In Loving Memory of a Real Life Woman Warrior, Carol Downer

By Dolly Veale, co-initiator of IEC and revcom.us writer

January 18, 2025

I am deeply saddened to inform our IEC community that Carol Downer, beloved co-initiator to this campaign, died on Monday January 13, 2025 at the age of 91. Unfortunately, she was not able to hear the great news on the release and return to Germany of political prisoner Nahid Taghavi that would have brought her great joy —as it did to all of us. She was a personal and personable friend as well as a close comrade in the struggle. She was very engaged on many spheres of social life and you always found vigorous political and cultural discussions in her presence.

We have received heartfelt and thoughtful messages from Nahid Taghavi’s daughter, Mariam Claren, as well as from Kave Milani of Burn the Cage/Free the Birds movement in Europe and an on-line tribute from the Iranian/Afghan women’s group OSYAN/Rebel (see below for all these tributes in full). These capture the many dimensions of this real loss to the justice-loving peoples of the world. I am also attaching a link to an important letter Carol wrote in July 2022 about her decades-long relationship with the Revolutionary Communist Party, the mass organizations it had initiated, that includes her remembrance of her trip to Iran in 1979 in the “Send the Shah Back, Hands off Iran” delegation, in which she played an active role.

When I asked Carol to join me in launching this struggle to free Iran’s precious political prisoners in late 2020, she did not hesitate for one minute to step wholeheartedly into this internationalist struggle. We sat on her porch in our Covid 19 surgical masks and co-wrote the first call to action. Carol’s approach to changing the world reflected a “largeness of mind and generosity of spirit” that revolutionary leader Bob Avakian articulated as a quality of the fighters for a better future.

I will conclude with Carol’s own endearing words during our informal chats about the indelible impressions on her from her trip to Iran in 1979:

When the revolutionary uprising in Iran happened, and American hostages were taken, there was violence against Iranians in the U.S.  It was very jingoistic and scary.  People at our [feminist health] clinics were invited by the Iranian Student Association to go to Iran during the upsurge.  We were excited because we wanted to understand what it was about. We didn’t even know where Iran was on the map which is typical of Americans, we learn of the rest of world through war. We were there for 2 weeks with the Send the Shah Back committee [i.e., send the Shah back to Iran from the US so he could stand trial for his crimes].  It was long enough to know what was going on.  It was a wonderful revolutionary atmosphere, an absolutely revolutionary atmosphere where people talked to each other and to us everywhere we went. Cab drivers would talk politics if you’re in a cab, most of them spoke English.  In restaurants, walking down the street, revolutionary literature were everywhere out on sidewalks – hundreds of different pamphlets were spread out with people reading and talking.  There was a freedom of talking and people told us about how it was before – how lives had been changed.  

We toured the Shah’s Evin Prison where we saw blood splattered walls and the electric beds where people were tortured. We heard the stories of people who were disappeared and rounded up, the history of the Shah’s rule.  We saw the extravagance of the Shah’s palace where everything he had was gold – his drinking chalice, his ashtray, even his Kleenex box were all solid gold.  It was sickening.  One evening we left our hotel and joined a demonstration of about 8 million people.  I refused to put on a hijab. I went to women’s group meeting who were the wives of ministers/bureaucrats.  They were middle class women who shared with us that before the revolution, how none of them talked to each other because everyone was afraid.  People kept things superficial.  Even within families there had been incredible tension because you could be turned in.  It was visceral…. they told us women in the US were not liberated either, that we were just as oppressed with our high heels and lipstick.  I saw their point including recently on how far down the road we have lost our original inspiration for women’s liberation.  Now it’s all about revenge and how capitalistic we are.   Those women told us that before the revolution, if there was a threat of shortage such as due to crop failure, since they were middle class, they would hoard food as they had freezers.  But they said after the revolution, though there were shortages, they didn’t hoard because of the spirit that everyone was in it together and would make it together and not just think of themselves.

Carol was a fierce and fearless revolutionary feminist who cared about the oppressed people all over the world. We will miss her presence dearly as we fight urgently for a future that she and we yearn for and humanity needs.