We Who Have Never Known Revolution

The reactions to the protests in Iran have been insufferable.

Predictably from the right, but also from the left. And often they’ve been indistinguishable.

I watched a viral Instagram video by a western comedian leftist influencer who ‘explained’ what was happening in Iran by repeating CIA/Mossad/MI6 talking points about the ‘regime.’

Owen Jones wrote a Guardian article reproducing the same western security service talking points about the ‘barbarous regime.’ (One pro-regime change Guardian journalist incidentally, has written 19 articles in 16 days for the paper.)

Multimillionaire leftist streamer Hasan Piker said the US should lift sanctions on the condition of elections in Iran.

The right were more inclined to also demand the bombing of Iran. But on the evilness of the ‘regime,’ (a manipulation of language never applied to one-party states aligned with western imperialism), well, everyone was on board.

The only distinguishing feature was the leftist invocation to stand with the protestors and against Trump. This was presented by people like Owen Jones as the goldilocks position, the product of the virtuous, compassionate, rapier-sharp mind.

The drivel from the right wasn’t surprising and can be dismissed, but the drivel from the left, and the overlap therein, needs to be examined.

Why, just like for the right, did ‘the Iranian people’, in a moment of opportunistic chaos, become a monolith for the left too? Why did many on the left, with the forces of imperialism poised to strike, throw off the shackles of anti-imperial critique and decide the protestors were the true expression of all Iranian thought and desire? Why did many, in the crucial moment, decide not to burden themselves with any level of intellectual probity?

For people like Owen Jones and leftists influencers, there was no attempt to wonder whether the repetition of CIA/Mossad/MI6 talking points was bad. No attempt to read beyond the mainstream and wonder how the protests started. No attempt to investigate why the protests turned violent. No attempt to wonder why protests in Iran always dominate western headlines yet protests in other countries do no such thing.

One reason for this, a reason many on the left won’t admit, is because they, like the right, view Iran as a unique evil. Decades of brainwashing about the “ayatollahs” and the “mullahs” has done just as thorough a job on the left as it has on the right. And therefore, at moments of crisis, we read nothing from the professional pontificating left that could counter imperial rhetoric. All we see, all we saw, were the same notes being sung from the hymn sheet, minus, perhaps, the odd quaver or two.

It got me thinking: so often we in the west do not see ourselves because we cannot see ourselves.

We do not understand what we are from, and as such, we cannot understand what others are from either.

Modern Iran is the result of a revolution. A proper, popular, multifaceted revolution which overthrew a corrupt, repressive monarchist leader aligned with the west and installed a revolutionary form of anti-imperial, Islamic governance. Both the form of governance and the process of its emergence are beyond our understanding and, crucially our, imaginations, forged, as they have been, by imperialist, bourgeois sensibilities.

The Iranian academic, Helyeh Doutaghi, put it best in a must-read article about how Iranian unions organise and act within the context of a revolutionary state.

“Resistance within a state forged through popular revolution and committed to anti-imperialism requires a set of principles and practices distinct from those practiced in the imperial core."

Many in the west truly cannot understand this because we inhabit anti-revolutionary states of both the political and the physical.

We are imperial bodies in imperial lands.

We long ago submitted to the forces of enclosure, capitalism and neoliberalism, forces which are overwhelmingly anti-revolutionary in nature.

We sit atop stolen treasure, paraded proudly in our museums, and the corpses of millions of innocent people stripped of life by the anti-revolutionary imaginaries of colonialism and imperialism made real.

Leftists like Jones in the imperial core have not an ounce of credibility to pronounce on the wrongness of a revolutionary process he and his kind have never had the guts for. How you can sit comfortably inside the imperial meat grinder and honestly believe you have, whether on the right or left, a moral, let alone intellectual position from which to judge a revolution is beyond me.

But Nate, the American Revolution!

The American Revolution? The American fucking Revolution? The American ‘Revolution’ is the biggest lie, the biggest misnomer in history.

The American Revolution was another episode of European fratricide in a distant, indigenous land. A ‘revolution’ which culminated in a European-on-European civil war within a state that had destroyed and dispossessed the original of the soil.

Eradication has always been, and remains, the preferred form of western revolution.

We see it today, anti-immigrant nativists spewing the language of eradication as the west’s latest ‘revolutionary’ ideology.

The tales white westerners spin in grasping for a heroic, revolutionary heritage make me sick. And these tales are spun while denouncing real, currently-existing revolutions, whether in Iran, in Cuba, in Venezuela or yes, even in North Korea.

We exist within anti-revolutionary, bourgeois formations. Within states of the personal and political committed to nothing other than wealth accumulation and actualisation of the self.

The English made their revolution stick for about three minutes. The French got rid of a monarchy and embraced this power to become the second largest colonial power on earth. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe folded itself into an anti-revolutionary imperial process that embraced neoliberal capitalism and NATO warfare.

We, Europeans and Americans of the USA, have no commitment to a thing outside of ourselves, to a transcendent form of collective existence that goes beyond the self. We have absolutely zero concept of fully realised versions of solidarity.

And to make ourselves feel better about this cowardice, we hide behind systems of liberal democratic electoralism and call it freedom.

Our people go hungry, our shelter costs half our wage, ten men own half our wealth, our health systems are decimated, our taxes get spent murdering distant people in distant lands, but because we can vote for this barbarism we call it freedom!

We call it freedom and we demand, like Piker, that others adopt this system of freedom too.

The fetishisation of liberal democracy is the gateway to imperialism.

And imperialism is our perfect revolutionary form.

We of this world, westerners who have never known revolution, we who drip in blood and stolen treasure, have no credibility nor vestige of moral authority to judge the revolutionary processes of others.

Describing why the gas workers unions in Iran did not shut down the gas works while demanding better conditions, Doutaghi, in her article, says that such a praxis “can only be understood within a state forged through popular revolution and subsequently subjected to sustained imperial assault. Protest under conditions of sanctions, war, and regime-change pressure cannot, and should not, mirror the organisational forms, success metrics, or strategic imaginaries developed in the imperial core.”

We can’t understand. But we could.

Jones and the rest could have been writing, if they truly had the courage of their supposed anti-imperial convictions, articles about the revolutionary formations and organisational modes in Iran that balance national sovereignty with justice, revolution with progress.

We could have been hearing about the 21-fold increase in female higher education enrolment since the revolution, how women comprise 60% of all university students, how Iran produces more STEM subject graduates, both male and female, than the US. Do Jones and the aesthetic leftists even know this? Do they know that Iran’s literacy rate, at 90%, is higher than the USA’s?

If they don’t know these facts they are ignorant, and if they do they are negligent. Either way, they decided at the critical moment to reproduce regime change propaganda instead.

Doutaghi explains how Iranians have constantly to guard against these sorts of western imperialist interventions at moments of unrest. She explains how protests in 2022, led by women, “emerged as a set of legitimate social grievances but were rapidly appropriated and rearticulated — through overt Zionist endorsement, coordinated diasporic networks, and sustained media warfare — into a regime-change project.”

Doutaghi also reminds us that the police in Iran cannot be compared with the police in the west who “function as the domestic arm of the empire, suppressing dissent, criminalising resistance.” She says that in Iran, by contrast, the police “exist within a state born of popular revolution, subjected to decades of sanctions, assassinations, sabotage…a state which faces sustained attempts at disarming it internally by delegitimising its capacity to maintain order.”

Leftists and anarchists then, operating inside empire and outside of a revolutionary framework, filter everything through a Eurocentric frame, including the response of the police, who could only ever exist to subjugate the masses.

We can’t understand. But we could.

Leftists would do well to read Doutaghi and seek out viewpoints from Iranian organisers operating within an anti-imperial, revolutionary context.

The next time Iranians protest, those who have never known revolution, risking nothing while covered head to toe in the entrails of empire, would do well to stay quiet.

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