Sociologist Chahla Chafiq was a 25-year-old Marxist activist during the 1979 Iranian revolution. Now in exile in France, she looks back on the tensions between socialism, feminism, and anti-imperialism that have roiled Iran’s opposition politics for decades.
  • Heaven_and_Earth [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    The interview addresses people who call these protests a "color revolution"

    These people use this idea that if this regime falls, we’re going to fall into a civil war, and it’s going to be much worse. And we don’t know what’s going to come.

    They are creating this fear, a panic, around that. It’s something that they’ve been pushing for many, many years. And, of course, that is an idea that comes from the regime.

    The second thing is that they create this doubt, this unnecessary doubt, around activists inside Iran, saying that maybe they’re working for a foreign power like Israel. And creating this doubt allows the regime to be justified in its repression of these people, even environmental activists — people who have also been killed in the prisons, or have been tortured, or we don’t even know what’s going on with them. They’ve disappeared.