The New Dark Age

As the US-Israel axis of Epstein continues its genocidal campaign of carpet bombing Tehran, huge crowds of people have flooded the streets of the country to protest the attacks and defend the revolution.

And they’re angry.

One man, a crowd streaming past him chanting Ali Khamenei’s name, said he wanted to go into hand-to-hand combat with “the shameless Trump.” Holding his young son’s hand, he called the exiled Iranian monarchists, led by Reza Pahlavi, despicable and said he would sacrifice his family for the revolution.

At one pro-government rally, a woman, her young daughter by her side, said that “America and Israel have dug their own graves, and we will bury them one by one.”

When the western media and political class tell us to “listen to Iranian women,” these are obviously not the women they’re talking about.

And when they talk about freeing Iranian women, do they mean Akram Khodabandeh? The captain of Iran’s women’s Taekwondo national team and the holder of eight gold and silver international Taekwondo medals, Khodabandeh was volunteering for the Red Crescent and searching for bodies in the aftermath of the US-Israeli slaughter.

No. They talk about freeing women and the first thing they do is murder 168 children, mainly girls, in cold blood.

This mass slaughter of children as the opening salvo of the attacks galvanised Iranians.

And amid all the talk of repression and freeing women, we won’t be told that Iran’s official government spokesperson, Fatemeh Mohajerani, is a woman. We won’t be told that Shina Ansari and Zahra Behrouz Azar, both women, serve as vice presidents of Iran, or that 70% of all of STEM graduates in Iran are women.

The idea that Iran is a house of cards waiting to fall is a lie.

One guy, obviously secular, interviewed yesterday in a park in Tehran said this will be “the last loss” for the Zionists. He doesn’t, I’m sure you agree, look particularly oppressed. In the video his friend, an artist, says his studio was destroyed by bombs.

I don’t need to tell you that these scenes aren’t what you’d expect to see from a repressed people who just needed a little encouragement to rise up against their leaders.

These are the scenes you expect from a proud people and a deep-seated revolution that has, according to polls taken by western organisations, majority support among the Iranian people.

And as a result, these are not scenes that will feature prominently, if at all, on the BBC or CNN, because they undermine the propaganda about the ‘brutal regime’ which has been fed to us for nearly 50 years.

‘Brutal regime’

This regime change propaganda has in recent days been parroted by supposed anti-war politicians like Mamdani and Zack Polanski, the leader of Britain’s Green Party. How hard would it be for people who trade on their anti-war credentials to say “now isn’t the time to talk about the internal politics of a country which has just been illegally attacked and is now being carpet bombed.” How hard would it be to point to the massive protests we’ve seen since the attacks began and question this prevailing narrative?

Too hard, obviously.

I’ve even heard Corbyn, the hero of the British left, feel the need to preface every anti-war sentiment with something about the Iranians needing to have the ability to “decide their own future.” What does that even mean? Do we who live within corrupt, capitalist liberal democracies really decide our own future? Are we free to pursue our interests free from burdens? Did we choose to be born into capitalist systems? Are we free therefore to choose another system of economic-social relations?

Of course not.

It’s baby-brained stuff, but it is a very particular, and frankly racist reflex among many western politicians, even those like Corbyn, Mamdani and Polanski who call themselves progressive. A reflex which assumes every non-liberal western style democracy must be inherently bad for the governed.

It’s absolutely tiring.

Of course some Iranians hate the government. And the riots in December and January, followed by the wildly exaggerated atrocity propaganda regarding the number of dead, have made it more difficult to talk about this in a rational way. This muddying of the waters was, of course, the explicit intention of the US and Israel, both of whom had agents on the ground inciting violence.

And Iran isn’t a monolith, ideologically. But no one wants bombs raining down on their heads, destroying their cities, killing their husbands, wives, friends, neighbours, and children.

Bombs which have now killed over 1,000 Iranians.

This is a despicable, shameless war. A war of choice and aggression.

The supreme international crime.

A war of unadulterated, bloodthirsty imperial violence by an out-of-control empire worse than the Nazis. Nazi Germany lasted 12 years. American violence, from the Sioux to Korea, Vietnam to Iraq, has been going on for decades, centuries.

The United States is effectively one giant fucking war crime.

And despite cheering at the prospect of these war crimes before they started, even the exiled Iranian diaspora are starting to have second thoughts about Iran getting the Gaza treatment.

Iranian exiles

While we’re on the exiles, there’s this very strange idea that an Iranian living a bourgeois life in the west has a greater moral authority to determine the narrative on Iran than anyone else. Diaspora Iranians are treated as if they are mystics or sages. They’re not. They’re people with an ideology and an agenda. That Iranian friend certainly doesn’t have a higher moral or ethical standard just because their parents fled a revolutionary process they disagreed with. I can’t believe it needs to be said, but calling for war and murder on the country your parents are from doesn’t make you a good person. And on top of that, not all in the Iranian diaspora want the republic to fall, far from it. But again, these are not the voices you’ll find if you consume only mainstream western media.

An undefeatable idea

The truth is, the Zionist pigdogs are at war with an idea. And you can’t defeat an idea. The Islamic republic is an idea, an idea of national sovereignty grounded in religious and spiritual beliefs. As such, it cannot be defeated, whatever the outcome of this war. And seeing your neighbours and loved ones vaporised and beheaded by American bombs only strengthens the underlying premise of the idea: that America is an imperial evil which must be resisted and defeated.

When it comes to empire and imperialism there is no sweet spot, no liberal middle ground that enables you to denounce imperialist war crimes while also denouncing the target of those war crimes. You stand with the victims of western imperialism, or you don’t. If you have any sense of solidarity, you don’t create the intellectual and rhetorical ground for imperial crimes by droning on about ‘brutal regimes’ at the precise moment those countries are in the crosshairs of empire.

US imperialism has killed millions of people, but because the system switches out its leader every four to eight years, its legitimacy is never questioned. Almost everyone, on the other hand, is happy to question the legitimacy of a government under attack by these imperial forces. It’s crazy, I’ve seen too much of it in recent days, and we need to combat it. Whether Mamdani, Polanski or Corbyn, the reflexive imperialist consciousness from people who sell themselves as enlightened and progressive is dangerous and contagious.

But combatting it is uphill work. One hundred articles like this get instantly drowned out by one five minute BBC segment recycling imperial tropes and propaganda, or one Guardian article. Because many will subconsciously defer to mainstream media, especially when it positions itself as unbiased, or of the left, believing it, wrongly, to be an honest arbiter of truth.

So please share this article and follow and share the work of other anti-imperialists like Caitlin Johnstone.

Together we can at least try and use these moments, these disgraceful, shameful wars, to build a broader anti-imperial consciousness.