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This is the Civic Media Spotlight.
Hello and welcome to the second hour of the Civic Media Spotlight.
We move on to Nightlight with Pete Schwabba and Greg Bach.
Pete and Greg talk to Chris Knapp, executive director of Friends of the Boundary Water Wilderness, to talk about the renewed push for mining near the boundary waters.
He breaks down what's at stake environmentally,
and how recent policy changes could impact the future of the region.
Enjoy.
Welcome back.
You've got the Civic Media Network folks.
I am Pete Schwab.
He is Greg Bach.
We are Nightlight along with Dom Lee, who is working the board and producing the show from Civic Media headquarters in Madison.
It is great to have you with us tonight.
It is tonight is Nightlight Movie Club folks.
It's Thursday night.
That means an hour number two.
We will be discussing tonight's film Goodfellas.
And we hope you will join us and be part of the conversation.
You can share your favorite characters, phrases, scenes, actors, whatever.
Be part of the conversation.
That is an hour number two.
Pardon me.
Our question of the night is in the spirit of good fellows.
If you were in the mob, what would your gangster nickname be?
Let us know at 855-752-4842-8557.
You can also text us on the app or the stream.
Right now, it is my pleasure to welcome
our first guest of the night.
He's the executive director of Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness.
Chris Knopp joins us tonight on Nightlight.
Welcome, Chris.
How are you?
I'm doing well.
Thank you so much, Pete.
Great to be here.
Thanks, Greg.
Thanks.
Great to have you.
Let's just start out like, you know, tell us what you do, what Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness does.
Give us some background on the organization and maybe how you ended up there.
Sure.
Sure.
We're a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to protecting the Boundary Waters Canoe area, Wilderness area in northeast Minnesota.
And for folks that haven't been up there, this is a million acres of wilderness of over a thousand lakes.
And you, for fun, you carry the canoe on your shoulders from lake to lake on portage trails.
It is so beautiful, so relaxing.
It's an amazing place.
And what we do as a nonprofit, we're actually celebrating our 50th anniversary.
We were founded on May 7th, 1976 at a diner called Toby's Diner in Hinckley, Minnesota.
Oh, wow.
Off of Interstate 35.
And we're actually bringing some of our founders back next week on May 7th to have a breakfast.
So it's in Hinckley, Minnesota on May 7th at 10.30.
It's a free breakfast open to anyone.
You can get whatever carbs or sugar or fat, you know, there's cinnamon buns to do that.
But you had me free.
Yes, not calorie free, not heart attack free, but but it'll be free free to free to attend.
And it was so we were founded by ordinary people that just loved
going to the boundary waters, paddling these beautiful lakes where you can literally drink out of the lakes.
You can still drink out of the lakes without having to treat it.
Right in the middle of
the
lake, go and drink it, catch a walleye and smallmouth bass and have it for lunch or dinner.
It is that kind of a place where you connect with yourself, connect with your friends, connect with your family by doing these outdoor experiences.
So you camp overnight,
and you go from campsite to campsite.
So there are, again, 1,000 lakes up there to explore.
It is just an amazing place.
And so we were founded in 1976 to put into place protections that kept at a wilderness area.
So you wouldn't have logging in the wilderness that you wouldn't have.
On some lakes, you have motors, but on most of the lakes, you don't have motors.
So it's kind of a motorless area where you go from canoe, canoe, by canoe, and not so much motor boats.
And ever since then, we have met every challenge to the wilderness in the ensuing 50 years.
And right now, we've been leading the fight to protect this beautiful wilderness area from the threat of copper nickel sulfide mining.
So there's a proposed mine at the very edge of this wilderness area that would put sulfuric acid into the water and all these lakes are interconnected.
And so the sulfuric acid would go in among all the lakes there and really destroy the wilderness area as we know it.
You know, when we talk about whether it's Minnesota or Canada, Michigan, Wisconsin, one thing that we're all known for is not only our great beautiful lands, but the huge dedication to conservation, you know, Wisconsin, the home of Earth Day and all that wonderful.
This is something that I can imagine, Chris, that you're hearing from people that is not popular and that does not mean folks voted for one specific person.
People who hunt and fish and vote one way are the same people as people who hunt and fish and vote another way.
I'm sure you're hearing from folks that this is not popular and people are nervous about the possibility of mining these beautiful areas, correct?
Absolutely.
We have heard in the last...
the last three weeks you're literally from hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people probably millions at this point around the country saying that hey we love the boundary waters and we want to protect it you know this is not about wearing a you know a blue uniform or a red uniform this is about
core kind of Midwestern values of hunting, fishing and connecting with family and friends around a campfire after a long day of paddling.
And so what's proposed is that this is a Chilean mining company called Anifagasta that wants to dig this mine right at the edge.
And so what happened, it was just signed earlier this week.
by the president, it would open up these 225,000 acres of public lands, our lands, adjacent to the boundary waters to this type of mining.
And so this is on federal land, public lands, and they still have to go through permitting, but right now it allows for this to possibly happen.
And so we've been fighting this for literally two decades, and the battle will continue, but that's the threat that's out there.
Chris, can you explain why the type of mining they're doing or they want to do is so dangerous and so much worse than iron ore mining?
Can the dangers of copper and nickel to the waters?
Sure.
You know, when you do the traditional iron mining, Minnesota has an honored tradition of iron mining, and you can swim in an old iron pit.
Now, what's different with copper nickel sulfide mining is that the rock is bound up with sulfide and the amount of actual copper and nickel in the rock, it's not like 50% of the rock.
It's not like 25% of the rock.
It's not 10% of the rock.
It's not even 1% of the rock.
It's like less than 0.5%.
So you get 99.5% waste and you crush it for less than this 1%, half of 1%.
And when you crush that rock, that sulfide mixes with water and creates sulfuric acid.
You don't get that with tachyneid mine.
And so that's how it's different.
So okay, what happens when you get that sulfuric acid?
in the water.
It takes a mercury that's in the soil and otherwise inert and puts it in the water.
It's called methylmercury.
And already 10% of the people live in Northeastern Minnesota have elevated levels of mercury.
So this makes that situation work.
Mercury is a neurotoxin.
It's really dangerous, especially for small children as their brain develops.
And it bio accumulates the plants and then it gets into the fish.
And so it gets concentrated
as it goes up the food chain there.
And the other thing it would do, among the many other things, it would kill the wild rice.
So the wild rice is very, very sensitive to the levels of sulfate.
And it's central to the culture of the Anishinaabe tribes of northeastern Minnesota, northwestern Wisconsin.
And so this would kill the wild rice in the waters there.
So those are kind of like
true big problems that are different than taconite mining.
So this is not your, your, your, your fathers or grandfathers or great grandfathers taconite mining.
This is something new and different.
And it's, it's being promoted by these foreign mining companies.
Well, the big one is from Chile, as I mentioned, another from, uh, another from Switzerland and another from, from Spain.
So is this, you know, we're seeing a lot of, of,
conversation, controversy, outrage over data centers in Wisconsin and around the country.
And this is something I'm sure your group has been working on for a long time.
I mean, people have been trying to push back regulations on environmental protections for decades since they were put into place because business wants to business.
What are you hearing from like as local leaders?
We talk about the people that you heard from.
But what are you hearing from local leaders as far as elected officials, you know, whether it's common counsel, county supervisors, or higher up about what's happening right here?
Do you hear people saying, well, let's see what happens, or do you see folks who are in places of authority pushing back saying we cannot do this?
Sure.
They're sort of like,
two big things in general that leaders are outraged about it.
And it is because that we have a strong tradition of heritage of clean water in the state.
people clean water really resonates, you know, on the can of hams beer, it says the land of sky blue water, right?
And so, you know, when you when you when you when you put that on your beer can, you know, that's part of your your heritage.
But but it really is, you know, we have, you know, 11,842 lakes in Minnesota.
That's the answer to the trivia question, guys.
Yeah.
What what how many how many lakes are in in Minnesota?
But you know, we have the greatest the great lakes that we share with Wisconsin lakes.
and where the headwaters of the Mississippi River.
So water is central to Minnesota's identity.
And so elected leaders when this passed the US Senate two weeks ago, not quite two weeks ago, some were literally in tears at the Minnesota State Capitol.
And so the other part of this is that, okay, we're not gonna be able to protect this at the federal level right now.
Changes have to be made there.
that we at the state level, we in Minnesota, no one has to stand up for Minnesota and against a federal government that's reckless.
And so what we need to do is pass state laws and act right now.
And so this is the big thing for us right now is to say, we have agency over a future in Minnesota.
But here's kind of the interesting dynamic on this, that we have not had an actual hearing on the threat from toxic copper nickel sulfide mining at the Minnesota legislature since 2009.
It's unbelievable.
17 years.
I mean, J.J.
McCarthy, the quarterback was in second grade at the time.
It's unreal.
It's unreal.
And so we need real boundary waters champions to stand up now.
for this.
We're trying to push for
that.
Our guest is executive director of Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness.
Chris Knopp has joined us over the stream and just made a reference to J.J.
McCarthy.
I have to be honest, Chris.
I was not expecting to hear his name during this interview.
That goes on the bingo card.
It's a
free space one right there.
Boom.
There we
go.
Oh my goodness.
Chris, I'm on the other side of Wisconsin.
I live in a little town on the waters of Green Bay.
We have a PFAS issue here.
And part of the problem, it seems like nobody wants that.
But the damage was done before people found out.
And it seems like you guys are out in front of this.
But is there a coalition between Upper Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota?
Because I feel like if people can stop this, most of the people who are informed know about it.
That's not the problem.
It's the people that might get ticked off 10 years from now.
How do you alert everybody that this is clean water?
And once it's gone, it's gone.
Pete, you hit on something that's super important, that what we're doing at Friends of the Boundary Waters is creating a clean water movement.
And so we are reaching out to businesses, to other organizations, to faith institutions and individuals and creating a movement.
So this is, we have actually a Friends of the Boundary Waters clean water movement, clean water coalition that meets monthly.
We have the via Zoom meetings.
And then we have a citizen action network that makes phone calls.
So we had someone, someone who's working
on this issue in the porkies in Michigan, speak earlier this month on this.
We're meeting with, we talk with people in Wisconsin as well.
So this is a kind of a Northland challenge with that Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota all faced.
And so this is, we're creating a movement and we do that.
We're doing that here at Friends of the Boundary Waters.
Let's pick up there.
We're going to do a very short break and then we'll be back and have a few more minutes with our guest, Chris Knopp from the Boundary Waters Wilderness.
We are a nightlight and I
We are coming right back.
Don't go anywhere.
This
is the Civic Media Network.
Welcome back.
This is Night Light with Pete Schwabba and Greg Bach.
It is great to have you with us on this Thursday night as we discuss all the fun things in life.
We are doing movie club in hour number two and tonight's film is Goodfellas.
Be part of the conversation.
Our question of the night is if you were in the mob, what would your gangster nickname be?
I'm trying to join the mob several times.
They won't have me, but let us know what your nickname would be.
Our guest at the moment is Mr. Chris Knopp.
He is the executive director of Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness.
He joins us over the stream from Minnesota.
Chris, before the break, you were talking about this coalition of people between the UP and Wisconsin and Minnesota.
All the clean water affects us all.
Dirty water affects us all.
Polluted water, I should say.
Where can people find out more information?
And where can they go just to gather more information?
Sure.
Thanks, Pete.
People can reach out to us here at our website for Friends of the Boundary Waters.
It's www.friends-bwca.org.
Or you can give me a call if you want.
I take phone calls all the time.
My number is 651.
999-9-5-6-5.
So, 6-5-1-9-9-9-5-6-5.
Text me, call me, and I can get you the information that you need.
Wow, that's very generous.
Thank you.
We actually have some comments and some text messages on the line here.
Let's see.
They didn't identify themselves.
We looked through it.
It says,
While we're on the conversation, any plans to discuss potential changes to the fault, changes following the 2023 second versus EPA decision where the EPA narrowed the definition.
This is a very long question.
I don't know if you have the answer to it, but requiring wetlands to have a continuous surface connection to the traditional navigable waters, significantly limiting
federal authority, that's a mouthful.
I'm glad I got that out in one.
I don't know if you have any thoughts on that one, but I just liked some individuals who are getting in touch with us, letting us know their concerns with this matter as well.
Do you have anything to say on that?
Sure.
So what that's referring to is a Supreme Court case that narrowed the definition of what can be protected under the Federal Clean Water Act as a wetland.
So it really narrowed it down where basically you had to be in waters that could be navigated by a boat.
And we know that in any of the lakes in Wisconsin or Michigan or Minnesota where those wetlands that are kind of off.
that absorb all those big rainstorms that we've had here where flooding happens.
They're super important.
And so what needs to be done is the Federal Clean Water Act needs to be rewritten to make it clear that those wetlands that absorb all that water and big rainstorms is protected under the Clean Water Act so that they don't get filled in and we don't have those big runoffs that create the huge flooding that you've had all across
Wisconsin.
Yes,
absolutely.
We have another text here from Mark from Prairie to Sac.
It says, it's not just the BWCA that is at risk.
It's also Voyagers National Park to the west of the BWCA.
And I don't know if I'm saying this right.
Cutico Provincial Park to the north in Ontario.
They are all connected.
Are you part of other networks, Chris, across the country?
Sure, so that what that question gets at is that this is an ecosystem that is very expansive.
It goes into the Quedico provincial park in Canada, as well as the Boundary Waters Canary Wilderness, and then it extends west.
So the pollution from this would flow north.
right along the Canadian border and then through Voyager's National Park into Canada.
So this is a really an international scandal here that we would allow this type of pollution to impact this interconnected waterway.
And so we're in touch with the allies throughout the region.
Interestingly, in Canada, Canada has a very big extractive industry.
culture.
And so Canadian officials can be a little mixed on this and not always be protective of their water resources.
But yes, so this is a binational Canada US problem.
And yes, it extends throughout this interconnected waterways throughout the region there.
We only have a couple minutes left and this is an election you're here in Wisconsin and you talked about officials in Minnesota doing the work needed to protect the waters.
That's something we've gone back and forth in Wisconsin.
When folks are talking to the people who are knocking on the doors looking to
take those jobs in Madison to represent the people.
If this is something that concerned them, how do they frame their questions to say like, are you going to protect our waters or not?
I mean, that's the simple way of putting it.
But what do you say to folks who like, you know, how do I ask the question for those who are running for office?
So I know I'm voting for the person who represents my values.
Sure.
We ask people, what are your core values?
What do you value?
What experiences are deepest to you?
Is it teaching your grandson to swim or teaching a family member to fish?
What are those core experiences that mean something to you?
And I must tell you, we actually have a situation here that's kind of interesting that you might not think of.
would be a case in Minnesota, but actually our Minnesota governor can cancel one of the state mineral leases of this Chilean mining company.
It would kill this mining project at the edge of the boundary waters, but it would be the first step on the road.
So what we need to do is we need to stop these different mineral leases at the federal and state level.
But at the state level, we're
trying to get our governor here in Minnesota to, to cancel, take the first step on this long road to protecting the boundary waters by canceling the twin metals, one of the twin metal state mineral leases that's owned by this big Chilean company called Ana Fagasta.
So, so we're trying to get our supporters to respectfully ask the governor, you know, stand up for, for Minnesota.
You've done a great job of doing that.
You can stand up for the boundary waters against the federal government now.
That's great, Chris.
We appreciate your time tonight.
Real quick.
We got about 30 seconds left.
What would your gangster nickname be?
Sounds like you kind of are a gangster
for
what
you're
doing, but what would we call you?
The paddler
for a canoe cab.
Love it.
Chris.
The paddler or Senator there.
Oh, nicely done, Greg Bach.
All right.
Thanks so much, Chris.
Continue success and good luck with your efforts.
And thank you for spending some time with us tonight.
Great.
Thank you, Pete.
Thank you, Greg.
You got it.
All right.
We're coming right back for Act Two and Goodfellas or Night Light Movie Club.
I'm Pete Schwabba.
He's Greg Bach.
This is Night
Light.
Two more segments left in the civic media spotlight, and we stay right here with Night Light with Pete Schwabba and Greg Bach.
Pete and Greg talk to Golnar Nikpor, associate professor at Dartmouth University and scholar of modern Iranian political and intellectual history to provide context on Iran and the forces shaping the current moment.
Welcome back tonight, ladies and gentlemen.
I am Pete Chihuahua, coming to you live from northeast Wisconsin.
Just down the coast is Mr. Greg Bach, coming to you from our radio park in Donnelly, holding down the fort in Madison, producing the show.
We are the Otterhay Triangle, and it is great to have you with us tonight.
It is my pleasure to welcome our first guest of the night.
She is a scholar of modern Iranian political and intellectual history with a particular interest in the history of law, incarceration, revolution, and women's rights.
Golnar Nikpur joins us now at Nightlight Over the Stream.
Good evening.
Hi there.
Thanks for having me, Pete and Greg.
Well, it is our pleasure.
I hope you're having a great day and I'm looking forward to having you enlighten us and give us a perspective we might not have had yet.
regarding the Iran conflict here.
So just jumping right in, can you give us a little bit of your background?
And I know you were born in Iran, but tell us how you got to this point in your life in a thumbnail, if you could.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's right.
I was born in Iran in the early 1980s, so amid the Iran-Iraq war.
And I spent the first
several years of my life there before my family came to the U.S., where we lived around New York State, eventually settled on Long Island.
I professionally got interested, or I should say intellectually got interested in Iran as a college student.
I didn't think I would be a historian when I started college, but I
took a class and then another class I was interested in the politics of the world and in US politics but also interested in Middle Eastern history, Iranian history, sort of going back further than the modern period too and just got sort of passionately interested in the topic of history.
I realized at some point that history at the higher level is not like, you know, I never liked history as a high school student because you just have to learn, you know, kind of memorize names and dates but
Once you get a little bit further along, you see that it's a lot about reading and analysis and critical thinking and trying to figure out what things actually mean.
You know, there's not one concrete answer sometimes, but you try to work through the details and figure it out in a way that makes sense.
So that's still what I do.
I just kept taking one, putting one foot in front of the next until I got to this point where I'm now at Dartmouth College.
And I have to say, since you've given me this opportunity to talk a little bit about myself, I'm particularly gratified to be on this show because I
lived in Madison for a few years.
I was a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
And I love, I love Wisconsin.
So I'm really happy to be on the show.
I
was going to ask you about that.
So I'm glad you mentioned that.
It's great.
Well, that's lovely.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate that.
And really, you know, we appreciate you being on the show because, you know, I am, I am a child of the late, I am born in the late seventies and I grew up with the presence of Iran in my life, but always being fed.
information, whether it's from politics, whether it's from the news, whether it's from family or, you know, whatever that may be.
But, you know, as far as Iran now, what is, what is modern life in Iran like right now versus what we are told it's like our perceptions versus the reality, even in the face of this, the, of this war happening right now.
But what are the things that Americans need to know about Iran and Iranian life?
Yeah, that's a great question.
I mean, in some ways, that's my own interest in studying Iran and has been since I was, you know, in my teens.
It's trying to get an understanding of what's really true about this place that I spent part of my childhood in, but that, you know, once I came to the US, I got a very different sort of upbringing and education on the country.
So I would say that the first thing that I always tell
people who are interested in learning about Iran beyond the headlines is that it's a big country and it's an extremely diverse country in a way that I don't think that most people in the US have a clear sense of.
In the first place, it's 92, 93 million people total.
And that's not including a diaspora outside of the country of some six or seven million to the best of our ability to count it.
So maybe a hundred million people who call themselves Iranians all over the world.
But those people are enormously diverse.
They have dozens of different linguistic backgrounds.
So Persian or Farsi, that's the same language, is the main language of the country and the one spoken by its government and in schools.
But only about 50% of the Iranian people speak Persian at home because the country has historically been
Extremely diverse, many different dialects, many different languages, some of the ones you may have heard of, Ozeri Turkish or Arabic or Kurdish, but there's so many small sort of groups that speak different languages, even if they have a common cultural heritage, they're still distinct sort of ethnic, linguistic, religious.
and certainly political identities throughout the country.
So there's, you know, I'm always suspicious or skeptical when people say Iranians want this or Iranians are like that because we're talking about lots of it's a country, maybe not quite as as big and diverse as the US, but on some level, we should think of it more like that than like a model, right?
Where you can really get
radically different views depending on who you're talking to, depending on their class background, their ethnicity, but also just their worldview if they're a city person, a country person, you know, so you have this very distinct kind of diverse place.
The other thing I would say that is extremely sort of important to understand is that I think a lot of people in the US don't quite grasp, is that for whatever we may think of Iranian government, which is indeed authoritarian, it has invested a great deal into the
the development of the country and its infrastructure.
So that's why this sort of, you know, that would be something to talk about when we get into the war is this kind of war on infrastructure that we've seen.
I've seen Americans and my students even say over the course of the last several weeks that they're surprised to see all the things, you know, when they see the images of what has been bombed or what has been sort of targeted.
they're surprised at how sort of modernized the country is because the impression that people have is of this very sort of religious and maybe even um you know sort of steeped in the past
type
of place but it's it's it's invested in you know like Tehran has beautiful subways and streets and cafes where you can go get uh you know like
complicated coffee drinks, just as you look here, like third wave kind of life.
Oh, thank goodness.
Are they as expensive?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And just like any country that has, you know, sort of big cities and country life, what you have, what you see is going to depend on where you are.
So there's rural Iran, there's mountain Iran, there's big city Iran and Tehran is a big global cosmopolists, some 20 million people.
So
Again, it's one of the things I think people are least accustomed to thinking about is just that it's an incredibly rich in terms of cultural heritage, artistic heritage, literary film heritage place.
And it's incredibly developed in ways that I think we don't quite always take into account.
And it is a highly educated country.
in terms of literacy rates, in terms of education rates, all these things are part of the social fabric of the country over the last decades.
Our guest is Golanar Nikpur.
She is a scholar of modern Iranian political and intellectual history with a particular interest in the history of law, incarceration, revolution, and women's rights.
She joins us here on Night Light and is sort of enlightening us a little bit about what's happening in Iran during this war and her background.
I think for me, just the most horrible thing about this conflict so far, Golnar, is the bombing of the girl's school in Manav, or the Israeli airstrike.
The news cycle changes so much, and it's the Strait of Hormuz.
Is it open?
Is it not?
I can't believe that's not still, and maybe it is in Iran, but how if people, are they still talking about there?
Is there outrage over that one incident?
Because I'm not seeing like on the news, at least not in the American media,
You know that much outrage from Iran and I can't I can't tell if that's from our news media or where people are at with that
Yeah, that's a great question the bombing of the girl school in Minot was Absolutely foundational to how Iranians are perceiving this war and the Country is absolutely still mourning
the deaths of those children.
It's been in the news in Iran constantly, consistently, including memorials to each child and their names have been circulated and so forth.
And I think that it was a sort of foundational moment.
I should note that to the best of our ability to know the sort of military experts who look into these things, believe it was a U.S.
airstrike and not an Israeli one because it was a U.S.
Tomahawk missile, which the Israelis don't have.
So so yes, I think there's a huge gap between how people in the US have experienced the trauma of that that girl school being bombed and people in Iran I've even seen people who were maybe you know because of their opposition to the Iranian government To some extent and their exhaustion with you know, not knowing how to move forward They were
sort of not certain how they felt about the bombing initially but as soon as that girl school was hit there was a sense okay war actually means the death of ordinary people civilians little kids you know so this is these are images that are circulating and when the Iranian national soccer team played a match just a few weeks ago they they held
little backpacks to signify.
And that was from from the reporting their own decision.
I mean, they wanted to sort of say that they were playing on behalf of those little ones who had been killed.
And so I think, yeah, that's one of those things that has made an enormous impression in Iranians hearts across the political and social spectrum, and has really hardened, you know, it's you see a rally around the flag effect with with things like war and the Mina bombing allowed
made that happen right away, where people were really quite disturbed and grieving the loss of those lives.
And that hasn't been quite as, you know, even on the first couple of days after the bombing, there was not first page, there was not quite as much first page news about this mass casualty incident as you think that there would be, and really one of the worst sort of mass civilian death incidents.
instantiated by the US military in decades.
I saw some people say the worst in Vietnam.
I saw other scholar myself.
I won't say definitively which
one that
is the case, but I could certainly, you know, one would certainly like to see more.
And one of the things that I'm, you know, I hope as a scholar to be able to do is to keep a kind of, you know, the memory of those civilian lives lost.
um on the table because I mean you know hopefully for us to understand what happened and to learn from it we have to look at the what actually happened quite closely and I'm not sure that we've publicly done that um as you know the broader American citizenry but on the Iranian side yes that is and it's been used by the government as well so on the one hand it's been sort of effective propaganda for the government but I think also uh genuine kind of outpouring of rage and grief from all walks of life among Iranians about
People who very clearly are innocents right like small children who have no way to protect themselves
We only have about a about a minute before we have to go to break them and I'm gonna piggyback off of something Pete says What is something that the that our media often gets wrong about Iran where it's misconception or just the way it's presented
Well, I think the kind of the things I said about the Iranian populace holds true but as far as the government itself which of course has been
an enemy of the United States government since 1979.
We tend to think of it, you know, we'll hear American leaders or media call it like the Ayatollah, the regime, whatever.
And they'll often talk about the Ayatollah, the Ayatollah.
But
in
fact, you're on government.
Again, regardless of what your position on it may be, it's actually quite complex.
And it's not about one guy.
It is about one person at the top, but it's actually quite systematic.
And many, many people have
responsibilities, military, security, civilian, state building, responsibilities, and it's for that reason that you can't just decapitate it and expect the whole thing to collapse.
So I think that's very clear that our current administration doesn't quite grasp that about the system you're on.
Very well said.
We'll have more after a very short break with our guest.
She's a former Madisonian, folks, Professor Bollner-Nikkor.
We are coming right back on
Well, with more Nightlight,
with Pete Schwabba and Greg Bach on the Civic Media Network.
This is Nightlight with Pete Schwabba and Greg Bach coming to you over the Civic Media Network.
Great to have you with us tonight.
We are in the middle of a talk with our guest, Golnar Nikpur, who is a, she is a scholar and a professor and she's even spent time in Madison, Wisconsin.
She is enlightening us on the Iran War.
Professor, tell us about your book and you could probably spend a long time.
But I mean, why have...
prison situation.
Why has that gotten so much worse in Iran?
Yeah, so really what my book is about is about the making of the modern prison system in Iran.
And what really surprised me and the sort of, if I could say that there's one thing that the book is about, I mean, I spent 10 years on it, so I could probably say it's about more.
But
if there's one thing that it's about is that, you know, I found that
We all know, you know, we hear about your own prisons all the time.
And even now, as the war continues, there are a quarter of a million people incarcerated in the country, although that's everyone.
I mean, that's the full carceral sort of group.
But what I've learned is that if you go back even to the 1920s, which is really, I mean, just a century ago, right?
We're talking about a place that had only a few hundred people in forced confinement.
And if you go even just a little before that, a decade or two before that, it would have been a tiny number, you know, dozens or even a hundred or two hundred.
So how do we go from Iran being a place where prisons are really not a big part of the punishment apparatus?
There's no such thing as sort of long term forced confinement.
Of course, there's punishment and there's
and there's executions, but there's not really modern prisons, as we understand them, to being a country where there's now, as I said, about a quarter of a million prisoners.
So my book tries to uncover how that infrastructure gets filled.
And what I'm trying to make the case for in the book is that Iran has over that 100 plus years that I study, three really distinct different governments, two different monarchies,
and then a revolution that brings about the Islamic Republic.
There's coups, there's two coups, there's two revolutions.
It's an enormously sort of transformative era in Iranian politics, but all the same the sort of prison infrastructure undergirding those governments.
only increases in size and expands and sort of grows regardless of what type of government is in power, right?
So there's exponential numbers of prisoners beginning when the Iranians start building the modern prison system in the 1910s and 20s and 30s until today.
What I uncovered is that a lot of this is being done in conversation with these trends happening all over the world and with models coming first from European context and then from the American context.
So a number of the prisons in Iran today are built on blueprints based on actually a prison in the Midwest, a prison called USV Marion in Illinois.
So that was something that I found as well.
I mean, those prisons were built before the revolution with sort of Ed and Eric Hyde.
era of aid and help and technical help between the US and Iran.
But basically Iran's story is not unlike other carceral states.
This is not actually very different from the US story either.
Prisons are a modern phenomenon all over the world.
Of course there's forced confinement, dungeons and so forth at earlier times, but not these big sprawling carceral sort of systems.
Once you build the system, once you put laws on the books that mandate that you have to incarcerate people for certain periods of time, the prison system expands and grows.
And so my book is trying to make sense of the ways in which we shouldn't think of Iran as an exceptional space that it has these prisons because of its medieval kind of Islamic politics, but rather as a quintessential modern cultural state that uses prisons, surveillance, policing to
control, trouble populations.
Now, in the context of contemporary Iran, some of that process or much of that process has the veneer of Islamic legitimacy.
But the technology and the, or they're trying to give it that veneer, right?
But the technologies and the practices are actually global, right?
So I'll give you one quick example to illustrate what I mean.
Iran started about during the pandemic actually in 2020 using traffic monitoring cameras to issue tickets and summonses for the typical things that that happens here like traffic cameras might catch you speeding or running a red light but also added to that sending tickets to people to women who were alleged to have violations of the hijab law.
So you see the way in which
When I say that this is a global process, it doesn't mean that it's identical to other places in the world, but that the technologies, whether it's the prison itself, so USP Marian model being used, or technologies like ankle monitors, traffic surveillance cameras today, those are used for the specific needs of the government in that moment.
But if you only look at what's happening internally, you miss a bigger picture of
carceral economies of private companies that are selling surveillance tech of all sorts of things that are happening around the world and that if we exceptionalize Iran and
sort of imagine that what's happening over there is only because of something pathological about Iranians or Islam or whatever.
We actually miss all of these connections that help us see the way in which our struggles are linked, the way in which these histories are linked, and miss the connections that can help us imagine a different future together, one that's more free for everyone.
Boy, this has been great stuff.
Amazing.
Yeah, thank you so much.
Check out Golnar Nikpur's book.
It's the incarcerated modern prisons and public life in Iran.
In like 20 seconds, do you get back there ever?
And do you have plans to go back?
Well, I'm not sure when I'll get to go back, give him
the
current.
context of war I mean people in general there's difficulty going in and out and that might be the case especially if bombing begins again.
I haven't had
a
chance to go back since before the pandemic and I'm not sure if and when I'll get to go back but I do hope I can.
Iran is a beautiful country
And I miss it.
It has untold numbers of natural beauties and human beauty too.
So hopefully I'll get a chance to go back there at some point soon.
Well, please come back here anytime you want.
I'm happy any time.
It's been
really insightful and fun talking to you and great meeting you.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, thank you so much, Greg, Pete and Dom.
I really appreciate it.
No problem.
You got it.
All right.
We are coming right back for our number two of this edition of Nightlight with Pete Schwabba and Greg Bach.
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