Soon It Will Be Illegal To Oppose Imperialism

The British government has announced it is going to ban Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an idea which on the face of it sounds ridiculous.

The IRGC is the primary military branch of another country tasked with defending that country from hostile aggressors.

IRGC soldiers and commanders aren’t lurking in the shadows of Solihull plotting to blow up British politicians, they’re in Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan and Karaj strategising, as we speak, to repel American and Israeli forces.

So what’s the point, you might ask, in “banning” a branch of another country’s military which is operating thousands of miles away?

The point, and the devil, is in the detail.

The UK government is going to ban the IRGC using the new National Security (State Threats) Act passed earlier this year.

This legislation is even wider than the Terrorism Act under which Palestine Action were banned. Like the Palestine Action ban, the IRGC ban will make it an offence to “express an opinion or belief that is supportive of (the) proscribed organisation,” but will also criminalise “working with, or accepting material benefits from the proscribed group, including….information.”

Both are egregious clauses intended to target anyone who dissents from the official line, but the second appears to be a clear attack on journalism and on journalists who don’t take the approved pro-imperialism, anti-Iran position.

Breaking the law comes with a possible 14-year prison sentence.

It will mean journalists stop quoting the IRGC in their stories or reproducing press releases they publish. The effect, however, will be broader than this. To avoid falling foul of the law and facing prosecution, over-compliance is likely. Journalists will simply stop reporting anything said by official Iranian government figures, for fear of falling foul of the clause prohibiting information from the IRGC being shared.

And the effect is likely to be felt even beyond the UK.

Any journalist in the world who plans on visiting the UK will likely avoid quoting Iranian government officials for the same reason, in case they get arrested on landing in the country.

In the future, there won’t even be a fig leaf of balance to mainstream articles about Iran. Every article about conflict between Iran and the west will be self-censored, and people’s understanding of events, let alone the imperial contours of the world, will erode further. Which is, of course, the point.

The Zionist lobby for years has demanded the British government proscribe the IRGC, but successive governments, including the Tories have refused, because it is nonsensical, reckless, a legal minefield and a clear threat to factual journalism and reporting.

It took the most authoritarian, pro-genocide, Israel-sympathising British government in history to finally do it, and it was celebrated by Zionist media and politicians, including the UK’s presumptive prime minister, Andy Burnham.

And it is no surprise that it has happened now, with Iran under sustained imperial assault, an assault launched, in significant part, from bases in the UK. It is no surprise that with the illegal war on Iran wildly unpopular, and western sympathy for Iran greater than it has ever been as a result, that the British government is looking for ways to criminalise support for those resisting imperialist mass murder.

It’s the Gaza, Israel and Palestine Action playbook all over again.

As soon as a group successfully imposes costs on the US and its sympathisers, as soon as public support switches from the imperial cause and its allies, to the imperial enemy, the British government cries terrorism and threatens to lock up anyone who shows support for the resistors.

The British government isn’t banning the IRGC, a group which has never threatened the UK let alone attacked the country, to make British people safer. It is banning the IRGC to criminalise solidarity with a country under assault by, and successfully resisting, US-led imperialism.

The IRGC is the last line of defence against western hegemony and a Zionist world order which murders whoever it wants, whenever it wants, to get whatever it wants. No other group has fought so successfully against the military forces of imperialism in the last fifty years. This is their only crime.

And very soon, expressing that opinion will be illegal under UK law.

You know what won’t be illegal in the UK? Joining a foreign military which has committed genocide, and helping commit genocide yourself.

It will remain perfectly legal, as a Brit, to join the IDF, go and kill children in Palestine, Lebanon, and wherever else the forces of Zionist expansionism desire, and then come home as if nothing has happened.

And if you don’t want to do the dirty work yourself, you can wave IDF flags, praise genocide and solicit as much financial support for a military committing genocide as you like.

But if you dare express support for the forces fighting that genocidal army, or for the activists disabling the machinery of genocide, or for the protestors spraying graffiti on the war machines, you could face up to 14 years in prison.

To reiterate: it will soon be British law that committing genocide is legal, but speaking supportively of any group fighting to stop genocide is illegal.

The west is monstrous. The loss of legitimacy is total. Free speech, such as it ever was, is dead. Liberalism, such as it ever was, is dead. It died in Gaza, in Tehran and Beirut. It died for Israel, for Netanyahu, for Trump, for Ben Gvir, and for Zionism.

And it won’t stop here. Because it didn’t start with the IRGC. Before them, of course, there was Hamas, and its armed wing Al Qassam, banned as an international terror group despite being entirely local to Palestine, and the only resistance to Israeli genocide. Domestically, before Palestine Action, there was Just Stop Oil, an eco-activist group policed to extinction by British authorities. The UK’s official advisor on terrorism is now suggesting Just Stop Oil along with scores of other left-wing groups be proscribed as terror organisations. The UK’s move follows the classification in the US of “antifa,” (a loose ideology, not an organised entity) as a terror group, which will enable US authorities to go after any and all left-wing causes. It follows the EU sanctioning European journalists for reporting critically on Israel and straying from the anti-Russia line on Ukraine.

The ultimate goal, it seems reasonable to suspect, is the suppression of all anti-imperial causes and opinions, and all left-wing groups which pose a threat to the corporate-capitalist, warmongering, genocidal extinction economy.

From state-sanctioned mass murder being undertaken with impunity, to the suppression of all dissent against that violence, and the building of a coercive technological architecture to enforce acceptable opinion, we’re faced with a set of circumstances which parallel the most frightening dystopias ever imagined.

It’s grim, but it’s not over.

As the world cooks and the imperialists advance, supporting anti-imperial, pro-social groups, causes, and people is becoming the best and last insurance policy against a fully-realised dystopia.

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