The Lede

Telling Stories of a Distant Homeland — with Heather Raffo

“I didn't feel I had a torn identity at all, I felt a part of the fabric of this nation. I felt very Michigan,” says Heather Raffo, an Iraqi-American playwright, filmmaker and actress. But then, she tells New Lines magazine’s Rasha Al Aqeedi, the outbreak of the Gulf War in the early 1990s forced her to grapple with what it meant to have her identity split between two nations at war. “And it was really what has come to define me as an artist.”
Raffo finished her award-winning play, “The Nine Parts of Desire,” just as the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. “I made a point of telling American citizens about Iraqi citizens and sharing very personal stories,” she says. “I think having an American perspective, having that much of a distance, I was able to write something that could communicate directly with the Western audience, which was an audience that needed to hear the material the most.”
As if to underscore Raffo’s point, at first no theater would take it. “It was a dangerous time. Nobody wanted to be humanizing Iraqis.”
Two decades later, she had the chance to adapt the play into a movie, which is streaming on PBS until the end of May. It tells the story of a young Iraqi-American woman in Michigan struggling with the loss of her father — a far cry from the war movies that have dominated American depictions of Iraqis since 2003. But attitudes have changed a lot over the past two decades, and Raffo is part of a generation of artists from Middle Eastern diaspora communities pushing that change forward. 
“They are helping define the cultural narrative for Americans, for the West,” Raffo says. “And they're uniquely positioned to tell complex stories of both sides.”
Yet there is also a darker reason that Americans have become more open to such narratives, Raffo suggests. In 2003, political violence and mass death weren’t issues Americans had any real frame of reference for. That has changed. 
“We're in a different psychological space,” she explains. After the pandemic, she says, “Americans knew loss in a more intimate way than they ever had before. And loss is tragic, but it's also a moment of connection.”
“When things are happening that need to be spoken about, often it's the artists that will understand that first,” Raffo adds. “And I really think Arab Americans and Middle Eastern Americans are some of the first to know what happens when a society suddenly dissolves into sectarian identities.”
Produced by Joshua Martin

Sudan’s House Divided — with Dallia Abdelmoniem, Sharath Srinivasan and Kwangu Liwewe

After widespread protests led to the overthrow of Omar al-Bashir in 2019, Sudan seemed to be on track toward civilian rule. But in 2021, a coup ended the country’s brief respite from military dictatorship. Since then, power has been concentrated in the hands of two men — Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the de facto leader of the country, and the ambitious Gen.  Mohamad Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, commander of the notorious paramilitary known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). 
 
The relationship between the two rival generals had long been strained, but earlier this month, the tensions between them boiled over and a shooting war between the army and the RSF began on the streets of Khartoum. 
 
“We all knew it was going to happen,” former journalist and activist Dallia Abdelmoniem tells New Lines magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe from Port Sudan. “The world should have paid attention to the Sudanese, when they were saying after the coup of 2021, that you cannot deal with these two men.”
So far, attempts to mediate have failed, with neither side showing any sign of backing down. Many fear it could be the beginning of a new civil war.
“I think that it's very hard to get inside the heads of the warring generals,” says Sharath Srinivasan, a political scientist at the University of Cambridge and the author of “When Peace Kills Politics: International Intervention and Unending Wars in the Sudans.” 
 
“They have a tremendous sense of their coercive capacity and their right to rule,” Srinivasan says. “They have faced off in a way that makes it quite hard for one to retreat without the other taking advantage. We certainly are standing at a precipice.” 
 
With the country teetering on the edge of that precipice, many in Sudan have made the painful decision to leave the country while they still can, Abdelmoniem and her family among them.
 
“People are just fleeing. They're just leaving. I mean, I don't think I have one family member left in Khartoum,” she says. “We've all gone off in different directions, but there's no one left.”
 
Produced by Joshua Martin

Russia’s Ultranationalist Youth Army — with Ian Garner and Amie Ferris-Rotman

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Vladimir Putin’s government has intensified its efforts to secure the hearts and minds of its citizens — and, most of all, its young people. 
 
“History and the myths of the past have been very carefully constructed by the state,” Dr. Ian Garner, a historian and analyst of Russian war propaganda, tells New Lines Magazine’s Amie Ferris-Rotman. “It's a mythological narrative of death and rebirth of utopias created through sacrifice and martyrdom, and of Russia’s supposedly holy mission to be at the vanguard of history.”
 
Garner is the author of the forthcoming book “Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia’s Fascist Youth,” which dissects the state’s efforts to reshape the minds of Russia’s young people.
Casting Russia as the defender of tradition and righteousness in a civilizational battle against a treacherous and decadent West, the state seeks to legitimize its aggressive foreign policy and quell internal dissent through a fervent barrage of ultranationalist messaging.
“The power of the propaganda machine is immense. The weight of social pressure and peer pressure in Russia is terrifying. And the state pushes it in schools with propaganda lessons,” Garner explains. “It pushes it on television. It pushes it through sort of semi-mandatory volunteer activities in youth groups.”
Those youth groups, he explains, are the heart of the Kremlin’s nation-building project.
 
“There are now 1.3 million members of the youth army,” says Garner. “And the organization's website explicitly says we intend to pipe boys into the army.” Children are taught to use Kalashnikovs and compete to win prizes for partaking in patriotic activities. Most alarmingly of all, Garner believes, they are being taught that to be a good Russian means being willing to sacrifice yourself for the state. 
 
“It is re-creating children from the ground up. It is preparing them for war.”

Borders, Romance and Freedom — with Anna Lekas Miller and Joshua Martin

Anna Lekas Miller is a journalist covering borders and migration as well as the author of the upcoming book “Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, and Romance in a Divided World.” She had been reporting from Istanbul at the height of the Syrian Civil War when she met the Syrian journalist who would one day become her husband. The two quickly fell in love. But after he was deported by the Turkish authorities, they were forced to navigate a kafkaesque international system of borders, papers and passports, with no idea what their future together might look like. 
 
“We were very much living in limbo; we did not know where we were going to go,” Miller tells New Lines magazine’s Joshua Martin. “And I was really curious about how people's relationships do survive and how people do stay together.”
 
Yet though they rule so many people’s lives today, the systems governing migration were not always so restrictive. It was only during the First World War that the passport as we know it today entered widespread use, she explains, and it was conceived as a wartime security measure. Once the war ended, the League of Nations held a conference to consider its abolition. “It is powerful to imagine what that world might look like,” Miller says. “Instead, things started becoming more and more restrictive.”
 
Today, she says, those century-old questions are even more urgent than ever. “There are so many more people moving than ever before, and so many reasons that people are being pushed out of their homeland,” she says. Likely foremost among them will be climate change, which threatens to displace millions in the increasingly less-distant future. 
 
“If coastlines are disappearing, and people's homes are being swept up,” says Miller, “and you're not allowing them to transit to somewhere to be safe … I don't see how that's going to be physically sustainable in the future.”

Heidegger and the Far Right — with Richard Wolin and Danny Postel

Martin Heidegger was one of the 20th century’s most influential philosophers. His ideas continue to have a profound effect on modern thinkers and are taught in philosophy classes the world over. He was also a Nazi.
 
“There's a popularized version of his theories that’s extremely widespread today among far-right intellectuals,” says Richard Wolin, an intellectual historian and the author of the book “Heidegger in Ruins.” That’s no accident, he tells New Lines magazine’s Danny Postel. It was a strategic choice. The embrace of Heidegger in mainstream academic philosophy allowed them to cloak their ideas in respectability: “The most significant philosopher — according to some — of the 20th century comes, of course, with a lot of intellectual prestige and cachet.”
 
But that’s not to say that the substance of the philosopher’s ideas had nothing to do with it either, adds Wolin. “Heidegger was an arch critic of Western civilization. And, along with that, goes, of course, the heritage of the Enlightenment, liberal democracy,” he explains. It isn’t just that Heideggerianism was useful for the New Right that emerged in the 1970s and the decades after — his work also played a genuine role in the formation of their political project. “The connections are much, much thicker and much more significant than would meet the eye.” 
 
Of Heidegger’s acolytes among the New Right, the Russian fascist thinker Alexander Dugin, who has written multiple books about the philosopher, might be the most prominent. “After Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014, Dugin was dubbed ‘Putin's brain,’” says Wolin. “The extent of his influence on Putin is debated, but there's no question that he's a leading intellectual figure, not only amongst Russian ultranationalists but across Europe.”
The influence of Dugin and other New Right thinkers has become increasingly apparent in recent years. One of their most pernicious ideas is the “great replacement theory,” which alleges a conspiracy among elites to replace white European populations through non-white immigration and has inspired terrorist attacks, pogroms and genocide. It has traveled far beyond its European origins — from Tucker Carlson’s primetime show on Fox News to the speeches of Tunisian President Kais Saied.
 
“It was the New Right who took up this cudgel and began using the phrase ‘population replacement’ in favor of the idea of an Aryan or white nationalist Europe,” says Wolin. “And it has, in recent years, been reborn in rather insidious ways.”
 

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.”