Pre-empting the coming world war

Despite Ukraine, Paul Mason writes, Europe is still not awake to the security threat it faces.

The German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, (GREEN PARTY) condemning the Russian invasion days afterwards at the United Nations General Assembly emergency session—so did 140 other members states, but the war continues (lev radin / shutterstock.com)

PAUL MASON 21st November 2022

It must have been a shock in Britain to see a book entitled The Coming World War published in 1935. That after all was the year a ‘peace ballot’ took place, an informal referendum in which 11 million people—half the electorate—voted for peace, disarmament and active support for the League of Nations.

The book was vague about where the war might begin. But it warned that whole cities would be razed by bombers, with uncontrollable outbreaks of mental illness, starvation and social breakdown as a result.

Published by the Communist Party, the book was aimed squarely at the pacifist movement, an audience targeted so successfully as to require a second edition, in 1936. But within six months of its appearance its author, Tom Wintringham, was himself at war—in Spain, commanding the British battalion of the International Brigade. The pacifist moment was over.

That’s how quickly the world can turn. Today, too, we seem to be sleepwalking towards a global conflict whose shape is becoming all too clear.

Systemic incompatibility

There are justified grounds for believing the Ukraine conflict may soon become ‘frozen’. Back-channel negotiations are said to be happening between the United States and Russia. Behind the extreme gestures—the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline and the nightly threats of nuclear war on Russian television—some western analysts believe the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is seeking to de-escalate and freeze the invasion at its current territorial limits.

The contours of any future global conflict have however become sharper in 2022. The declaration on February 4th by Putin and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping—20 days before the invasion began—was a formal assertion of systemic incompatibility. There is no longer a single, ‘rules-based’ order, said the two presidents, but a multipolar world in which universal definitions of democracy, freedom and human rights are dead. By implication we, the Chinese Communist Party and United Russia—state parties which do not allow of alternation—will decide what constitutes freedom and democracy.

If this were merely a ‘live and let live’ philosophy, the west might simply decouple its economies from China, wean itself off Russian gas and resign itself to the strategic paralysis of the United Nations Security Council. But the invasion of Ukraine, Chinese manoeuvres against Taiwan and the relentless propaganda against universal norms being waged by both powers inside western societies are signals that coexistence will be hard.

Economic deglobalisation is under way, as each of the global trading blocs scrambles to secure raw materials and energy supplies. Russia has diverted its oil and gas supplies to China; the US is exploring long-term energy agreements with Britain and Germany. Meanwhile the US president, Joe Biden, has banned the export of semiconductor tools to China while pouring $52 billion into semiconductor manufacturing and research, with the express aim of overtaking China in this critical field.
Unsustainable models

But what’s really undermining the rules-based order is the long-term unsustainability of the socio-economic model each of the world’s major powers has chosen.

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The Russian oligarchic elite lives off economic rents from oil and gas—impossible in a future of net-zero carbon emissions. The Chinese ‘communist’ elite thrives on the super-exploitation of a giant factory workforce which cannot bargain because it has no rights. And the US plutocratic elite tops a financialised capitalism reliant on dollar dominance and repeated central-bank largesse: high inequality and structural racism have turned it into the most fragile of the G7 democracies.

None of these models can endure long-term. They are pushing the national elites into confrontation with one another—even as they proclaim their desire for peace and co-operation.

Which leaves us with a world system built around an American hegemony for which its electorate no longer has the stomach, a Russian elite which feels compelled to lash out in the direction of its near neighbours and a China straining to move from regional dominance to matching the US in global power.

Into every crack surges any party prepared to use force. With Ukraine, Putin calculated correctly that the west would not directly intervene in its defence. Where he miscalculated was over the determination of the Ukrainian people to resist. With Hong Kong, China moved swiftly and decisively to crush the remnants of post-colonial democracy. Yemen has been turned into a perpetual battleground between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In Afghanistan, 20 years of liberal interventionism and nation-building were reversed over the course of a single summer.
Previously unthinkable

Over the past two years, then, previously unthinkable things have become thinkable: armed insurrection in the US, ejection of western forces at gunpoint from a country they occupied for two decades, the jailing of trade unionists and democracy activists in Hong Kong, war between China and Taiwan and large-scale conventional warfare on the soil of Europe.

Anyone who thinks this is the worst it’s going to get, and that everything will soon calm down, is deluding themselves. One of the few rational things Liz Truss did, during her brief tenure as UK prime minister, was to obsess daily about the wind direction over Ukraine, in case Putin made good his threats to explode a tactical nuclear weapon there.

Amid such clear and present dangers, much of our mainstream political discourse seems irrational. We ‘cling to the average day’ (as WH Auden put it at the start of World War II) of scandals, think-tank reports and minor injustices.

During my brief recent attempt to become an election candidate for the Labour Party it was clear that neither the party’s membership nor any of the other potential candidates wanted to talk about Ukraine, defence budgets or Britain’s diplomatic priorities. For most social democrats, the important part of Britain’s foreign office is still the part that dispenses development aid.

A Europe-wide Zeitenwende

So in this final Social Europe column of 2022 I want to make a plea for a more thorough and Europe-wide Zeitenwende.

Once the world turns in the direction of dictatorship, systematic criminality and opportunist wars, we have to make the kind of mental leaps Wintringham’s generation did. From now on everything in politics has to be framed by the defence of democracy, tolerance, universal rights and the promotion of social justice. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has to be transformed, from Realpolitik towards the practice of the values it claims to represent: individual liberty, democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

The European Union and its member states need to rearm themselves—morally, diplomatically and militarily—to present a credible deterrent against Russian aggression. We need to be prepared for the eventuality that America walks away from NATO—either because of a second Donald Trump presidency or simply because it perceives the long-term threat from China as suddenly urgent and more important.

The architecture of the global system is failing. It can still deliver 141 votes at the UN General Assembly to condemn the invasion of Ukraine in its aftermath. But it cannot deliver justice for the thousands of Ukrainian citizens tortured, murdered and raped—at least not this side of the collapse of Putin’s regime.
New security architecture

The task is not simply to rearm and modernise Europe’s armed forces—difficult enough given the strong tradition of post-1945 pacifism—but to do so in a way that democratises them, making them look and behave more like the societies they are defending.

At the same time, we have to strive towards a new security architecture for the world, entailing—most likely—some dirty compromises with dictatorships. But we cannot assume that we will contain systemic conflict forever.

Wintringham’s The Coming World War was written as an anti-militarist tract. By 1940 the man himself was busy training British volunteers in the art of guerrilla warfare, his communism replaced by a kind of revolutionary-patriotic humanism.

As German social democracy has found since February 24th, it is possible to detest militarism and yet deliver rapid and effective renewal of the defence infrastructure and revived political commitment to deterrence. The whole progressive half of European politics is going to have to learn the same lessons, quickly.



Paul Mason is a journalist, writer and filmmaker. His forthcoming book is How To Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance (Allen Lane). His most recent films include R is For Rosa, with the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. He writes weekly for New Statesman and contributes to Der Freitag and Le Monde Diplomatique.

Today’s far right and the echoes from history

ROBERT MISIK 28th November 2022

Robert Misik argues today’s extreme right is sponsoring a brutalisation comparable to historical fascism.

Benito Mussolini tapped the power of the politics of anger and hatred 

(Bundesarchiv, CC-SA-3.0)

Right-wing extremists, some direct or indirect descendants of fascist parties, are coming to power in Europe—most recently in Italy, where Giorgia Meloni has made it to the summit of government. The black thread of her Fratelli d‘Italia goes back through the ‘post-fascist’ Alleanza Nationale and the ‘neo-fascist’ Movimento Sociale Italiano to the real thing. In Austria, the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), whose predecessor emerged in the 1940s as a sort of ex-Nazi rallying point, has already tasted power more than once.

But even freshly minted ultra-right parties, such as the Sweden Democrats on whom the new government of the right in that country depends, are not simply ‘populist’. To put it schematically, they have more in common with Benito Mussolini than Juan Perón and the eponymous ‘ism’ to which his authoritarian-populist rule in Argentina gave rise.
Avoiding the f-word

We nevertheless abjure the f-word. The new ultra-right would indignantly reject the label ‘fascism’: they would insist, after all, that under their rule there would be no suppression of dissent, no lawlessness or street violence—never mind concentration camps. Opponents of the far right avoid the term too, intuitively knowing this would only be presented as further evidence that ‘the establishment’ wanted to undermine its legitimacy and second-guess its abused voters.

Yet a problem remains: even the historical fascists were not soi-disant ‘fascists’ until they secured single-party rule; nor did they become so in one fell swoop. The Nazis disenfranchised Jews legally and labelled them Untermenschen—second-class people with reprehensible character traits—before the mood was ready for violent pogroms. The November pogrom took place in 1938, nearly six years after Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and over four years on from the referendum conferring on him the status of Führer.

The historical fascists were also political chameleons: Mussolini was previously a socialist. At the turning point, there was a realisation of power-conscious ambition: anger, hatred and even fear are much stronger political emotions than hope. The socialists mobilised hope, the fascists the heady cocktail of fear and hate.
Setting the agenda

Whether fascists or ‘only’ right-wing extremists, it can be assumed such forces will celebrate even more successes in the future. It is true that modern societies, especially the advanced economies and liberal communities of the historical west, are diverse in every respect: living situations, social milieux, political and ideological mentalities, and in ethnic terms. This means that even where the right has radicalised itself into a hard right and is very popular with its base there are usually majorities who passionately reject it. But this right often sets the agenda, while its opponents remain defensive.

One can blame this on the incapacity of the left, liberals and progressives generally—but there are probably deeper reasons. These have to do with often-analysed phenomena, such as neoliberalism or the alienation of the classical workers’ parties from their traditional milieux and the feeling among the working classes that they are no longer represented.

But now something else is added—a deep fear, of global instability, of decline, of loss of prosperity. There is general depression and little optimism. This fatalistic mood is the fuel of aggressive narrow-mindedness.
Defensive reactions

Those who feel insecure want to defend what they have: they would prefer to have walls around them, to keep the world’s mischief at bay. Hope has a hard time when change can only be imagined as deterioration. Interlinked economic and energy crises, war and inflation—all these darken the mood. One can well understand the defensive reactions that are favourable to the right.

‘Today fascism is not expansive, but contractive,’ writes Georg Diez in the Berlin Tageszeitung. Kia Vahland suggests in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that fascism is not only a form of rule ‘but also an attitude. And this is unfortunately celebrating its return in various formations and political systems.’

The extreme right today does not want to conquer empires but to say ‘stop the world: we want to get off’. So how is it similar to historical fascism and what distinguishes it?
Skilful camouflage

Historical fascism was reactionary as a form of rule, in its stated goals and in reality. It was explicitly against democracy and parliamentarism and also in favour of an authoritarian cult of the Führer. While it invoked ‘common sense’ and the supposedly unified opinion of the Volk, it rarely appropriated democratic inclinations. It was born out of war and shaped by the ‘discipline’ of the military.

Today’s fascism, on the other hand, invokes democratic values and claims to be the voice of the great mass oppressed by a powerful minority ‘elite’. Its protagonists even know how to use the values of liberalism and hedonistic consumerism, which means that it even radiates into anti-authoritarian milieux, as the sociologists Oliver Nachtwey and Carolin Amlinger have pointed out: values such as ‘autonomy’, ‘self-determination’ and ‘self-realisation’ can be integrated surprisingly well into authoritarian movements.

The far right often skilfully camouflages itself as a freedom movement against encroaching governments that disregard citizens’ wishes. Fascists have learned to ‘use the principles of liberal democracy to undermine and abolish them’, as Diez puts it.

With misinformation and incitement, allied to distortion of reality and radical simplification of its complexity, an us-versus-them polarisation is fuelled. From this synthetic war for the public mind, it takes only a spark to bring the real violence for which apocalyptic political rhetoric has already provided legitimacy.
Changing the foundations

In the golden age of postwar liberal democracy, the conservative right tried of course to impose its agenda when elected. But even in its reactionary form, in the shadow of the Holocaust it did not question the principles and functioning of democracy and accepted when it lost. Authoritarian conservatism and the fascist right do not do so today. They are trying to change the foundations of democracy in such a way that it is practically impossible to vote them out.

They are clamping down on independent media and opposition, changing electoral laws, gerrymandering constituencies and invoking the sham democracy of daily plebiscites, from opinion polls to staged referenda. Where they have the majorities for it, they use these anti-democratic possibilities unscrupulously.

Think of Hungary under Viktor Orbán. Think of the ‘make American great again’ Republicans. Or the lust for power of the Austrian far-right government under the nominally conservative Sebastian Kurz in alliance with the FPÖ between 2017 and 2019—which could still have ended very badly had the government not collapsed in corruption revelations affecting the FPÖ leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, and Kurz himself. In general, the hard right only adheres to the customs of democracy for as long—as in coalition governments—as it lacks the monopoly power to act otherwise.
Hate machine

‘Enemy images’—Feindbilder in the German-speaking world—are built up without restraint and emotions stirred up. Domestically, this targets the supposed advocates of a ‘cultural Marxism’ that seeks to prohibit ‘normal’ people from enjoying their ways of life. In the external firing line are ‘migrants’, especially refugees from predominantly Muslim countries, with entire ethnic groups stereotyped and scapegoated for crime amid shrill warnings of a ‘great replacement’ of European Christians.

The internet has become a gigantic hate machine. The logics of commercially driven ‘social media’ amplify the outrage, exacerbated by outbidding competitions within their bubbles, in which participants radicalise themselves to impress their peers.

A fantasy world is established in which the indigenous population—or at least the electorate of the extreme right—can redefine itself as a ‘victim’ so threatened that any form of resistance is justified. One feels threatened by hordes and as always in history—including that of the first half of the last century—this fantasy threat legitimises to those captivated by it inhuman acts they would reject under normal circumstances.

The brutalisation is slow, gradual, a barely visible slippery slope. Regardless of whether fascism is the correct word to apply to the threat, however, playing it down would be a much greater mistake.

This is a joint publication by Social Europe and IPS-Journal




Robert Misik is a writer and essayist living in Vienna. His latest book is Das Große Beginnergefühl: Moderne, Zeitgeist, Revolution (Suhrkamp-Verlag). He publishes in many newspapers and magazines, including Die Zeit and Die Tageszeitung. Awards include the prize for economic journalism of the John Maynard Keynes Society.

Symbolic but Significant: Why the Decision to Investigate Abu Akleh’s Murder Is Unprecedented

by Ramzy Baroud Posted onNovember 25, 2022

 The recent decision by the United States Department of Justice to open an investigation into the killing, last May, of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh is not a game-changer, but important and worthy of reflection, nonetheless. 

Based on the long trajectory of US military and political support of Israel, and Washington’s constant shielding of Tel Aviv from any accountability for its illegal occupation of Palestine, one can confidently conclude that there will not be any actual investigation. 

A real investigation into the killing of Abu Akleh could open up a Pandora’s box of other findings pertaining to Israel’s many other illegal practices and violations of international – and even US – law. For example, the US investigators would have to look into the Israeli use of US-supplied weapons and munitions, which are used daily to suppress Palestinian protests, confiscate Palestinian land, impose military sieges on civilian areas and so on. The US Leahy Law specifically prohibits “the US Government from using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights.” 

Moreover, an investigation would also mean accountability, if it concludes that Abu Akleh, a US citizen, was deliberately killed by an Israeli soldier, as several human rights groups have already concluded. 

That, too, is implausible. In fact, one of the main pillars that define US-Israeli relationship is that the former serves the role of the protector of the latter at the international stage. Every Palestinian, Arab or international attempt at investigating Israeli crimes has decisively failed simply because Washington systematically blocked every potential investigation under the pretense that Israel is capable of investigating itself, alleging at times that any attempt to hold Israel accountable is a witch hunt that is tantamount to antisemitism. 

According to Axios, this was the gist of the official Israeli response to the US decision to open an investigation into the murder of the Palestinian journalist. “Our soldiers will not be investigated by the FBI or by any other foreign country or entity,” outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said, adding: “We will not abandon our soldiers to foreign investigations.” 

Though Lapid’s is the typical Israeli response, it is quite interesting – if not shocking – to see it used in a context involving an American investigation. Historically, such language was reserved for investigations by the United Nations Human Rights Council, and by international law judges, the likes of Richard Falk, Richard Goldstone and Michael Lynk. Time and again, such investigations were conducted or blocked without any Israeli cooperation and under intense American pressure. 

In 2003, the scope of Israeli intransigence and US blind support of Israel reached the point of pressuring the Belgian government to rewrite its own domestic laws to dismiss a war crimes case against late Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. 

Moreover, despite relentless efforts by many US-based rights groups to investigate the murder of an American activist, Rachel Corrie, the US refused to even consider the case, relying instead on Israel’s own courts, which exonerated the Israeli soldier who drove a bulldozer over the body of 23-year-old Corrie in 2003, for simply urging him not to demolish a Palestinian home in Gaza. 

Worse still, in 2020, the US government went as far as sanctioning International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and other senior prosecution officials who were involved in the investigation of alleged US and Israeli war crimes in Afghanistan and Palestine. 

All of this in mind, one must then ask questions regarding the timing and the motives of the US investigation. 

Axios revealed that the decision to investigate the killing of Abu Akleh was “made before the November 1 elections in Israel, but the Justice Department officially notified the Israeli government three days after the elections.” In fact, the news was only revealed to the media on November 14, following both Israel and US elections on November 1 and 7, respectively. 

Officials in Washington were keen on communicating the point that the decision was not political, and neither was it linked to avoiding angering the pro-Israeli lobby in Washington days before the US elections nor to influencing the outcomes of Israel’s own elections. If that is the case, then why did the US wait until November 14 to leak the news? The delay suggests serious backdoor politics and massive Israeli pressure to dissuade the US from making the announcement public, thus making it impossible to reverse the decision. 

Knowing that a serious investigation will most likely not take place, the US decision must have been reasoned in advance to be a merely political one. Maybe symbolic and ultimately inconsequential, the unprecedented and determined US decision was predicated on solid reasoning: 

First, US President Joe Biden had a difficult experience managing the political shenanigans of then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his time as vice president in the Obama Administration (2009-2017). Now that Netanyahu is poised to return to the helm of Israeli politics, the Biden Administration is in urgent need of political leverage over Tel Aviv, with the hope of controlling the extremist tendencies of the Israeli leader and his government. 

Second, the failure of the Republican so-called ‘Red Wave’ from marginalizing Democrats as a sizable political and legislative force in the US Congress has further emboldened the Biden Administration to finally reveal the news about the investigation – that is if we are to believe that the decision was indeed made in advance. 

Third, the strong showing of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian candidates in the US Mid-term Elections – in both national and state legislative elections  –  further bolsters the progressive agenda within the Democratic Party. Even a symbolic decision to investigate the killing of a US citizen represents a watershed moment in the relationship between the Democratic Party establishment and its more progressive grassroots constituencies. In fact, re-elected Palestinian Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was very quick to respond to the news of the investigation, describing it as “the first step towards real accountability”.

Though the US investigation of Abu Akleh’s murder is unlikely to result in any kind of justice, it is a very important moment in US-Israeli and US-Palestinian relationships. It simply means that, despite the entrenched and blind US support for Israel, there are margins in US policy that can still be exploited, if not to reverse US backing of Israel, at least to weaken the supposedly ‘unbreakable bond’ between the two countries.

Author: Ramzy Baroud

Ramzy Baroud is editor of the Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is My Father was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press). View all posts by Ramzy Baroud

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Failed Coup: Is the U.S. Ready to Abandon Guaidó and Reintegrate Venezuela into the Global Community?

by Ted Snider Posted onNovember 29, 2022

In February 2019, the election in Venezuela did not go the way the U.S. had scripted it. So, the U.S. stuck with the script and ignored the election.

Though Hugo Chávez’ successor, Nicolás Maduro, easily won re-election to a second term, the U.S. ignored the result and recognized their choice as the legitimate leader of Venezuela. The script had been long in the works, and the performance of it was closely coordinated with Washington: Juan Guaidó was the legitimate leader of Venezuela.

Though, while campaigning, Biden called the Trump administration’s policy on Venezuela "an abject failure,” his administration has continued to recognize and support Guaidó as “the Interim President of Venezuela.”

U.S. attempts to isolate and sanction Venezuela since Maduro first won election have resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Venezuelans.

It is now becoming clear that the recognition of Guaidó and the isolation of Venezuela have been a failure and that both are coming to an end. Recognition of Guaidó is disintegrating and Venezuela is being reintegrated into the international community. There are even signs that the U.S. may be preparing to abandon Guaidó and the interim government.

The change in script is coming from many directions. An important contributor is the recent re-emergence of Latin America asserting itself against U.S. hegemony in the region.

The revival of the movement against U.S. hegemony began with the election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico. The Mexican President began the reintegration of Venezuela by inviting Maduro to the recent meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States hosted by Mexico. López Obrador boycotted the recent Summit of the Americas in protest of Washington’s exclusion of Venezuela. 

Perhaps even more important is the election of Gustavo Petro as president of Colombia. Colombia has long been the key to US projection into Latin America and a base of operations against Venezuela. Biden has "said many times that Colombia is the keystone of U.S. policy in Latin America and the Caribbean." He has called the relationship between the two nations "the essential partnership we need in this hemisphere," and Colombia "the linchpin . . . to the whole hemisphere." 

On August 29, Colombia returned its ambassador to Venezuela as Petro fulfilled his election promise to fully restore diplomatic relations with Venezuela. On November 1, Petro and Maduro reversed the relationship between their countries and signed a joint declaration in Caracas to consolidate bilateral relations and deepen integration. Petro declared that "It is unnatural, anti-historical, for Colombia and Venezuela to separate. It happened once, and it should not happen again because we are the same people.” He said that he committed to "a real integration in projects, not only in speeches” and called on Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru to "accept the reintegration of Venezuela to the Andean Community." The two presidents discussed enhanced cooperation on economy, trade, migration, the environment and security. In September, Venezuela and Colombia reopened their border, which has improved trade, migration and security.

The push from Latin America to reintegrate Venezuela will be critically strengthened by the recent election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil. In an interview before the election, Lula told Time that he was “very concerned when the U.S. and the E.U. adopted Guaidó as President of the country. You don’t play with democracy.” Lula’s former foreign minister promised that a Lula election "would open the door for Brazil to re-engage diplomatically with neighboring Venezuela."

In addition to Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, several other Latin American countries have reopened communications with Venezuela, including Mexico, Peru, Honduras, and Chile. Ecuador is also considering re-establishing diplomatic relations with Venezuela, and Argentina has announced that they will re-establish ties.

On October 6, nineteen members of the Organization of American States voted in favour of a proposal to strip Guaidó’s permanent representative to the OAS of recognition on the grounds that Guaidó is not the head of state. The proposal failed only because the 35 nation organization requires a two-thirds majority. More than half voted for the resolution and many other countries abstained, with only the U.S, Canada, Guatemala and Paraguay supporting Guaidó.

The change in script is also being written in Europe. In 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron recognized Guaidó as acting president and called Maduro “illegitimate.” But, on November 8, at the COP27 climate summit, Macron addressed Maduro as “President” as he shook Maduro’s hand for one-and-a-half minutes while telling him that he “would be happy if we could talk to each other for longer to engage in useful bilateral work for the region.” 

Macron’s shift in foreign policy is a further development of the European Union’s 2021 decision to continue to recognize Guaidó a “privileged interlocutor” but, in a break from the U.S., no longer to recognize him as the interim president.

But the change in script is coming not just from abroad: it is coming from within Venezuela too. At the end of October, the alliance of parties that oppose Maduro began discussion to cease the claim that Guaidó is Venezuela’s legitimate leader and end the interim government. A senior opposition figure told the Financial Times that “It has been decided to redesign everything without Guaidó as interim president. There is an overwhelming conviction among the majority [of the opposition] that the figure of Guaidó and the interim government is at odds with reality.”

The rebellion is occurring even within Guaidó’s own shadow government. In December, Julio Borges, Guaidó’s foreign minister, resigned because he had come to believe that the interim government should be terminated.

But, most importantly, there are signs that the U.S. is preparing to abandon the nearly four year plan to remove Maduro by recognizing the shadow interim government. On October 21, CNN Spanish reported that two sources “close to the opposition leadership” said that the interim government led by Guaidó will end in January 2023. A “diplomatic source close to the Venezuelan opposition” told CNN that “the United States plans to strip him of recognition as interim president in January, when a new legislative session begins.”

Though seemingly not reported elsewhere, the CNN story is lent support by reporting in the Miami Herald that a White House official says “The Biden administration will not get involved in a leadership fight within Venezuela’s struggling opposition movement as a revolt brews against its interim president, Juan Guaidó.” The Herald reports that the White House official says that “The White House will not oppose this effort” to “do away with the so-called interim government.”

A Venezuelan opposition leader echoed the statement made to the Financial Times that “a consensus is forming that the concept of an interim government no longer makes sense, and specifically the role of Guaidó as interim president.” 

Though the U.S. continues to recognize Guaidó, “when pressed,” U.S. officials “would not rule out revoking U.S. recognition of the interim government.”

Miguel Tinker Salas, Professor of Latin American History at Pomona College, and one of the world’s leading experts on Venezuelan history and politics, told me that “Guaidó’s term expires in January, and there is wide spread speculation that the U.S. could use that fact to end its recognition.” He added that “For all intents and purposes he has been sidelined by developments in the country and even for those in the opposition he is a non-entity.”

In the first signs of the U.S. granting a measure of legitimacy and support to Maduro, Washington has offered the first crack in the sanctions against Venezuela. In negotiations in Mexico City, representatives of the Maduro government and the Guaidó led opposition agreed to create a United Nations managed humanitarian fund that will use $3 billion from funds that will be unfrozen by the U.S. or Europe to finance health, food and education programs for the poor. In return, Washington agreed to allow Chevron to resume limited pumping of oil in Venezuela after years of being prohibited to do so by U.S. sanctions. The Chevron opening would not only bring relief and recognition to Maduro and Venezuela, it ”could represent an important step toward allowing Venezuela to re-enter the international oil market,” according to The New York Times.

Though the U.S. motivation may have more to do with global oil supplies being severely impacted by sanctions on Russia, the opening coincides with other signs that Venezuela is being reintegrated into the global community and that the nearly four year attempt to sideline Maduro with a parallel government may be coming to an end.

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Thousands Protest Turkish Strikes on Kurdish Groups in Syria

November 27, 2022 

Agence France-Presse

Syrian-Kurdish demonstrators raise pictures of people killed during conflict, as they protest against Turkey's threats against their region, in the northeastern Syrian Kurdish-majority city of Qamishli, on Nov. 27, 2022.

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QAMISHLI, SYRIA —

Thousands of Kurds protested on Sunday in the Syrian city of Qamishli against days of deadly Turkish cross-border strikes targeting Kurdish groups in the country's northeast.

Turkey announced last Sunday it had carried out airstrikes against semi-autonomous Kurdish zones in north and northeastern Syria, and across the border in Iraq. It has also threatened a ground offensive in those areas of Syria.

Demonstrators in Kurdish-controlled Qamishli, in Hasakah province, brandished photos of people killed during recent strikes in the semi-autonomous region, an AFP correspondent said.

"Only the will of the Kurdish people remains," said protester Siham Sleiman, 49. "It will not be broken, and we remain ready. We will not leave our historic land."

After a three-day lull, Turkish fighter jets heavily bombed Kurdish-controlled areas north of Aleppo early on Sunday, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor.

A separate Turkish drone strike killed five Syrian government soldiers near Tal Rifaat, also north of Aleppo, the Observatory added, reporting an exchange of shelling between Kurdish combatants and Turkish forces and their Syrian proxies.

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US Official Urges 'De-escalation' as Turkey Strikes Syria

Protesters in Qamishli also chanted in favor of the resistance in "Rojava"— the name Kurds in Syria give to the area they administer.

"The message that we want to convey to the world is that we are victims of eradication," said Salah el-Dine Hamou, 55. "How long will we continue to die while other countries watch?"

The Turkish strikes come after a November 13 bombing in Istanbul that killed six people and wounded 81. Ankara blamed the attack on the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which it and its Western allies consider a terrorist group.

The PKK has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984. Turkey alleges that Syrian Kurdish fighters are the PKK's allies.

Kurdish groups denied any involvement in the Ankara blast.

Some protesters on Sunday carried Kurdish flags alongside photos of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan — jailed in Turkey since 1999 — and shouted slogans against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Syrian-Kurdisg demonstrators raise flags bearing an image of jailed leader Abdullah Ochalan, as they protest against Turkey's threats against their region, in the northeastern Syrian Kurdish-majority city of Qamishli, on Nov. 27, 2022. -

The Turkish raids have killed at least 63 Kurdish and allied fighters and Syrian regime soldiers, as well as a Kurdish journalist, according to the Observatory, which relies on an extensive network of sources in Syria.

Eight people have been killed in retaliatory artillery fire, three of them across the Turkish border.

Since 2016, Turkey's military has conducted three offensives mostly targeting Kurdish fighters, and captured territory in northern Syria, which is now held by Ankara-backed proxies.

The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurds' de facto army in the area, led the battle that dislodged Islamic State group jihadist fighters from the last scraps of their Syrian territory in 2019.

VIDEO
Kurds protest against Turkish threats in Syria's Qamishli

Updated: 27/11/2022

Two rockets targeted a US patrol base in northeastern Syria late Friday, the third such attack in nine days, US Central Command said.

Centcom did not indicate who fired the rockets but said, in a statement, that they aimed at "coalition forces at the US patrol base in Al-Shaddadi, Syria".

Hundreds of American troops are still in Syria as part of the fight against IS remnants.

Turkey says it is targeting rear bases of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), designated as a terrorist group by the European Union and the United States, and the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which dominate the SDF.

Both Kurdish groups denied responsibility for the Istanbul attack.

 

Monkeys in central Thailand city mark their day with feast

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

November 28, 2022 

Monkeys enjoy fruit during monkey feast festival in Lopburi province, Thailand, Nov. 27, 2022. The festival is an annual tradition in Lopburi, which is held as a way to show gratitude to the monkeys for bringing in tourism. (AP Photo)

LOPBURI, Thailand--A meal fit for monkeys was served on Sunday at the annual Monkey Feast Festival in central Thailand.

Amid the morning traffic, rows of monkey statues holding trays were lined up outside the compound of the Ancient Three Pagodas, while volunteers prepared food across the road for real monkeys--the symbol of Lopburi province, around 150 kilometers north of Bangkok.

Throngs of macaque monkeys ran around, at times fighting with each other, while the crowds of visitors and locals grew.

As the carefully prepared feast was brought toward the temple, the ravenous creatures began to pounce and were soon devouring the largely vegetarian spread.

While the entertainment value of the festival is high, organizers are quick to point out that it is not just monkey business.

“This monkey feast festival is a successful event that helps promote Lopburi’s tourism among international tourists every year,” said Yongyuth Kitwatanusont, the festival’s founder.

“Previously, there were around 300 monkeys in Lopburi before increasing to nearly 4,000 nowadays. But Lopburi is known as a monkey city, which means monkeys and people can live in harmony.”

Such harmony could be seen in the lack of shyness exhibited by the monkeys, which climbed on to visitors, vehicles and lampposts. At times the curious animals looked beyond the abundant feast and took an interest in other items.

“There was a monkey on my back as I was trying to take a selfie. He grabbed the sunglasses right off my face and ran off on to the top of a lamppost and was trying to eat them for a while,” said Ayisha Bhatt, an English teacher from California working in Thailand.

The delighted onlookers were largely undeterred by the risk of petty theft, although some were content to exercise caution.

“We have to take care with them, better leave them to it. Not too near is better,” said Carlos Rodway, a tourist from Cadiz, Spain, having previously been unceremoniously treated as a climbing frame by one audacious monkey.

The festival is an annual tradition in Lopburi, the provincial capital, and held as a way to show gratitude to the monkeys for bringing in tourism. This year’s theme is “monkeys feeding monkeys,” an antidote to previous years where monkey participation had decreased due to high numbers of tourists, which intimidated the animals.

 

South Korea government plans first talks with striking truckers

REUTERS

November 28, 2022 

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Unionized truckers shout slogans during their rally as they kick off their strike in front of transport hub in Uiwang, south of Seoul, South Korea, November 24, 2022. (Yonhap/via REUTERS)

SEOUL--South Korea’s government plans to meet the country’s striking truckers’ union for talks on Monday for the first time since a nationwide walkout began five days ago, as supply chain glitches worsened and construction sites faced concrete shortages.

With supplies of cement and fuel for gas stations running short, the government has elevated its warning of cargo transport disruption due to the strike to “serious”, the highest level in its disruption scale, the transport ministry said on Monday.

But a union statement on Sunday offered little prospect of a breakthrough in the dispute. “The transport ministry’s position is already set, and there is no room for negotiations, so this meeting is not a negotiation ... the content is a demand for an unconditional return to work,” the union said.

The second major strike in less than six months by thousands of unionized truckers for better pay and working conditions was criticized last week by South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol as taking the nation’s logistics “hostage” in the face of an economic crisis.

The strike organizer, the Cargo Truckers Solidarity Union (CTSU), has criticized the government for only being willing to expand the minimum-pay ‘Safe Freight Rate’ system for three more years, instead of making it permanent and expanding its application as the union demands.

According to South Korean law, during a serious disruption to transport the government may issue an order to force transport workers back to their jobs. Failure to comply is punishable by up to three years in jail, or a fine of up to 30 million won ($22,550).

Disruptions to industry from the strike come with the export-dependent economy, Asia’s fourth-largest, already facing lower-than-expected growth next year, with the central bank downgrading South Korea’s 2023 growth forecast to 1.7 percent from 2.1 percent previously.

Container traffic at ports dropped to 7.6 percent of normal levels as of 5 p.m. local time (0800 GMT) on Sunday, the transport ministry said, down from 17 percent of normal levels in the morning.

Major steel companies POSCO and Hyundai Steel saw shipments drop to 5 percent or less last week compared with usual levels, according to two industry sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to discuss the matter with media.

Gas stations may run out of gasoline and kerosene this week, especially in large cities. While stations secured inventory before the strike, about 80 percent of truckers for major refiners such as SK Innovation’s SK Energy and S-Oil Corp. are striking union members.

In the construction sector, ready-mix concrete work has been suspended since last week at 259 out of 459 sites nationwide, with almost all sites expected to run out of concrete by Tuesday, Yonhap news agency said, citing unidentified concrete industry sources.

The cement industry estimated an accumulated output loss worth about 46.4 billion won ($35 million) as of Saturday, with shipments down to 9 percent of usual levels, lobby group Korea Cement Association said.

“Non-union bulk cement truck owners, who are implicitly sympathetic or in fear of the cargo union’s illegal activities, are giving up cement transportation,” the association said in a statement.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio review: This tale of a lost child is the filmmaker’s destiny


A still from del Toro’s Pinocchio. Photo: Netflix

That Guillermo del Toro would eventually create a version of Pinocchio feels something like cinematic destiny. The overriding theme of his cinematic vision is, after all, a love for those others would see as freaks, outcasts or misfits.

The Mexican-born filmmaker began work as a special effects illustrator and make-up designer before making his first feature film, Cronos, in 1993 – a fable about a girl’s deep bond with her vampiric grandfather.

Since then, del Toro has forged an international career making films in both Spain and the US, and won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Shape of Water in 2017.

It is no surprise that just as Cronos concerns a girl trying to protect her undead grandfather, Pinocchio involves a father trying to protect a replacement for his deceased son. Pinocchio presents a climax of many of the core elements that have dominated del Toro’s career to date.

As a scholar of del Toro’s work, I interviewed him in 2015. He spoke, even then, of his ambitions for Pinocchio, and his belief that “animation is in many ways the future of genre movies”. He explained that the only thing hindering his ambitions was a “way to capture randomness”.

Clearly, he found it. His depiction of Pinocchio’s world has a satisfyingly cluttered, haphazard style, not least in the unpolished nature of Pinocchio himself, who is carved by a drunk, grieving Geppetto.

Guillermo del Toro holds the primary puppet used for his stop-motion Pinocchio. Photo: Netflix

The broken and unfinished state of Pinocchio’s body is symbolic of his outsider status. Del Toro once again populates his film with misfits, disregarded and disenfranchised – those lost in a chaotic world.

Many viewers were introduced to del Toro’s work with Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), which told the story of a young girl, Offelia, trapped in a manipulative and cruel relationship with her Spanish fascist stepfather, Captain Vidal. Offelia is offered an escape through a terrifying set of challenges by the mysterious Faun (whose costume is made, incidentally, from ancient-looking wood – perhaps another nod to Pinocchio) in an adult fairytale set against the Spanish Civil War.

Trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.

This notion of the abandoned child, whose future is fought over by those seeking to alter their destiny, can be seen in many of del Toro’s other works. In The Devil’s Backbone (2001) we follow Carlos, a 12-year-old orphan of the Spanish civil war who finds himself in a haunted orphanage, surrounded by danger.

In Hellboy (2004) a demon child is unleashed by Nazis attempting to enhance the supernatural, and is rescued by a scientist who raises him to protect civilisation. He becomes a father figure, but later dies, leaving Hellboy abandoned and cursed by his own difference.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a culmination of the director’s artistic preoccupation with the abandoned and unwanted child. In del Toro’s oeuvre, these children become symbolic of the future of a world at war.

A mockery of fascism

Del Toro sets his Pinocchio in Fascistic Italy, where military bombs have killed Geppetto’s “real” son, setting the tale in motion.

Some might see this blending of historic reality and fantasy as crass. But through del Toro’s commitment to the rendering of his worlds, the appearance of the fantastical is never jarring, but assumed, as much a part of the fabric of reality as the bombs of the Fascist regime.

Pinocchio performs in a circus act.

Italian prime minister Benito Mussolini is depicted attending Pinocchio’s circus act, and is presented as a ludicrous, bloated man-child. Pinocchio is supposed to provide a fawning tribute, but instead goes off script, comically mocking the regime. This further illuminates the grotesque childishness of the Fascist agenda in a manner reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s famous depictions of Hitler and his floating globe.
Navigating the ‘uncanny valley’

It’s significant that Pinocchio is del Toro’s first animated feature, (although he worked on the TV show Trollhunters between 2016 and 2021), not least because of the style of animation used.

A poster for Robert Zemeckis’ Pinocchio adaptation, which struggled with problems of the ‘uncanny valley’.

Stop-motion offers a visually stunning alternative to other notable Pinocchios – a lived in, grimy aesthetic, which echoes the darker, more mature elements of del Toro’s version.

It also eliminates the “uncanny valley” problem (as faced by Robert Zemeckis in his own interpretation earlier this year) where there is an inherent creepiness to the CGI figures. In Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, all of the characters look strange in one way or the other, and the presence of a talking cricket and a wooden child seem not to disturb the inhabitants of his world too much.

Instead, at the film’s core is a testament to humanity summed up by the wooden boy’s proclamation that “life is such a wonderful gift.” This sentiment, coupled with a heartbreaking closing sequence – made all the more moving because of the real world relevance that runs through the film – places Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio as a worthy addition to his growing body of work.

It’s an oeuvre which advocates for the future of the young and shines a light on the childish futility of warmongering. Using fantasy and genre fiction, del Toro once again gives voice to those who might otherwise be disregarded as “freaks”.

Keith McDonald, senior lecturer Film Studies and Media, York St John University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Moderna and U of T partner to create mRNA treatments for diseases beyond COVID

JESSICA LAM AND ZEYNEP POYANLI/THE VARSITY

mRNA vaccines hold the potential to alleviate symptoms of cancer, diabetes, and more

By Ashiana Sunderji — Published November 27, 2022

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) technology is in the spotlight following the global pandemic and the implementation of COVID-19 messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines. Traditional vaccines inject a dead form of the virus, allowing the body to develop an immune response and antibodies so the body will know how to respond if the live virus enters the body. mRNA vaccines differ, as they inject instructions for creating a protein of the virus that will initiate an immune response instead of injecting the actual virus. 

In an effort to further this technology, Moderna, one of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies that created an mRNA vaccine during the pandemic, has entered into a partnership with a team of researchers in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering here at the University of Toronto. Moderna has worked and developed partnerships with various biomedical and research agencies, such as AstraZeneca, Merck, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. However, the University of Toronto is Moderna’s first solely academic partnership.

Why U of T?

Moderna is already in the process of working toward the development of other mRNA vaccines and treatments for other infectious diseases and has expressed its desire to innovate further in a variety of contexts. U of T News reported that during an executive meeting between Moderna and U of T, Leah Cowen, U of T’s vice president of research and innovation, and strategic initiatives, expressed, “Moderna recognizes that there is nowhere else in the world where you can find expertise at scale like you can at U of T.” The OFK lab, led by Omar Khan — an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at U of T — works to build nanotechnologies that regulate and administer nucleic acids in order to fight illnesses, and will be the lab working in direct collaboration with Moderna. 

UTSG possesses the only laboratory facilities in the GTA — the Lash Miller Chemical Laboratories and the Combined Containment Level 3 facilities in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine — that can conduct research with Risk Group 3 pathogens of bacterial, viral, or fungal classification, which is essential to conducting innovative research in the realms of health and disease.

Why mRNA?

RNA functions as the intermediate between DNA and proteins. It regulates gene expression. Understanding the path a disease or illness is involved in and takes within the body can allow for the formation of gene-targeted therapy, in which RNA is injected into the body to alter protein expression and function, which helps treat the disease. This can be done for a variety of illnesses to improve the efficacy of treatment, including cancer, diabetes, infectious diseases, Huntington’s disease, or musculoskeletal diseases. The COVID-19 vaccines that Pfizer and Moderna created were based on the companies’ respective attempts at creating mRNA vaccines for cancer treatment.

With further innovation, these treatments could potentially reduce symptoms or even cure a variety of diseases altogether. The Moderna-U of T partnership aims to produce research in a range of fields including molecular genetics, biomedical engineering, and biochemistry, to develop RNA innovations that will improve disease prevention and cures. It will be very exciting to see where this partnership takes medical and biotech innovation right here at U of T.  

Living in fear: Iranian LGBTQ+ activists in Turkey

Among the most vulnerable communities, discrimination and abuse follows them in exile, but the current uprising may signal a change.

The current protests in Iran, and around the world (Istanbul pictured here) are the country's first counterrevolution by women about women's rights. | Omer Kuscu/dia Images via Getty Images

BY FARIBA NAWA
NOVEMBER 28, 2022 

Fariba Nawa is a journalist based in Istanbul and host of On Spec podcast. She’s also the author of “Opium Nation: Child Brides, Drug Lords and One Woman’s Journey through Afghanistan.”

ISTANBUL — Lately, Mikaeil Alizadeh has taken to dancing by night and protesting by day. She remains vigilant. Her eyes darting in every direction, anticipating the worst.

Several Iranian dissidents, just like her, have been kidnapped and killed in Turkey, where Alizadeh now lives. Her home country has become notorious for deploying agents in foreign countries to kill those opposing the mullah’s regime, and with a 534-kilometer border, Turkey is the closest and easiest place to target them. Here, Iran’s hardcore militia, the Revolutionary Guards, hire mafia members to mete out their violence.

“My biggest fear is being raped, it’s a nightmare I have,” Alizadeh says.


LGBTQ+ members like Alizadeh, who identifies as gender fluid, are among the most vulnerable Iranians in Turkey. They are part of the most persecuted communities, both back home and among the 1,400 registered refugees from Iran in Turkey, who have applied for asylum to Western countries.

In Iran, gay sex is illegal, and it’s punished by flogging, imprisonment or even execution. As recently as September, United Nations experts demanded Iran release two women on death row for homosexuality and trafficking. One of them, Zahra Sedighi-Hamadani, had tried to help members of the LGBTQ+ community escape to Iraq, when Iranian authorities arrested and disappeared her at the border last year.

The current protests in Iran, however, signal a change. Fueled by the killing of Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa Amini, who was accused of breaking Iran’s dress code, these protests are now the first counterrevolution by women about women’s rights. And many of the protestors — the majority in their teens and early twenties — believe gender equality includes LGBTQ+ rights.

But many of the country’s LGBTQ+ activists are either in Iranian prisons or have fled — some are stuck in limbo, in places like Istanbul. After every uprising in Iran, dissidents escape to Turkey, a country they can enter visa free, but many lead desolate lives here with little support — harassment, unemployment and abuse follow them to Turkey, where the government has been increasingly spewing hateful speech and curbing their rights.

While Iranian LGBTQ+ activists were keeping a low profile in Turkey in the past, the protests in Iran have now prompted some of them to share their stories.

Alizadeh is one of them.

Wearing a black pantsuit with her hair pulled back, she says in her husky voice that friends gave her the stage name Leo, as her eyes resemble those of a leopard’s. But her birth name is Fatimeh.

Alizadeh uses her social media platform to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and gender equality in Iran. | Photographs by Hilaneh Mahmoudi for POLITICO

Alizadeh makes a living from belly dancing in restaurants and clubs, and she gives dance lessons too. With nearly half a million followers on Instagram, she also uses her social media platform to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and gender equality in Iran.

She says she didn’t protest against the Iranian regime until now. But “I’m sure the regime will fall this time. People know what they want, and we are fighting for it. We’re going to be successful,” she insists. At a recent protest in front of the Iranian consulate in Istanbul, Alizadeh wore an ethnic outfit and danced outside, protesting the law that forbids women from dancing in public in Iran.

However, the comments on her posts are rarely positive, and sometimes they’re hurtful. “I just don’t like you anymore,” one woman writes under a video. But Alizadeh isn’t discouraged by criticism or insults. She points to her supporters as her source of inspiration — including Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani.

But it took a long time for her to get here.

When she was 15 years old, Alizadeh’s parents tried to force her into a marriage she didn’t want, so she ran away and married a boy who ended up abusing her. Having discovered her passion for dance early on, she opened a secret dance studio after she divorced her husband, and began teaching Zumba to both men and women in the conservative city of Mashhad. Police later raided her school, labeling it a brothel and shutting it down.

At the time, Alizadeh dressed like a man, wearing trousers and big sweatshirts, covering her hair with a cap. She’d realized she liked girls and, at 22, applied for a government program to have sex reassignment surgery.

Alizadeh makes a living from belly dancing in restaurants and clubs, and she gives dance lessons too. | Photographs by Hilaneh Mahmoudi for POLITICO

Iran is second only to Thailand in terms of the number of sex change surgeries performed there, as a law was passed in 1986 to give the country’s queer community a choice to change their gender, so they could engage in heterosexual life. “Iran doesn’t accept gay, a third gender, or nonbinary or gender fluid. You have to choose, boy or girl,” Alizadeh says. “One reason I’m protesting is so we can have other options.”

Alizadeh spent months seeing therapists and psychiatrists assigned by the government, until she was allowed to get a mastectomy and hysterectomy at age 23. Authorities then issued her a new passport, and Fatimeh became Mikaiel — but the abuse didn’t stop.

Still small framed with feminine features, as a man Alizadeh was beaten by her girlfriend’s family. And those in her transgender community weren’t necessarily happier after surgery either; some of them committed suicide, she says.

Then, after receiving threats on her phone for dancing, Alizadeh finally fled to Turkey. “I was being crushed from every angle,” she says, pausing for a drink of water. Once in Turkey, she then applied for asylum to a third country and became a refugee, but she didn’t imagine that eight years later, she would still be stuck in the country.

In the meantime, she met a man she fell in love with, and realized she could also be a woman. “He researched and told me that I was gender fluid. That’s when I finally felt comfortable with myself,” she says. That’s when she started to discuss her life on Instagram, and other Iranian LGBTQ+ individuals who had reassignment surgery started messaging her with their own stories.

Alizadeh is now informally married — as same-sex marriage is illegal in Turkey, and her passport identifies her as a man — to Bahador Shafeqhatian, a former lawyer. | Photographs by Hilaneh Mahmoudi for POLITICO

Alizadeh’s now informally married to her husband Bahador Shafeqhatian, a former lawyer, who dotes on her. However, she can’t formally marry him in Turkey because her passport identifies her as a man, and same sex marriage isn’t recognized here. She says that if she gets asylum to the West, she’d have to leave her husband behind for a while. But she hopes one day to return to her home of Iran, and enjoy the same freedoms as Westerners. She dreams of opening a dance academy there — if and when this regime falls.

Yet, while stuck in Turkey, many Iranian LGBTQ+ individuals continue to struggle with basic needs, like putting food on the table. As refugees, they don’t have work permits and end up taking low-paid jobs — which can include sex work.

They also face discrimination and violence in the smaller cities that Turkey settles them in while they wait for their asylum cases to be processed. But chances of getting asylum to the West are akin to winning the lottery.

Similarly stuck, AM is an Iranian lesbian who’s been living in a city an hour from Istanbul for five years now, and she’s hoping to finally get resettled in a place where she can legally work and feel safe.

Like Alizadeh, AM is also fearful. The 36-year-old doesn’t want her name to be revealed. And a couple of men recently beat and badly bruised her and a woman she was kissing. She doesn’t go to protests either because she fears for her family in Iran.

“I keep having nightmares that police have taken me, that several men are raping me at the same time. I had these nightmares before, but they have gotten much worse now,” she says as she cries quietly in a voice message.

Police in Tehran harassed and threatened the family of one of AM’s LGBTQ+ friends after he gave a TV interview in Turkey. The informants watch everything Iranians in Turkey do like hawks, she says.

Just three weeks ago, Iranian dissident and refugee Mahshid Nazemi was detained by Turkish immigration, after she reported to Turkish police that she’d been followed by a man in a car and threatened with kidnapping for giving press interviews against the regime. Nazemi is now in a deportation camp, but the U.N. has warned Turkish authorities that sending her back to Iran would risk her life. Meanwhile, over a dozen Turks and Iranians are currently on trial in Istanbul on charges of espionage and attempts to kidnap Iranian dissidents for the Iranian regime.

AM insists the protesters in Iran now have to win because it would finally end the regime’s reign of terror against its own people — both inside and outside the country. And if the regime stops the movement with brutality, I ask, then what?

Then, “our conscience is at peace that at least we tried,” she says.