It’s crazy this even needs to be said, but if you are a westerner your ONLY job is to oppose the abuses of the western empire. Not Iran. Not China. Not Russia, Cuba or North Korea.
I still find myself fuming at the way ostensibly well-informed individuals can stand right in the heart of the empire denouncing its targets, as we saw in the open letter* that a group of left-wing western individuals addressed “to Iran’s political prisoners” framing Iran as a “source of oppression” equal to the US and its allies.
*NOTE: there are allegations that some of the supposed signatories’ names were added to the letter by The Guardian without their consent, and at least one has since retracted and apologized.
If you live in the US or one of its allied nations, then you live under the single most tyrannical and murderous power structure on earth, and that’s where your focus belongs. You do not have any legitimacy in squandering any of your energy and attention criticizing human rights abuses in empire-targeted nations while living under a globe-spanning empire that is fueled by a nonstop river of human blood. It is not okay for you to use your western privilege to attack the nations your own government is working to help absorb into the power structure you live under.
Whenever I say this online I’ll get some Trotskyist or anarchist babbling about the need to express “solidarity” with Iranian political prisoners or whatever, but whenever I press them on what actual, material benefit those expressions of “solidarity” bring to the people they’re meant to help, they can’t point to anything solid. Whereas I can point to some very obvious ways in which contributing to an imperial war propaganda campaign can help grease the wheels for real material actions which hurt actual Iranians.
If you’re a westerner, you have an obligation to use your voice responsibly. If you are feeding into the latest “the people in the empire-targeted nation need liberation from their evil tyrannical government” war propaganda narrative with your expressions of “solidarity” and your blind insistence on treating all bad things as equally bad, then you are using your western voice irresponsibly, and you are morally culpable for the mass slaughter you help facilitate with your recklessness.
It’s not okay to be a citizen of the western empire and act like human rights abuses in an empire-targeted nation are of equal or comparable concern to the far more egregious abuses of your own leaders and their allies. It’s also not okay to be a fully grown adult and believe the use of force in empire-targeted governments is happening separately from their targeting by the empire, as though Iran would look the way it looks today if the US and Israel had not been working to collapse and control it for generations.
Iran has only survived the latest imperial onslaught because Tehran tightly controls what happens in that country. The only reason we didn’t see Xinjiang absorbed into the western power umbrella with the help of CIA-backed separatists is because Beijing waged a sweeping crackdown on the extremist factions who’d been launching attacks in the province. The only reason North Korea has gone relatively unmolested by the western empire in recent years is because its government obtained nuclear weapons. It’s baby-brained analysis to pretend such things happen independently of the US and its allies working to take control of unabsorbed nations and force them into compliance with Washington’s capitalist world order.
The western empire therefore makes the world a crueler and more abusive place not only by its direct acts of cruelty and abuse, but by the way it forces its targets to choose between (A) annihilation and (B) using extreme amounts of force to retain their sovereignty. The empire we live under is responsible for the vast majority of the dysfunction and misery in our world, and yet you as a westerner want to spend your time yelling at Iran? Fuck off, man
Am I imagining it / remembering falsely or is this sounding closer to marxist-leninist anti-imperialist thought than some of the stuff Caitlin Johnstone has written in the past? I have a vague memory of some complaints about her approach in the past, but this seems pretty on point overall.
She’s written a similar article five years ago https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/08/14/you-need-to-understand-that-the-us-is-the-most-tyrannical-regime-on-earth/
Can I just say, I always find myself annoyed by Western leftists fetishism for the Iranian communist movement, particularly the MEK. I’m not going to sit here and say that many innocent leftists weren’t persecuted by the Islamists in the 1980s, however I find it absurd that Western leftists lionize the Iranian leftists so ardently, without understanding the context their persecution existed in.
During the Iran-Iraq War, a war the US (through Sadaam) imposed upon a newly formed Iranian government (forged vua popular revolution), the MEK, an ostensibly communist revolutionary party, began a series of terrorists attacks on the parliament and security forces. They then sided with Sadaam during the war, which aligned them with the proxy for US imperialist ambitions. To this day, Iranians absolutely despise Sadaam, and the MEK by association. Communists are demonized as a result, as well as due to the religious posture of the state.
The persecution of leftists happened largely as a response to the largest communist group in the country siding with imperialism against a government that was formed explicitly to remove the influence of imperialists.
The MEK’s analysis, being that the primary contradiction after overthrowing the shah was to be the establishment of a socialist state, was incorrect. They’d assumed they had dealt with the imperialists, but in reality they just got rid of the biggest hurdle, wheras the Iraqi invasion was just another method the US used as a way to impose their will, and the MEK cooperated, in complete contradiction to the needs of the Iranian working class.
Again, I’m not going to say that the leftists caught as a result of this was a good thing. However it’s absurd to demonize the Islamic Republic to such a degree after the experience that was had. Frankly, it was the fault of the MEK, the supposed communist movement in Iran, for incorrectly analyzing the conditions at the time, and setting back a socialist revolution in Iran by decades or maybe even more than a century.
and setting back a socialist revolution in Iran by decades or maybe even more than a century.
Heaven forbid!
