Making a Mockery of Oppression

Theatrical activism only happens when a people become a cause.

June 2020. America convulses in the aftermath of the death of another Black man at the hands of the police. Progressive activists take up the mantle. In protest, White activists don black makeup and lie in the streets of Minneapolis, repeating “I can’t breathe…”, performing the scene of the final moments of the man’s life. The media lavishes the performers’ moral clarity for standing on the RightSideofHistory™. January 2026. Iran is being savaged by its ruling regime, with tens of thousands of civilians murdered by their goverment. The response of the liberal/Left is immediate and unequivocal. White girls don Gilani dresses in a display of cultural solidarity, while the leftist-fuckboy-feminist lads sport t-shirts adorned with Mahsa Amini’s face and emboldened with the lion and sun symbols of Iran. University students block off areas of campus and declare them to be Iranian liberation zones. From the encampments, student activists demand humanitarian aid. Greta Thunberg leads a group of activists who sail on a self-titled freedom flotilla across the Persian Gulf to deliver aid to Bandar Abbas. Celebrities grandstand for Iran at awards ceremonies. The media fetes these activists and celebrities as the moral compass of society.

Of course, none of this happened.

There is something that has been sitting in the back of my mind for the past two years, something that attending the London protests for a free Iran over the past weeks brought into sharp relief. The distinctive feature of the anti-regime protests is that the protestors are almost entirely Iranians, with a visible presence from the British Jewish community (judging purely by phenotype, one would wager a majority are Persian Jews, but no doubt the Ashkenazi-majority British Jewish community is also represented). Either way, the protests are almost exclusively Iranian affairs; the chants are almost exclusively in Farsi, and the playing of the original national anthem renders a rousing display that leaves you in little doubt about where the crowd is from. This makes those who are not there even more conspicuous. Where is the White Western progressive-activist class? The Guardianista liberals? Strange that an opportunity to be seen speaking on behalf of the Brown oppressed should pass them by, no? Needless to say, there is no one else from the Middle East; they’re two streets over at another protest holding placards of the Ayatollah and waving the flag of the Islamic Republic.

The moral compass of Western society shows its true colours at the recent FreePalestine!™ rally in London on the 31st January, 2026.

The reality of the fact that Iranians in places in the UK are standing almost entirely on their own provides not only a contrast, but constitutes a form of confession; that for the Western progressive-activist class, activism truly is a selective performance. And while the idea of White progressives doing Blackface on behalf of George Floyd may indeed be stretching the limits of what the desperate attention-seeking moral narcissism of this section of the Left would do, the analogies related to Iran in the first paragraph above are factual copies of the displays of activism by the Western FreePalestine!™ crowd over the past two years. White kids adorned in black-and-white chequered keffiyehs; university encampments declared by the activists to be “liberated zones”; entitled kids on an Ivy League campus demanding “basic humanitarian aid”; celebrities jumped all over FreePalestine!™, worn like a designer handbag. Greta and her “freedom flotilla” to Gaza. Across protests, and particularly on university campuses, there has been a co-opting of cultural symbols and slogans of Palestinian nationalism, along with various simulations of captivity and oppression. Why does this kind of cultural co-opting only occur under the banner of FreePalestine!™? Why not Iran?

Before we consider that question, however, we need to start with a prior: why does this kind of performative activism occur at all?

The superficiality of the Western progressive-activist class comes packaged with a default assumption that operates as a shield from scrutiny. The assumption holds that because they are supposedly standing for causes nominally associated with equality of individuals from underrepresented groups, or throwing their support behind people stripped of their human rights, that they are motivated simply by pure humanitarian intentions, by a desire to see good in the world. Yet this assumption always collapses under scrutiny. Principles of humanitarianism and human rights are universal, meaning that their application is not selective. Yet every cause that the Western progressive-activist class throws itself behind, from race to trans to Palestine, violates the universality of the principles they supposedly stand for, precisely because their support is always selective; their morality is relative, their humanitarianism is conditional, and their empathy is qualified. This is the inevitable endpoint of conflating shared interests with shared values; the shifting tides of special interests easily dissolve the universality of values. Confuse the two enough and suddenly, the proud Leftist supporter of queer intersectional freedom from oppression finds They/Their “allyship” happens to be with far-Right Islamist extremists who hang gays, stone women to death, practice sex slavery, and violently oppress numerous minority groups, from Copts to Kurds to Yazidis to Druze.

Two deeply confused progressives in a state of blissful ignorance that a “Free Gaza” is not, in fact, a free Gaza for Gazans like them.

The supposed principles of the Western progressive-activist avant-garde collapse under scrutiny because they are built on a moral and intellectual house of cards. The progressive-activist class constitutes a generation raised on extreme relativism in relation to knowledge, truth, and morality. Their worldview is formed from the incoherent merging of postmodern cynicism, theory-based cultural nihilism, and American Puritanical piety, which filters the clash between divine grace and earthly sin, between Good and Evil, through the lens of identitarianism and replaces it with dualities of Oppressed and Oppressor, of Victim and Victimiser, of Colonised and Coloniser, of Indigenous and White. It is a worldview characterised by a form of Calvinist predestination, in which to be designated as the Oppressed/Victim/Colonised/Indigenous is to be deemed the Elect, marked for salvation. That salvation comes not by the sovereign grace of God, however, but in the slogans of the progressive-activist avant-garde, who chose on whom to bestow salvation according to their will. In this worldview, to be Oppressed/Victim/Colonised/Indigenous is be lionised and deified, to be vested with virtues of morality, nobility, and enlightenment. Whatever is designated in opposition to these categories is impugned with Original Sin, from which there is no redemption.

Oppression in this worldview, however, is a product of pseudo-academic theorising by the bored tenured bourgeoisie, embraced by their underlings for whom “oppression” is primarily experienced in the form of “microaggressions” and words as a form of “harm”. It makes a mockery of the realities of hard suffering (and death) experienced by people living under despotic, tyrannical regimes. In this regard, the “oppression” of the progressive-activist class constitutes a luxury belief, a concept to be embraced and performed as a form of status symbol. The deification of oppression in their pseudo-radical activist worldview, juxtaposed against the reality of their lives in free societies, creates a cultural imperative to perform oppression, to join the ranks of the moral, the noble, and the enlightened. Yet paradoxically, this performance of oppression by a generation of ennui-riddled, anxiety-addled, Pavlovian dogs trained to react rather than to think, requires a crucial ingredient: safety.

The campus encampments, the demands for “humanitarian aid”, mixed with the face-covering keffiyehs and unhinged incitements of violence, can only be performed because there is no threat resulting from their performance. Their chants for violence would not be met with violence; they would not be cut off from the 7-Eleven down the road from their encampment; the outcome of sailing a “freedom flotilla” into a UN-recognised legal maritime blockade of Gaza would, barring a catastrophe, result in interception, a brief detention, and release. There would never be a flotilla to Iran, because doing so poses a very real threat to an activist’s life. And they are free to engage in unhinged rhetoric promoting violence and bolstering the most virulent inclinations of Palestinian nationalism, precisely because they will not be the ones to bear the consequences of their luxury beliefs. They will be safe in the West while another generation of Shahids prepares to commit themselves to paradise in the vain hope of “dismantling the Zionist entity”. Anyone in the West who encourages Palestinians to persist in this delusion is doing more harm than they know.

The performance of oppression thus reflects the imperative of the progressive-activist luxury belief that covets oppression as a reified aspect of their bourgeois lives, but for whom the experience of real oppression is lacking in free societies. The cognitive dissonance of this duality is primarily expressed by inventing oppression and claiming victimhood within some theorised academic construct. This ecosystem of tenured pseudo-radicals and their emotionally incontinent underlings incentivises the experience, or at least the perception of, oppression, as a status signifier. Seldom, however, is it expressed through cosplaying as a particular group, enacting their identities and symbols. Why, then, is this desire to co-opt the rhetoric and symbolism of Palestinian nationalism so strong for the progressive-activist class? Why is it that the Palestinians are considered suitable for the progressive-activist class to engage in their performance of oppression and act as if they themselves are the “resistance”, the “freedom fighters” of their fantasy campus encampments?

This question brings us to the heart of the progressive-activist embrace of FreePalestine!™, something beyond basic humanitarian concerns. As the counter-revolution in Iran makes clear, the Western FreePalestine!™ crowd was never about human rights, but instead leverages the Palestinians as the primary vehicle through which the progressive-activist class expresses its own anti-Western, anti-capitalist, and anti-Israel worldview. In the pseudo-academic disciplines wherein the political consciousness and indoctrination of the progressive-activist class undergo their awakening, “Palestine” and the Palestinians have been co-opted as a sort of analytical framework, a lens through which to view domestic and wider international issues, from Native American rights and dispossession in 18th-century America to police violence in 21st-century America to global climate change. Paradoxically, this has had the effect of reducing the visibility of the people initially considered the locus of oppression, relegating them behind narratives of “Palestine” superimposed over the issue in question. This is the pathway through which, for example, the term “indigenous” and the concept of “indigeneity”, typically discussed in studies on Native American and Australian Aboriginal peoples, were superimposed on Palestinians and Palestine, even though the Levant was conquered by Arab imperialist expansion.

The net effect of infusing “Palestine” as an interpretative lens into Western Leftist pseudo-scholarship is that the Palestinians as a people metamorphose into FreePalestine!™ as The Cause. They are no longer understood as a people, with the full range of human experience and perspective that entails, but are filtered into an abstraction of Palestinianism that reflects the neuroses of the Western academic Left and its projection of “Palestine”. In this abstraction, “Palestine” is reduced to Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish, to keffiyehs, watermelons, orange trees and olive groves, to martyrs and revolutionaries. It is an inanimate 2-dimensional abstraction, before which the progressive-activists of the West can stand in front of speak for “Palestine” in the pseudo-academic jargon of intersectionality and post-colonial and settler-colonial theory. This is why FreePalestine!™ attracts such cosplaying and co-opting, why the activism attached to this movement in the West has indulged such performative theatrics: because the Palestinians are not a real people to them. They are an abstraction, and only the Western progressive-activist can take that abstraction and turn it into an abstract illusion, adopting for themselves the role of the 3-dimensional representation of Palestinianism.

This is why no other cause in the Middle East—not the Druze, the Kurds, the Yazidi, or the Iranians—attracts anything so much as a whimper from the progressive-activist class. They have not been incubated in an abstraction of these people, they cannot turn their suffering against Israel, and they cannot turn that abstraction into performative theatrics activism. If anything confirms that the narcissistic self-indulgence and, above all, self-interest of our self-annointed moral compass of society, is in fact a broken compass with a distorted map of the terrain of humanity, this is it.