The Lede

Silence and Memory in Eastern Europe — with Linda Kinstler and Amie Ferris-Rotman

Linda Kinstler, an academic and journalist, only discovered the truth about her grandfather a few years ago. 
 
“Both of my parents were born in Riga, Latvia, during the Soviet Union,” she tells New Lines’ Amie Ferris-Rotman. “But they came from very different backgrounds.”
 
Her mother came from an old Jewish family in Ukraine. During World War II, many of her family members were gunned down at Babyn Yar, alongside hundreds of thousands of others, by Waffen SS and Wehrmacht forces. It was one of the largest single mass killings of the Holocaust. Her father’s family was from Latvia. “His father was a member of the Arajs Commando,” Kinstler says, “which was one of the most brutal killing units of the Holocaust in the Baltic states.”
 
Kinstler only discovered this a few years ago. She wrote about her family’s story in her 2022 book “Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends,” which interrogates the painful politics of remembrance in a part of the world that is only just beginning to grapple with the legacy of World War II. In Eastern Europe, she explains, “It is like World War II happened yesterday. These questions of complicity and guilt and vengeance, and responsibility for what occurred, remain extremely active and inform daily politics.”
 
On the battlefields of Ukraine, those questions are more urgent than ever. “Putin framed this phase of the invasion as a campaign of denazification,” says Kinstler, who covered the war for The New York Times. “He's invoking all of these myths of Ukrainian complicity with the Germans and framing Ukraine as a Nazi nation to justify this war.”
 
As Ukrainians pursue charges against Russian officials at the International Criminal Court, including Putin himself, it remains to be seen whether any of them will be brought to justice. For many of the tens of millions of victims of Nazi extermination, it is too late. Only a few experienced any kind of justice in court. The same was true for the victims of Soviet oppression. But memory, Kinstler says, can also be a kind of justice in its own way, and the failure at Nuremberg only underscores the need for remembrance — especially at a time when some would seek to rehabilitate men like her grandfather’s commander as heroes of the anti-Soviet resistance, and fewer and fewer witnesses remain.
 
“We are very much in this much anticipated moment, when the Holocaust is going to pass from memory into history, when the people who witnessed it themselves — who survived it — are, increasingly, no longer with us.”
 
Produced by Joshua Martin

How America Fell Out of Love with War — with Samuel Moyn and Faisal Al Yafai

Samuel Moyn was working as an intern at the Clinton White House as the United States intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo.
 
“I was in my 20s. It was after 1989. And it seemed as if we’d lived through the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama told us,” he explains to New Lines Magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai. Post-Cold War triumphalism was at its apex, and in those heady days, it seemed that there was nothing left to stop the United States from spreading democracy and human rights around the world. “And that was incredibly appealing to lots of Americans, especially young people like me.”
 
But today, Moyn, now a professor of Law and History at Yale University and one of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, is a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a cross-partisan think-tank urging restraint in US foreign policy. It’s a significant shift from the politics of his youth. Like many Americans, he watched neoconservative American interventions turn repeatedly to catastrophe in Iraq, Afghanistan and, he contends, Libya. “And so I began to conclude that maybe great powers, using force for a good cause — allegedly — always made the world not better, but worse,” he says. “I think a lot of us made a big mistake in identifying America with humanity.”
 
The shift in Moyn’s views reflect a growing discontent within American politics on the use of force abroad — and not only among the left-of-center. As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump became the first major Republican politician to condemn the invasion of Iraq. In doing so, he paved the way for the rise of the ‘America First’ wing of the party — a far-right, illiberal faction that has risen to dominance in recent years. 
 
“It's an incredibly interesting moment,” says Moyn. “I think the Republican party has completely given up neoconservatism and, and really no major force in the Republican Party anymore backs those sorts of ideas, which is why neocons for many years now have been reorienting to the Democratic Party.”
 
Though they share a deep suspicion of American power, Moyn sees himself as having little in common with the new ideals of the Republican right. “If you're on the left, like me,” he says, “You resist the idea that when you call for less war, that you're committed to isolationism. You might be committed to a better internationalism.” 
 
“One of the attractions of the isolationist views that the Republicans are embracing is that they're simple,” he adds. “It's easier to sell that position to a fickle public, on Fox News.”
 
Produced by Joshua Martin 

Life and Loss in Occupied Iraq — with Noor Ghazi and Rasha Al Aqeedi

Noor Ghazi was 13 years old when the U.S. and its allies declared war on Iraq. 
 
“We gathered at my grandparents; house, because it was far away from any strategic location that might be targeted by the coalition,” she tells New Lines magazine’s Rasha Al Aqeedi, who also lived through the war. “I was listening to the clock ticking. It sounded very slow, like it was just dragging itself out to stop this war from happening.”
 
But her family couldn’t avoid the presence of the foreign troops forever. At first it wasn’t so bad — Ghazi recalls soldiers handing out food and toys to neighborhood children. Yet things soon changed as the occupiers fought to quell the mounting resistance. When a passing American convoy was attacked, her best friend, Raghad, was killed in front of her in the ensuing shootout. “They just randomly opened fire, and she fell on the ground, and she died instantly.” 
 
The Americans recorded her death as “collateral damage.” 
 
“For me, it hurts,” Ghazi remembers. “Knowing that she was just buried as a statistic. As a number.”
 
As the violence intensified, many Iraqis made the painful choice to flee the country. After her father’s cousin was tortured to death by sectarian militants, Ghazi’s own family eventually came to the same decision. “I cried, and I said, ‘But you said we will never go on to leave,’” she recalls. “We came to the United States, and I was in a state of denial. … How do I live in America now? This country who invaded us?”
 
Today, she still lives in the U.S. She has visited Iraq, but after nearly two decades of war, she no longer recognizes it as the home she left behind. “So I decided that my heart is in Iraq,” she says. “But I'm still living here today, because I want to offer my little girl a better life.”
 
“I don't want her to suffer or be through what we have all been through.”
 
Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-Kholy 

How Cyberpunk Lost its Edge — with JD Harlock, Elia Ayoub and Lydia Wilson

In recent decades, one subgenre of science fiction has emerged as the de facto vision of the future: cyberpunk. Fed up with the overly utopian visions of the future cultivated by events like the moon landing and served up in popular culture like The Jetsons and Star Trek, cyberpunk sought to complicate this with a “high tech, low life” countervision rooted in a dystopian lens. 
“Early cyberpunk writers like William Gibson wanted to change that they wanted to change how we viewed the future, because they didn't think we were heading into a good place,” science fiction writer J.D. Harlock tells New Lines magazine’s Lydia Wilson. But today, in the face of global crises like climate change, that warning has lost its edge: “We're just oversaturated with dystopian and post-apocalyptic imagery,” says writer and researcher Elia Ayoub. “It's very easy today to imagine the apocalypse. And so I think there's been this growing need to have something beyond cyberpunk.”
 
Something, perhaps, like solarpunk, a literary and art movement which imagines a future where humanity actually succeeds in solving its major challenges, like global warming and inequality. Though it has retained cyberpunk’s focus on the social consequences of technology, solarpunk is optimistic, imagining a utopian future where humanity has the potential to work through its problems. If cyberpunk was the warning, solarpunk hopes to be the solution.
“If we want to imagine what we want as an alternative to the things that we oppose, we need to literally be imagining it, we need to exercise that muscle, so to speak,” says Ayoub. “What is this vision that we are fighting for? What does it look like? What does it feel like? How does it feel to live in such a society?”
“The point of solarpunk is that it's a radical solution to radical times,” agrees Harlock. “We're going to be forced into these radical solutions, whether we're willing to go along with it or not, because the world can't really continue the way it has been for the last 30 years.”
Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-Kholy 

The Age of Conspiracy Theories — with Gabriel Gatehouse and Faisal Al Yafai

Known best by his alias “the QAnon Shaman,” the shirtless man depicted in photos with a horned fur hat and an American flag painted on his face became one of the most iconic images from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S.Capitol. His real name is Jake Angeli, and he believed in the conspiracy theory known as QAnon — that the U.S. government was controlled by a global child-trafficking Satanist cabal and that Donald Trump was fighting a secret war to defeat them. 
 
Gabriel Gatehouse, an award-winning foreign correspondent with the BBC, recognized the man in the photos. He had met him just months before, while covering the 2020 election. Dismissing the man as nothing more than a fringe weirdo, he had passed up the chance to interview him. That same man was now the face of the Capitol riot. 
 
“It bothered me, because I realized that I had not given his story,” Gatehouse tells New Lines magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai.  “That was the question I hadn't asked myself: There must be a reason why he believes this. It's not true. But it means something. What is it telling us about the world that we live in?”
 
That was the question Gatehouse set out to find answers to on “The Coming Storm,” a  podcast series he made with the BBC. 
 
“We reach for conspiracy theories when the world doesn't make sense to us,” he says. Distrust in traditional media and government institutions — not entirely unwarranted — has led many to reject what they say entirely, Gatehouse explains. “And they feel like the internet has put this powerful tool in their hands, to connect with people and uncover the hidden truth. And I think they genuinely believe it.”
 
QAnon itself may burn out or at least change into something new. But Gatehouse suspects it may not matter all that much. Something else will just take its place. 
 
“QAnon was like the match that lit the fire,” he says. “And the fire is now raging, and it is going to keep on burning, I think, until something quite fundamental changes.”
 

Examining Nigeria’s Elections — with Obiageli Ezekwesili and Kwangu Liwewe

Tomorrow, Nigerians will head to the polls to elect a new president and vice president, as well as members of the Senate and House of Representatives. This election is Africa's first in 2023 and has been described as the most consequential election this year — not only for Africa but for the rest of the continent. Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation and has its largest economy. So when Nigeria sneezes, the rest of the continent catches a cold.
“Citizens are tired of simply repeating and rinsing electoral cycles. So they want elections that lead to governance, not just governance, but good governance, and the benefits of having democratic processes,” Oby Ezekwesili tells New Lines magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe. 
“People actually boasted that they didn't waste their time to go and vote, because they're all the same. That was the basic premise on which people didn't waste their time with our democracy. And it's not just in Africa, it's actually across the continent.”
But elections have consequences, especially in a country like Nigeria. In an effort to curtail attempts at corruption related to the elections, the Central Bank of Nigeria, working with the Independent National Electoral Commission, announced that the country will move to a cashless economy and that the current naira notes will no longer be valid in the days close to the elections. But this creates its own set of systemic issues for low-income groups who rely on cash transactions. Ezekwesili, who is the senior economic adviser of the Africa Economic Development Policy Initiative and the former vice president of the World Bank (Africa region), predicts that this will affect Nigeria’s productivity in the months ahead. 
For now, she is among those who remain hopeful that this election has the potential to deliver what Nigerians ultimately want: accountability, economic growth, human capital development, infrastructure to support their needs as citizens as well as businesses and a better environment for doing business. And though Ezekwesili says that the presidential candidates put forth by the incumbent All Progressives’ Congress (APC) and long-dominant People’s Democratic Party (PDP) simply don’t resonate with the culture of good governance that citizens want to see, it is ultimately up to those citizens to make the decision that will move their country, and indeed the continent, forward.
“The less attention that citizens pay to democracy, the more that they should be ready to take any consequences of their absence from a process that is actually defined by the level of participation,” Ezekwesili says. “But it is vital, it is critical for us to have a peaceful election —  Nigeria is too big to fail.”
And so when polls open Saturday morning, the elections will be watched closely — even by those not participating in them, whether in Nigeria or abroad.
Produced by Faisal Al Yafai, Sabrine Baiou and Christin El-kholy

Ukraine’s Long War — with Olesya Khromeychuk and Amie Ferris-Rotman

The Russian invasion of Ukraine began on the 24th February, 2022.
“I'll never forget that night,” Olesya Khromeychuk tells New Lines magazine’s Amie Ferris-Rotman, as she looks back on it almost a year later. A historian and the director of the Ukraine Institute London, Khromeychuk says that her shock soon turned to defiance and determination. “We were all prepared for an escalation. We expected it to happen.”
The invasion, she points out, was not the beginning. It was the culmination of centuries of repression and eight years of war — a war which started when Russia began arming separatist paramilitaries in the Donbas region, in response to the overthrow of the Kremlin-backed Yanukovich regime during the 2014 Maidan revolution. 
“My brother was the first one who warned me of it when he returned to the frontline after his first deployment,” she says. “He was absolutely certain that it was going to escalate. All of my veteran friends said the same thing. It was just a matter of time.” Yet Khromeychuk’s brother never lived to see it. He was killed in action in 2017, five years before his prediction came tragically true. 
She wrote a book about him, called The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister. “I wrote it in order to try and raise awareness about this forgotten war,” she recalls. At the time of his death, the Donbas war had faded from view in the eyes of the rest of the world. 
“It took a full-scale war for the world to actually discover Ukraine.”
Produced by Joshua Martin

The Many Worlds of Indian Cinema — with Anupama Chopra and Surbhi Gupta

“It is a movie-crazy culture,” says journalist and film critic Anupama Chopra. “Cinema is the number one choice of entertainment. The Indian movie star is somewhere between human beings and god.”
 
Since 1993, Chopra has been covering India’s cinema industry — or industries — and is the founder and editor-in-chief of the digital platform Film Companion. In the past, she tells New Lines magazine’s Surbhi Gupta, the Indian movie culture was dominated by the goliath that is Bollywood, the Hindi-language industry. Yet Indian film is larger than Bollywood alone. “Every other state has its own thriving, regional cinema, with its own local stars,” she explains. 
 
With the rise of streaming, a trend accelerated by the Covid pandemic, those regional cinema industries have burst through the boundaries of state borders. “We all discovered the brilliance of Malayalam cinema and how Telugu cinema does the sort of over-the-top commercial film in such a brilliant way, or all the kinds of really exciting stuff happening in Tamil cinema or Kannada cinema,” says Chopra. “We are no longer fixating on what region of India a film comes from. We are all watching everything.”
And it isn’t only domestic audiences who are watching, either. The Telugu language movie “RRR” was a surprise hit with international audiences, including in the United States, where it won several awards. “Honestly, I've never seen anything like it for any other Indian film,” Chopra says. “It's not just playing in the U.S.; it's running to packed houses in Japan.”
But back in India, not everyone has been celebrating. At a time of rising nationalistic fervor, the movie is one of several to draw criticism from those who believe such films are fanning the flames. Chopra is skeptical. “Films are not removed from society,” she says. “That is the current mood, and that is what films will reflect.”
For better or for worse, film and society are inextricably linked. “You have to understand that films in India are not just entertainment, right? It's a way of life.”
Produced by Joshua Martin

The Fight for the Right — with David French and Faisal Al Yafai

In 2019, the writer Sohrab Ahmari launched a blistering attack against David French, a former lawyer and political commentator who now works as a columnist for The New York Times. Both men were known as committed conservatives and prominent figures on the religious right. Yet their dispute became emblematic of the deepening division within conservative intellectual circles since Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 — the ripples of which have been felt throughout the entire American political landscape. 
“It's weird that we're both considered conservative,” French remarks to New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai. “Someone can say that they're a Republican, and it won't necessarily tell you their view of individual liberty or their view of the power and role of government and economic affairs or their view of foreign policy. That's how divided the right is right now.”
 
The author of the book “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation,” French has spent the past few years increasingly worried by the intensity of partisanship that now characterizes U.S. politics. “I think it's a public service to humanize each other,” he says. But that was precisely Ahmari’s objection.
“The right is, I would say, by and large on Ahmari’s side,” explains French. “In other words, this idea that we're not going to play by gentlemen's rules here. We're going to roll up our sleeves and we're gonna have at it.” From the point of view of Ahmari and his fellow travelers, that partisanship is a feature, not a bug. Feeling increasingly out of step with the direction of American society, French argues that they have embraced an uncompromising, ends-justify-the-means approach to politics embodied by politicians like Trump or his potential rival Ron DeSantis — even to the point where some are questioning their commitment to democracy itself. "Many folks are not necessarily after majority rule at all.”
It’s a line of thinking that extends beyond the realm of the strategic and into the intellectual.“This is sort of where you're going to see the classical liberal versus authoritarian approach,” he explains. “The more authoritarian approach takes a very negative view of individual liberty, because they argue it breeds individualism, which fractures, community bonds and ultimately harms all of us. What Ahmari and others are saying is, ‘Well, when people fail in their responsibility to exercise liberty virtuously, then the government has to step in and eradicate that liberty.’ And I firmly disagree with that.”
So that may be what the division comes down to — power vs. persuasion. “And it's so weird that in our politics, we've become so polarized that a lot of people just scorn persuasion entirely,” French says. 
Produced by Joshua Martin

Behind the Hamline University Incident — with Erika Lopez Prater, Christiane Gruber and Rasha Elass

“I said, ‘I'm showing these images to you for a reason,’” recalls Erika López Prater, a former adjunct professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. “I wanted to demonstrate the rich variety of art-making within Islamic traditions.”
 
The images in question were medieval paintings of the Prophet Muhammad. At the time it was produced, the art was intended to be celebratory. However, due to shifting religious practices, many Muslims have come to consider such depictions of the prophet to be forbidden or offensive. López Prater says that she tried to be mindful of these sensitivities and warned students before displaying them. But after a complaint was lodged with the administration, university officials turned on her and her contract was subsequently canceled.
 
After Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan, wrote an essay in New Lines condemning the university’s actions, López Prater’s story became a national controversy. In this podcast with New Lines magazine’s Rasha Elass, they discuss the rich variety of artistic traditions within Islam and unpack the complicated web of factors behind the current controversy. 
 
“These anxieties around images of the Prophet Muhammad started to really emerge over the course of the 20th century,” Gruber says. Attitudes among Muslims have varied widely across time and place, and aniconic beliefs were far from universal historically. She traces modern concerns back to very recent origins — to controversies over disrespectful cartoons published in Charlie Hebdo in France and the Jyllands Post in Denmark. Such depictions should not be conflated with the depictions found in Islamic art, she argues: “The intent behind those cartoons was to shock. And of course it overlapped with xenophobia.”
 
But another big part of the problem, López Prater says, comes from the increased marketization of higher education in recent years. “Colleges and universities have adopted a customer-service model,” she explains. “They’ve slashed tenure track positions in favor of cheap adjunct labor. Meanwhile, that is accompanied by administrative bloat.” That trend, she suggests, has encouraged institutions to prioritize financial and reputational concerns over academic enquiry and enabled officials to treat academic staff as disposable. 
 
“There is this hugely tragic irony that the administration was trying to sweep this issue under the rug through the quick dismissal of an adjunct professor,” she adds. “And instead have been having to reckon with a long history of racist and Islamophobic events on their college campus and within the Twin Cities and within our country.”