This afternoon, we talked live with the journalist and author Anand Gopal about his new book, Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution, an epic ground-level account of the Syrian civil war as experienced by the people who came together to govern the city of Manjib as the Assad regime fell apart after the Arab Spring. We talked about:
How shopkeepers, teachers, athletes, and poets built a city government from the ground up and kept it alive for eighteen months
Why the authoritarian bargain — economic guarantees in exchange for giving up political rights — fell apart worldwide under neoliberalism
How economic precarity awakened Syrians to the possibility of protest and of political change
How Ba’athists, ISIS, and today’s Western authoritarians have all worked from a familiar playbook
What’s driving Iran’s mass protests, and how the opposition sees the American bombing campaign
Why it’s so hard to agree on a definition of “freedom” — and why it’s worth fighting for anyway
Wondering how friends and neighbors can come together to resist authoritarianism and persist even under the worst of circumstances? You won’t want to miss this book or our conversation. Just click on the video player above to watch now.
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Join us for more Live conversation this week!
This Friday, March 6, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, The Ink Book Club will meet with author Emily Yellin and Judge John Lawson to talk about the late civil rights activist Reverend James Lawson Jr.’s memoir, Nonviolent: A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation, and Love.
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and make sure to turn on your notifications — you’ll get an email and an alert within the app once we’re live, and you can watch, chat, and even participate in the conversation from your iOS or Android mobile device. If you’re using a computer, you can also watch (and ask questions in the text chat) on our homepage. If you don’t see the conversation streaming on our homepage, just look in the notification menu (the bell-shaped icon at the upper right) and click to join us.
