Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Anand Gopal
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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After nearly two decades reporting from conflict zones across the Middle East and Afghanistan, journalist and author Anand Gopal found that in the writing of his latest book, he gained a new perspective on a region he thought he knew well. “I’d been so used to reporting on stories of devastation, and here’s one of construction,” he tells Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede.
Gopal spent two decades considering how power ignores its subjects. Following last week’s discussion with Emran Feroz and Sarah Chayes, he offers his own perspective of reporting on the war on terror in Afghanistan, and subsequently on the air campaign to defeat the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.
“Inequality sounds the death knell of democracies every time.”
In “Days of Love and Rage,” however, Gopal writes of a remarkable inversion of the standard narrative driven by the powerful. His new book focuses on the city of Manbij in northern Syria, where residents overthrew the regime of Bashar al-Assad and embarked on an 18-month experiment in self-governance. That experiment forced Gopal to confront his own assumptions about democracy.
In Manbij, as in the United States, Gopal found two competing visions of freedom at odds with each other. “What does democracy mean?” he asks Al Yafai. “Does it mean a society in which everybody actually is able to take an equal share, which means they can only do so if they have enough material resources? Or does it mean something more formal, like you just go and vote every two or four years, and how you live the rest of your life, even if you can’t make rent — that’s not democracy’s business?”
That divide would ultimately prove the undoing of the Manbij experiment. “People who had previously been secular, pro-democracy revolutionaries got so disgusted with the inequality and with the crime that they began to gravitate towards these individuals,” Gopal says. Those individuals revealed themselves to be Islamic State, which built a popular coalition and overthrew the democracy from within.
Gopal tells Al Yafai that these dynamics are not unique to Syria. Looking across history, from ancient Rome to 19th-century France to the present-day United States, he sees the same pattern repeating. “Inequality — political and economic inequality — really sounds the death knell of democracies every time,” he says. “And I think that more than anything else explains why we’re seeing the slide towards authoritarianism everywhere.”
Gopal’s reporting has also led him to a stark conclusion about his home country. “We are an empire, but a kind of a failing empire,” he says. “The elites that run the country have believed too much of their own messaging.” As the United States wages a new war, this time against Iran, Gopal sees a familiar disconnect between official narratives and reality on the ground. He argues that American leaders have been surprised by Iran’s resistance because they bought into the contradictions of their own rhetoric. “It makes no sense when you say that they’re both a threat to world peace and also you expect them not to fight back,” he says.