I could write very lengthy tomes about the fallacies of the “anti-imperialist” far left of today. All these fallacies came out clearly in the letter by far-left intellectuals to Iranian political prisoners published in The Guardian.
The photograph, taken in January of this year in Tehran, shows a truck loaded with the dead bodies of protesters heading to a morgue. The estimates of protesters killed run into the tens of thousands. Political prisoners keep being executed. Why doesn’t the mass murder of Iranians by the Islamic regime stir the same type of anger among the loudest voices of the far-left as the relentless Israeli bombing of Palestinians in Gaza does?
There is a great deal of anti-Semitism involved in the pretext of these political positions, and the letter gives its anti-Semitism away by mentioning “Zionism”—an idea or concept abused and distorted by the left, which has no direct relation to the struggle of Iranians for freedom. However, anti-Zionism was mentioned because the far left is using it as a pretext and a presupposition for all other political positions, and all positions must first emanate from and be conditioned by “anti-Zionism”. These ideological fallacies presuppose many things for the sake of the “anti-Zionist” struggle.
Firstly, the anti-Zionist pretext assumes that Iranians murdered by the regime have been murdered by “anti-Zionist” forces, the same anti-Zionist forces that have been actively fighting “Zionism” and “US imperialism”. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has now turned into an active genocide by Israel, is being used to excuse and legitimise the active war conducted by Iran and the US via its proxies and “revolutionary groups”. This effectively means that, for the far left and the authors of this letter, the Iranian regime is fighting the good fight abroad while suppressing its people at home. This is like saying that the anti-Zionist war by the Iranian regime would still continue even if the regime were replaced, because it is not the regime that is the belligerent side of this war, but Israel and the US. Hence why they use the allegory of the scissors: the Iranian regime murdering tens of thousands of Iranians is as bad for Iranians as Israel and the US.
But this is an obvious fallacy and a grand, fantastical ideological distortion because, effectively, it is not Israel or the US that are killing Iranian civilians, but the Iranian regime. The story about the bombing of the school in Iran is only brought up to muddle the facts even further and expand the distortion—it is a deliberate lie that Israel and the US deliberately targeted civilians and killed schoolchildren in Iran. The schoolchildren were placed in an IRGC military complex specifically and purposefully by the IRGC to cause the incident. When the schoolchildren were struck, the US was convinced that it was targeting an IRGC military complex—which is, in fact, true.
The position of the far left here is fallacious. They are effectively proposing that Iranian political prisoners should not be liberated by Western or Israeli military means—their liberation should rightfully come in a pure moment of revolutionary zeal that will somehow overcome the regime’s deadly oppression. But what if this option is not available? What if the regime is so deadly that this revolutionary zeal can be systematically crushed by machine guns? The answer by these left-wing intellectuals is not to support and advocate their liberation by Western military means—as that would be impure and afflicted with bad intentions. The answer is to write a letter and say, “We are so sorry.”
Iranians have the right to be liberated in any way they deem fit, and it is they who hold the right to determine their future. Iranians have the right to seek help in any way they think they deserve it. The left in the West should not tell Iranians how they should be liberated, nor give patronising lessons about the horrors of “Zionist” or “Western imperialism”.
The position of these left-wing intellectuals on Iran is exactly the same as it was on Syria. None of them cared when Bashar al-Assad and Iran massacred the Syrian people because the murderers were “anti-Zionist” and “anti-imperialist” and therefore had to be excused for their crimes. Instead of using Western military means to attack and cripple the regime, far-left stalwarts like Jeremy Corbyn campaigned against the bombing of the Assad regime in response to its chemical attacks and even campaigned against the bombing of ISIS. Assad could massacre as many as half a million people in front of our own eyes, telling us in public that even if 10% of Syrians died, it meant nothing and was just a statistic, and still, the left-wing anti-Zionist purists told us that intervening against the Assad regime would amount to a Western imperialist crime.
At the end of the day, the far left is very much converging with the new far right on foreign policy matters. More on this in another article.
You can read the letter here. You can read about what Iranians in Malta think about the US and Israeli intervention here.
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