidarity with the protesters, not a sector we’d usually associate with feminism.
Chahla Chafiq
The oil workers’ strikes were also important during the revolution against the Shah. Back then, they were on salary, and now they are contract workers, so I hope it can be sustained. There are other factories shutting down, too.
And the veil, the hijab, which was such a symbol, like a flag of this regime, is being burned. Even women who do wear it are saying it’s not important and that it’s not normal to impose it.
Someone on Twitter asked, “Don’t you want to go back to your peaceful or calm normal life from before?” I said, “No, no, we don’t. We can never go back to that life. That was not at all normal.”
Liza Featherstone
You’ve explained that the Left made a mistake in supporting the regime for anti-imperialist reasons. But I wonder how you think the relationship between the United States and Iran should inform our understanding of what’s happening now. These two countries are always on the brink of scary conflict, possibly a nuclear conflict. And the United States does still hold more power in that situation. How should that shape our understanding as internationalist leftists?
Chahla Chafiq
It’s important for Americans to know that Iranian people are not their government. Just as it’s important for us to know Americans are not their government. What people, what Iranians like us, but also Iranians who are in Iran, have demanded from the Western countries is to not interfere with this struggle that the Iranian people are waging. Not to fight the Iranian people’s fight.
A big problem is the attitude of some diaspora groups. Many of these people work in American universities and the press, like the New York Times. And they’re taking the Islamic Republic’s discourse and claiming to the American government that they represent Iranians’ issues. Also in the European Parliament, there are people speaking on behalf of Iranian women, but arguing to keep the regime there — people who benefit from keeping that regime in place. They’ve for many years played both sides. And now they’re presenting themselves as representatives of what Iranians want.
Liza Featherstone
So in terms of the intellectuals who are part of these regime-apologetic networks, what kinds of arguments are they making? What kinds of arguments should give us pause when we hear them, in your view?
Chahla Chafiq
These people use this idea that if this regime falls, we’re going to fall into a civil war, and it’s going to be much worse. And we don’t know what’s going to come.
They are creating this fear, a panic, around that. It’s something that they’ve been pushing for many, many years. And, of course, that is an idea that comes from the regime.
The second thing is that they create this doubt, this unnecessary doubt, around activists inside Iran, saying that maybe they’re working for a foreign power like Israel. And creating this doubt allows the regime to be justified in its repression of these people, even environmental activists — people who have also been killed in the prisons, or have been tortured, or we don’t even know what’s going on with them. They’ve disappeared.
The third point is that since there are elections in Iran, they say, “Look, it’s an authoritarian democracy. There is some democracy, there’s some room to maneuver, and there’s voting. So there, it’s not a completely totalitarian system.”
And the fourth thing is that they use the presence of women in civil society to say, “Look, it’s not the Taliban.” Whereas actually, women who are involved in civil society are part of the resistance, and they’re fighting to be there. It’s not because they’re tolerated by the regime. Say you had a body that gets a bacteria or virus, and its defenses start working. It’s as if, instead of saying, “Okay, it’s my immune system,” you’re giving the credit to the bacteria that attacked you. I was at a conference where someone made that analogy, and it was quite effective! Westerners are so afraid to have a colonial mindset, but when you talk about it in those terms, it becomes much clearer.
Liza Featherstone
But how should we understand the role that the United States may be playing within the country? I mean, we are all leftists. We know the history of how the United States and its intelligence forces do get involved in “enemy” countries.
Chahla Chafiq
We don’t see everything. The relationship between the US government and Iran is with the Islamic Republic. It’s not with the people. And [the governments] have many meetings that are unofficial meetings. Although the facade is that “they’re angry with each other,” they’re negotiating. Even around what happened in Afghanistan, Iran played an important role between the Taliban and the United States and the discussions they had. And these diaspora lobbies are important because they continue this relationship when the meetings are not happening. These are the people who are getting the message of the Iranian government across to the United States. In that meeting last week, Joe Biden was sitting there and smiling at the camera.
Liza Featherstone
Something that I think might surprise some of our readers — that I’m hearing you say under the surface — is that you don’t think the United States necessarily wants this regime gone.
Chahla Chafiq
I am sure that the United States does not want to get rid of the mullahs. This Iranian government has good relations with China and Russia, but even for other countries, it can be helpful to have it as a power in the region.
Liza Featherstone
How does the US government benefit from keeping the mullahs in power?
Chahla Chafiq
Short-term interests matter in foreign policy. Little of it relates to a long-term idea or process. We saw during the Cold War the support that the United States gave to political Islam to combat Soviet influence. And after the Iron Curtain came down, that’s when it became their enemy, right? Maintaining the Islamic Republic in that area allows the United States to have this common enemy with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel.
The current Iran is beneficial to everybody except for its own people.
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Workers prepare to replace older water pipes with new copper ones in Newark, New Jersey on 21 October 2021. (photo: Seth Wenig/AP)
US legislators are calling for increased measures to protect American residents from toxic lead in their tap water.
A group of up to 15 US senators asked the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday to lower the levels of lead allowable in drinking water, require all lead pipes to be replaced in the next decade and ensure that low-income neighborhoods can benefit equally from the remediation efforts.
Lead water pipes have been banned across the US since 1986, but as many as 13m ageing lead pipes still connect homes to water in the US, leaving millions of Americans facing the risk of lead water contamination.
“It is unacceptable that communities across America continue to be at risk from exposure to any level of lead in their drinking water, which can cause serious health and neurological problems,” said Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, one of the signatories, in a statement to the Guardian.
Separately an Illinois congressman is calling for Chicago to start supplying filters to residents whose tap water proves to have more brain-damaging lead than is allowed for bottled water.
A recent series of Guardian articles has revealed that communities of color often face high lead levels and little access to remediation efforts, including in Chicago, the city with the most lead pipes in the nation.
A Guardian investigation revealed a third of 24,000 home tests in Chicago uncovered lead levels in drinking water exceeding the federal government’s limits for bottled water – with the worst results concentrated in minority neighborhoods.
“It’s deeply distressing to read that more than one in 20 tap water tests performed in Chicago were at or above US government limits and one third had more lead than is permitted in bottled water,” said Illinois congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, referring to the Guardian’s analysis.
Krishnamoorthi, who represents several Chicago suburbs and small parts of the city, said the city needs to act quickly to replace its estimated 400,000 lead service lines to protect public health and take advantage of newly available federal funding. But Chicago officials have said it will take 50 years to replace all the pipes.
“What’s happened so far is not acceptable,” Krishnamoorthi said.
The senators’ letter to the EPA commended the Biden administration for securing $15bn in federal infrastructure funding to address lead pipes and praised the EPA for its increased attention to the issue. But the senators called for tighter regulations to protect Americans’ health – including an update of the nation’s drinking water standards, known as the Lead and Copper Rule.
They urged the EPA to focus on protecting some of the populations most vulnerable to lead poisoning, by prioritizing replacing lead pipes in schools and childcare centers, Native American tribal communities and public housing projects.
The senators also called on the EPA to make sure that cities are not charging low-income residents for replacing lead lines, after a story this summer found that numerous water districts are replacing only the portions of pipe on city property. In those cases, residents who cannot pay thousands of dollars to replace the pipe crossing their private property are left with the risk of even more lead in their water following construction.
“Service lines should be fully replaced regardless of homeowners’ ability to pay and the costs should include repairs to homes from this replacement,” said the senators’ letter, which noted that a handful of cities have mobilized efforts to rapidly replace pipes and created jobs by training residents to help. “The City of Newark, New Jersey, has shown this can be done quickly, efficiently, and equitably while creating good-paying union jobs for local residents,” said the letter.
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