The Mask Has Fully Slipped

The humanitarian facade and slogans of the activist Left mask any suffering and oppression that does not fit their ideological narratives.

The online (dis)information war over Iran escalated into a fever pitch once Great Satan and Little Satan entered the chat and thus opened the doors for the RightSideofHistory™ rabble to finally decide on where they stand. Unsurprisingly, given the parties now involved, their stance is not with the people of Iran. After complete radio silence in January while 30–50,000 Iranians were slaughtered—because an Islamic theocratic regime murdering its own people doesn’t neatly fit any ‘anti-imperial/colonial/Jews’ narrative that can be leveraged against Israel, America, or the West in general—the activist Left has roared into action to once again parasitically suck on the blood of another people’s suffering to fuel their collective neuroses. And just as they did with Jews after October 7th and over the past two years, the activist Left has engineered a narrative against the Iranian people themselves, targeting Iranians with hostility, denigration, and, with the grotesque caricaturing of ‘the diaspora’, racism, just Leftish-style.

In contemporary political typologies, the Left can be broadly divided between the far Left, typically referred to as the ‘Progressive’ or ‘Activist’ Left, and more traditional liberals. Most liberals nevertheless see themselves as ‘progressive’ with a lower-case-p, so over time, I’ve come to think that the terminology of ‘Progressive’ for designating the far Left is unhelpful. It’s also inaccurate, given the regressive politics and worldview of the far Left. For present purposes, we’ll avoid that conflation by referring to the far Left as the ‘activist Left’. And this activist Left is not your grandfather’s Left of trade unions and the working class. Demographically, the activist Left is Whiter, more well-off, university-educated, and orders of magnitude more likely to post political content online, than other political categories.

The ideologies of the activist Left, as I covered in detail here, are a product of the hermetically sealed academic Left, incubated in a closed institutional system resistant to external scrutiny and without any need for their theories to have contact with reality. The ideological lineage started with the old Marxist Left, replaced class with culture as the focal point of political analysis, collapsed empirical reality into a meaningless nihility with postmodern subjectivity and relativism, and privileged truth claims within the provenance of specialised identity groups, where ‘truth’ is relative to the identity of those designated ‘oppressor’ and those designated ‘oppressed’. The result is a malformed political worldview defined by moral inconsistency and ideological incoherence.

Over the past two years, whenever I’ve written about the incoherent ideologies of the activist Left, like clockwork, my emails and social media messages are filled with angered liberals eager to offer disclaimers and denials of those ideologies, or at least to distance themselves by stating they do not ascribe to such views. This is a distinction I have usually been willing to grant, not least because I count myself in this centre-Left/liberal political bloc, and I have no truck with the activist Left. In my experience, the average liberal is not particularly ideological, and generally operates from a broad heuristic vision of what it means to be a good person and citizen, and the type of society they’d like to live in. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I think most liberals are sincere in their good intentions toward society and humanity.

The problem is that there is a well-known road that was paved with good intentions, and liberals are prone to a vulnerable naïvety that renders them ignorant of, or unwilling to see, where that road leads, so long as the activist Left claims to be doing the paving. The naïvety in the liberal worldview is that everyone else under the broad banner of the Left must surely only be there because they, too, have good intentions and are simply a Good and Moral Person. Liberal naïvety is a form of visual impairment, a blindness in their left eye to the danger of Leftist ideologies, and a form of red-green colourblindness that is incapable of seeing the true colours of the now-50-year-old Islamoleftist alliance. The practical implication is that liberals’ unwillingness to see, hear, or speak ill of the pathologies to their Left has now flattened the distinction between the liberal and activist Left. The result is that there is no functioning error correction within Left-of-centre politics: the lunatics are running the asylum, from academia to the online ecosystem.

This dynamic creates a vacuum in which the ideologies, slogans and rhetoric associated with the entire left-of-centre spectrum are those of the activist Left, while liberals effectively acquiesce by refusing to see the activist Left for what it is. This selective moral and intellectual relativism has crippled Left-of-centre politics, alienating the very minority groups the Left claims to speak for, atomising society and politics into a zero-sum morality play in which the White liberal/Leftist emerges as the moral compass of humanity. And now Iranians can be added to the list of people alienated by the Left, their voices and perspectives in this moment drowned out by the activist Left’s ideological grand narratives and selective double standards. It is one thing to adopt the predictable ‘anti-imperialism’ narrative of the activist Left in the context of Iran; it is another entirely to denigrate and mock the Iranian people’s suffering, to downplay and excuse the ideologies that have caused that suffering, and to conveniently suddenly seem to ‘care’ about dead Iranian schoolgirls because one can blame it on Jews or Trump.

October 8th 2023, changed me. It was the moment I realised that it wasn’t only the moral compass of the activist Left that was broken, but that we were witnessing a complete moral collapse across the institutions of the liberal/Left ecosystem: academia and universities, the media, NGOs and political organisations. From the Democratic Socialists of America to Black Lives Matter, from the deranged apoplexy of American ‘Students for Justice in Palestine’ to British student unions, from the Euromed Feminist Initiative to the absurd negation ‘Queers for Palestine’, coordinated rallies around the globe celebrated the single biggest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Leftist academics took to Twitter/X to declare that the pogrom’s gruesome carnage was ‘what decolonisation looks like’. ~1,700 Ivy League and Oxford academics signed an open letter stating that the pogrom was ‘justified by context’. Feminists leapt in to deny, equivocate and obfuscate rape and sexual violence against Jewish women. All of this before a bullet went in the direction of Gaza, before ‘but Gaza tho’ became the convenient excuse for the vilest, virulent explosion of Jew-hate across the Western world.

What alienated me was the response when I raised this with my fellow liberals, moderate left-of-centre types who I assumed could see this for what it was. Yet the responses ranged from equivocations and excuses, in some cases denial, in others a feeble, “oh gosh, yes, this is awful…” (wait for it) “…but…” (here it comes) “but, I mean aalllll hate is awful and well but Israel tho and but Islamophobia tho…” And this type of refusal or inability to condemn without qualification scaled up across the entire Left/liberal information ecosystem. On display was a form of ‘bullshit asymmetry principle’; to convince my fellow liberals that the activist Left has a major antisemitism problem, I found myself on proof of every single incident that could be mustered and having to explain the history of Leftist antisemitism, or it would be confidently dismissed as ‘not a thing’ or the now well-trodden rotten orchard of ‘a few bad apples’. This is a double standard that the liberal/Left never applies to the Right, where words or deeds are given their plain meaning and held to represent the whole of the ideologies from which they originate.

What I realised in the post-October 7th aftermath, and over the past two years, was that ‘good liberals’ were not as distinct from the activist Left as they might like to think. They are effectively inoculated to the madness. And the inoculation is because of the Left’s mask. The mask is painted in the colours of the rainbow and adorned with various declaratory symbols and slogans that represent standing for various identity groups and causes. The mask serves two purposes. For the activist Left, the mask hides the true nature of their political project, which is less ‘for’ anything positive and instead entirely defined by the word ‘anti’: anti-capitalist, ‘antizionist’, antisemitic, anti-Israel, anti-America, ‘anti-imperialist’, ‘anti-colonialist’, anti-West. This is a political ideology defined by negation and moral double-standards selectively applied to the West; no imperialism is non-Western in origin, no colonialism is non-Western in origin, no oppression is non-Western in origin, and no non-Western actors hold agency. This is an ideological lineage, a descendant of the old Marxist-Leninist Left, blended with the Third Worldism of the 1960s–1970s, and filtered through postmodernist and cultural-theory ideologies that stripped the substance from the Marxism but retained the overarching anti-Western framework, and infused itself with resurgent political Islam in the 1970s and 1980s.

The defining characteristic of this activist Left is that the causes they choose to scream for are not decided by reference to any universal principles or values, but relative to the identity of the perpetrator and the supposed victim. The inevitable endpoint is not standing for human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, or against oppression and for people seeking freedom from state violence and repressive regimes: it is moral inversion. If Western actors (or White people) cannot be blamed as perpetrators, there is no Cause for the activist Left to pathologise. In the realm of geopolitics, the ‘oppressor/oppressed’ dynamic centres nation-states as the unit of political analysis, rather than specific groups. This reproducibly results in the activist Left aligning with regimes that violate and repress the very rights they claim to stand for in the West, once that regime is positioned as ‘anti-’ something Western. As a predictable consequence, the activist Left chooses selective silence and ignores the repression of people once the perpetrators are non-White/Western; worse still, they will even justify savage violence if the perpetrator can be framed as ‘anti-imperialist/colonialist/Jews/America’. The activist Left will only ever selectively adopt causes if they serve their own political ideologies and ends; everything else is conveniently ignored.

These pathological traits are well over a century old at this tired stage. Let’s have a brief recap of the movements and massacres that Leftists in the West have excused, obfuscated, denied, or even celebrated, dressed up in the obfuscating language of Leftist revolutionary and pseudo-academic jargon, over the past century:

• The Bolshevik purges (1920-1930s)

• The Holodomor in Ukraine (1930s)

• Stalin’s Gulags (1930s–1950s)

• The Algerian FLN (1950–1960s)

• The Hungarian Uprising (1956, where the term ‘Tankie Left’ derives from, as Soviet tanks were the main instrument, and subsequently symbol, of the uprising’s ruthless suppression)

• The Prague Spring (1968)

• Marxist-Leninist-inspired ‘liberation/anti-imperialist’ movements (1960s–2000s): The PLO, the IRA, Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof, the Red Brigade

• Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China (1960s–1970s)

• The Khmer Rouge’s Cambodian Genocide (1970s)

• The 1972 Munich Olympic Massacre

• Islamist-inspired movements (1990s–present): Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis

• 9/11 (see: Chomsky, Noam; Baudrillard, Jean)

• The al-Assad regime in Syria during the Syrian Civil War (2010s)

• The Islamic Republic (1979–present)

• October 7th

• All Jew-hatred from October 7th, packaged under the banner of ‘antizionism’ and FreePalestine!™

A political movement that claims the RightSideofHistory™ as its inheritance is consistently and reproducibly on the wrong side of humanity. The justifications are predictably incoherent, but the endpoint is the same: selective alignment with some of the vilest and most repressive regimes in history.

For the activist Left, this moment, of course, makes them unapologetically on the side of the Islamic regime. This is nothing new; it is an expression of continuity from the days of the Marxist/Postmodern Left, with Michel Foucault leading the charge, who celebrated the Islamists seizing power in Iran. Characteristic of far Left academics, Foucault et al. were spineless weasels who conveniently stayed silent once the consequences and realities of the Islamic regime became clear. That silence remains a key characteristic of the liberal/Left ecosystem when it comes to the repression of the Iranian people. Juxtaposed against the perma-outrage for Gaza and the Palestinians, the silence becomes a confession; the role of an oppressed people for the activist Left is to serve as leverage against their ‘anti’ neuroses. Gaza can mobilise the deepest-rooted pathological loathing of the activist Left, which is Jews and their state, a direct inheritance of the old Marxist Left. Scrutinise their advocacy for Palestinians, and you’ll find that any Palestinian voices who offer a perspective that differs from the activist Left’s party line will be sidelined; any Palestinian deaths that can’t be blamed on Israel, like Hamas’ public executions after the ceasefire, will be treated with silence.

The situation in Iran is a final mask-off moment for the activist Left. There are no more excuses to keep the mask on. For anyone familiar with the history of the Western Left, the first mask-off moment was the French-Algerian War, when French ‘intellectuals’ justified the FLN’s massacres and terrorist attacks, while selectively condemning France’s actions. It was Albert Camus who stripped the mask off his colleagues, disgusted at their ambivalence at the FLN’s atrocities, not only against the French, but against their own Algerian Muslim population. To many unfamiliar with that history, a more recent mask-off moment crystallised on October 8th, 2023, and the immediate days and months thereafter, as academia, the media, celebrities, and the progressive-activist sections of the Left came together across the West in celebration and/or justification of the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Yet far too many people in the wider liberal ecosystem refused to see the post-October 8th behaviour of the activist Left for what it was, despite two years of unabated replication of their repugnant Jew-hate. They refused to turn to the unmasked face of the activist Left, lest they be confronted with the reality of what they are.

And so we come to the second purpose of the mask: a disarming disguise worn by the activist Left that prevents other Left-leaning liberals from seeing the movement to their Left for what they are. When they turn to their Left, they see the mask, with its rainbow colours and declaratory slogans, and settle into the naïve assumption that the activist Left is just like them, that the only reason anyone finds themselves on the political liberal/Left is that they are a good person who wants good things for others. The mask serves its purpose; it lures good liberals into the facade that there is no ideological content to Leftist politics whatsoever, just feels and vibes and healthcare and NetZero™. Most milquetoast liberals, at least in my experience, are not particularly well-versed in the history of the Left or its driving political ideologies. This isn’t an issue until another common feature of the liberal/Left ecosystem emerges: that ignorance of a topic or issue is taken as proof of its non-existence. And attempting to convince a good liberal of the malevolence within Leftist ideologies runs into the brick wall of selective obstinacy; there is almost no amount of evidence that could convince them that any problem exists, and omnipresent ‘far Right’ is always one second away from being invoked as a convenient dismissal.

This selective obstinacy is a form of defence mechanism. Because liberals assume that anyone on the political Left arrived there due to their self-evident goodness, they consider any criticism of the pathologies of the Left to be a personal attack, an attack on their sense of decency, rather than a criticism of ideas and ideologies. This creates a dynamic where the softer liberal Left becomes the staunchest defender of the insanity of the activist Left. One can draw attention to what lies behind the mask of the activist Left as much as you like, but good liberals won’t believe you; the self-preservation of their worldview, and of their place in a political order defined by an assumption of personal virtue, means that cognitively, they can’t believe you. And so the dual purpose of the mask is fulfilled: it hides the ideological political project of the activist Left while lulling good liberals into the comforting delusion of common cause, so that the only ‘far’ end of the spectrum they ever look at is ‘the far Right’. Combined, the mask has created a political movement blind to its own pathologies and moral inversions, yet convinced of its impeccable enlightenment and moral virtue.

Zohran Mamdani provides a good example of how the mask works. Anyone familiar with the ideological history of the far Left knows exactly what Mamdani is and why he’s dangerous. Like the Islamist revolutionaries and their Marxist-Leninist useful idiots in the West of the 1970s, he speaks in the language of the international Left, drapes his public persona in the rhetoric of social justice and egalitarianism; all while repealing executive orders against antisemitism and watching hate crimes against Jews soar by 182% in his first month in office, attending a mosque where the prayer calls for the ‘killing of the infidel by your [the Prophet’s] sword’, dressing up a story of violent Islamic conquest into a cutesey tale of ‘immigration’, running interference for the perpetrators when synagogues are attacked or Islamists throw bombs at a New York protest, and obfuscating his wife’s celebrations of October 7th and incitement of Jew-hate (in her capacity as a private person, of course). And yet, good liberals refuse to see this for what it is, blind to it all, because they only see the mask, and the mask says free buses and farmers’ markets. Tellingly, Iranians know exactly what Mamdani is because they’ve seen it before; it was Mamdani’s of the MEK and Tudeh Party¹ who were instrumental in bringing the Islamic regime to power, who stood next to the mullahs promising Utopia, while leading the Iranian people into five decades of Islamist dictatorship hell.

Which leads us back to this moment, to Iran and the Iranian people. What is it about Iranians and the Iranian national independence movement that ignites the incontinent rage of the activist Left?

We can understand this mobilisation against the Iranian national independence movement by juxtaposing it against the organising ideology of the activist Left, which is primarily anti-Israel, antisemitic, anti-America, and anti-West. Within this organising ideology, regimes or movements defined by opposition to Israel, America, and the West, always attract the support of the activist Left. Violently repressive regimes like the Islamic Republic and Islamist terrorist groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, are characterised as ‘resistance against imperialism’. The Islamic Republic is thus understood both as a product and a victim of ‘Western imperialism’. The pro-Islamism of the Western activist Left takes the form of viewing Islamist movements, as Judith Butler put it, “as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left”. The crimes of the Islamic Republic are met with apologism and ignored: to acknowledge their crimes would be to admit their agency as oppressors (who can never be non-White) and the central role of Islamist ideology as the architect of that oppression. To acknowledge the regime’s crimes would invert the activist Left’s organising ideology. At the Lion and Sun Revolution rallies in the West, a popular chant identifies three enemies of a free, democratic Iran (in Romanised Persian)—‘Mullah, Châpi, Mojâhed’—translated to clerics, Leftists, and the MEK (an Islamoleftist faction). Iranians know too well the dangers of this alliance.

As I articulated in this essay, the contemporary Iranian ‘Lion and Sun Revolution’ is secular and nationalist and defined by an explicit rejection of Islam and Arab-Islamist neo-colonialism, which the Islamic Republic represents. This is represented in the regime’s flag; the symbol in the middle is a stylised Arabic representation of the word ‘Allah’, while the red and green borders contain Arabic script. The mullahs were always explicit in their desire to eradicate a distinct Iranian national identity and the nationalistic view of historic Persia and replace it with Islam, which, from its inception, has constituted an Arab colonial project. It is expressed in the regimes’ ideologically indiscriminate (in an Islamist ideological sense) support for Arab Islamist terrorist groups throughout their empire-by-proxy in the Middle East. And it is expressed during the regimes' violent attempts to suppress the counter-revolution in Iran since January, which draws on Arab Islamist militias from Iraq, with the Iraqi flag now flying off the back of trucks in Khuzestan province. As one truism goes, the leaders of the Islamic Republic are Iranian by birth; Arab and Muslim by culture.

The flag of Iran [left] with the lion and sun emblem and the Arabised/Islamist flag of the Islamic regime [right].

The first foreign ‘boots on the ground’ in Iran were Arabs, now joined by Pakistani and Afghan jihadists, so the Western liberal/Left couldn’t care less because they are incapable of discerning aggression, colonialism, or imperialism, that is non-Western in origin. The fusion of pan-Arabism and Islamism into the ‘anti-imperial’ creed of the Western Left, via the Marxist-inspired Third Worldism of the 1960s/1970s, created a narrative of the Middle East in which Arabs are treated as the sole ‘indigenous’ people of the region, and pan-Arab nationalism treated as an inalienable right. The academic Left enshrined this narrative, starting with the canonisation of Edward Said and ending in billions of dollars from Qatar and Saudi Arabia funnelled into the ideological curation of Middle East-related courses in the humanities and social studies in Western universities. In this construct, (primarily Arab) Muslims exist only as victims, and Islamism is merely a misunderstood vehicle of ‘liberation’. This construct relegates all other national causes in the Middle East, from the Iranians to the Kurds to the Jews, treating them as historically contingent and qualified by reference to the overarching doctrines of pan-Arabism/Islamism.

Considering the foregoing, several aspects of the Lion and Sun Revolution place the Iranian people squarely at odds with the grand narratives of the Western activist Left. As the Left understands the Islamic Republic and their terrorist proxies as ‘resistance against Western imperialism’, celebrated for two years on our streets under the banner of FreePalestine!™, the rejection of this regime and its empire-by-proxy by the Iranian people is viewed by the activist Left as a betrayal of their Sacred Cause of Palestinianism. As the narrative doctrines of pan-Arabism/Islamism and the activist Left loathe Jews and Israel, the fact that Iranians share none of this animosity towards Jews and their state places them beyond the pale to the activist Left, who, in their putrid ire, have adopted a Leftish-racist mantra, branding Iranians ‘spiritually Israeli’. The fact that the future free Iran will normalise relations with Israel is viewed by the activist Left as a ‘Zionist plot’. Another Leftish-racist mantra is also on full display, the Left’s new form of xenophobia: denigration of ‘the diaspora’, a rhetorical means of mocking and silencing Middle Eastern voices who don’t support the grand narratives of the activist Left.

An imperialist project to anyone except the Western Left.

As the Iranian independence movement explicitly rejects Islamism, viewing it as an imposition on Iranian national identity, this creates an internal contradiction for the activist Left, who can only view Islamism as redemptive and ‘liberating’ rather than the inherently violent vehicle of repression that it is. So they leap to the defence of the regime, invoking its ‘sovereignty’, when in fact true sovereignty, i.e., the legitimacy of a government, is derived from the consent of its people. And they mock Iranians for ‘wanting to bomb your country’, a repugnant charge given the 47 years of suffering, exile, and death, inflicted on the Iranian people by the Islamic regime. The activist Left cannot tolerate the agency of the Iranian people being expressed in ways that contradict and expose the de-agentifying, infantilising narratives of grievance-driven perma-victimhood at the core of the Western view of the Middle East. And as the overthrow of the Islamic regime in Iran constitutes a rejection of Arab-Islamist neo-colonialism, the Lion and Sun Revolution lays bare the original colonial ideology in the Middle East. As a secular and democratic movement, the Lion and Sun Revolution falsifies the fantasy of the fusion of religion and politics under Islam as a liberating force.

The Iranian people in this moment have fully ripped the mask from the activist Left, and are holding a mirror up to them so that everyone can see exactly what this Left truly is. In their express rejection of Islamist theocracy, they falsify the Leftist fantasy of Islamism as a ‘liberating’ force. In their uncompromising championing of women’s rights, they expose the hypocrisy of the activist Left’s hollow ‘feminism’. In their scorn of the glorification of Islamist terrorism, they unmask the activist Left’s comfortably ignorant cosplaying terrorist-chic. In highlighting that a ‘free Palestine’ looks like the Islamic Republic and is the furthest from free as human dignity can get, Iranians reveal the vacuity of the slogans behind the Left’s FreePalestine!™ neurosis. In exposing the Arab-Islamist imperialist project of the Islamic Republic, Iranians lay bare the mindless stupidity of the activist Left’s selective ‘anti-imperialism’. In having a deep civilisational sense of themselves as a nation and people that is not conditional on the negation of Jewish self-determination, Iranians stand above the hysterical antisemitism of the activist Left, and unmask the worm at the core of the pan-Arab/Islamist political project. In their unapologetic desire for a secular, democratic Iran, the Iranian independence movement divulges the regressive, authoritarian impulses of the Western activist Left.

Iranians also refuse to be quiet about any of this; the ecosystem of prominent Iranian voices online is relentless in exposing the hypocrisy and stupidity of the activist Left, who are used to speaking for and over the voices of anyone they claim to stand for. And what is most revealing of the poisonous invective of the activist Left is the rhetoric they have deployed to undermine Iranians, which essentially casts the Iranians as Jews. The activist Left has flipped its script from the Jews to the Iranians; the rhetoric is the same—‘zios’, ‘zionist whores’, ‘warmongers’, ‘spiritually Israeli’—but the target has changed. This exposes something far darker in the brain-rotted psyches of the activist Left; it reveals just how deep their Jew-hate runs. Israel/the Jews have become the entire framework through which the politics of the activist Left runs, and any people—like the Iranians—who disrupt the picture in that framework, will effectively be ‘Judaicized’ by the activist Left. This makes the Iranian counter-revolution a mask-off moment for the entire Left/liberal ecosystem. The post-October 7th period of virulent Jew-hate from the activist Left was always excused by the wider liberal ecosystem as an isolated pathology, geographically and demographically confined to a very particular issue, a lamentable spilling over of misplaced passions. But this excuse does not wash with the Iranian national independence movement or the Iranian people driving it.

And beyond the insanity of the activist Left, where is the remaining liberal/Left in this moment? They’re busy defending their status as Good Liberals. There is a dynamic I’ve now seen play out multiple times in the online discourse: an Iranian posts online about the selective double-standards and warped narratives of the activist Left; the comments section fills up with unhinged comments about ‘the diaspora’, ‘zios’, and, ‘wanting to bomb your own country’, and the Good Liberals arrive to declare, ‘well, I’m on the Left and I’ve no idea what you mean so this actually does not exist.’ The very thing they’re denying the existence of is happening right around them, in front of their eyes, and rather than say anything, their sole purpose is to reinforce that they are a Good and Moral Person. The mask is working as intended.

Typically, this is accompanied by a declaration of ‘nuance’ (a word invoked by Good Liberals to arrive at a superficial and/or naïve conclusion dressed up as moral and intellectual profundity), often along the lines of ‘you can be for a free Palestine and a free Iran’ (not with any remotely serious understanding of how Palestinian nationalism and FreePalestine!™ defines a ‘free Palestine’ and how that relates to why Iran is unfree); or ‘you can be for a free Iran and anti-war’ (not without ignoring half-a-century of attempts at reform, of political opposition, or civil protest after civil protest, all of which ended in the regime spilling rivers of Iranian people’s blood, which makes the ‘anti-war’ statement as flippant as it is hollow); or ‘you can be for a free Iran but against foreign intervention’ (selectively applied only against Western intervention; if the intervention is Arab or Muslim, they couldn’t care less); or ‘Iranians aren’t united in their views’ (seriously, we live in democracies where the ‘majority’ is 51%—what arbitrary threshold is being set here? Iranians may disagree on the contours of the future, but they are overwhelmingly united on the foundation that the regime must go); or ‘there is no plan’ (there is—the Iran Prosperity Project—most people just haven’t heard of it because their information ecosystem prioritises denigrating Trump rather than foregrounding the Iranian freedom movement).

None of this is to argue that there are no valid concerns over the conduct of the war, the wider dynamics in the Middle East, or that there is any uniform perspective among the Iranian people. But those questions deserve serious consideration and moral weight, grounded in the desires of the vast majority of the Iranian people to be rid of this regime. When these questions are reduced to selectively curated ‘perspectives’ that reflect a narrow sample of regime-supporting Iranians; when the liberal/Left prioritise the narratives of the token ‘antizionist’ Persian on social media; when Western media interview NIAC-backed regime hacks or the ghoul foreign minister Araghchi himself to spew the regimes lies; when that same media—CNN, the BBC, the Guardian, the NYT—eulogise mass murderers in deference to the regime, this liberal/Left information ecosystem reveals itself to be far from the arbiters of truth that is their lofty claim, but organs of soft-peddled regime propaganda determined to undermine and delegitimise the Lion and Sun Revolution, motivated solely by despising Trump and Israel. In January, when Iranians knew that if help came, it would come via America and Israel, they were banking on people’s sense of humanity for the Iranian people’s suffering outweighing their hatred of Israel, Jews and Trump. They were wrong. And they know it: a running joke now is that Iranian’s are fighting two wars, one against the regime and the other against the Western Left.

And this is the crux for the wider liberal ecosystem, beyond the activist Left: there is no issue with a plethora of different opinions and perspectives, but if arriving at those opinions requires conveniently ignoring what the majority of Iranians are saying in this moment, what they chant on the streets in Tehran and Mashhad, then it isn’t ‘nuance’: it’s sophistry. The Iranian people are written out of their own story. Good liberals might not share the ideology of the activist Left. Yet they engineer an information ecosystem in which the outcome is congruent with the activist Left: total scrutiny on Israel and Trump/America, while obfuscating the Islamic regime’s actions, promoting regime mouthpieces and narratives of the war, and being deliberately obtuse with any intellectually or morally serious examination of the Islamic Republic’s crimes, strategies, and ideology.

Never forget that back in January, the people on the streets of Iran were calling for help—from someone, anyone. It would have been lovely if some fluffy countries that everyone likes had come to their aid. Perhaps New Zealand could have dropped sheep instead of bombs; at over 100kg, an adult sheep would most certainly kill the Ayatollah if it landed on him. Or Ireland—who doesn’t love the Paddy’s?—we could have used our non-existent air force (sorry, Dad) and poured Guinness on the clerics until they drowned. I’m curious, what nations would liberals find morally acceptable to act against the regime? What type of intervention against one of the most brutal regimes to exist would satisfy the moral calculus of liberals comfortable in the West?

I don’t know how this war ends, and I, too, have any number of anxieties and open questions about the strategy of the war and developments on the ground. But they are secondary to two overarching realities: the first is that external force is required to remove the regime, and the second is that, however anyone views Israel and America, they are far better societies than the one created by the Islamic regime in Iran. The Iranian people deserve their freedom from this abomination of tyranny. I’m all ears for how that should be achieved; I just haven’t heard any remotely convincing arguments that there is an alternative. My number one anxiety right now is that America and Israel pull up before the job is done, leaving a rump regime intact, and locking the Iranian people into another half-century of suffering and repression. To quote some perspectives that have been absent from the media in the West, from a political prisoner in Iran:

“My most important point is this: if Trump abandons this and leaves for any reason, the Islamic Republic will emerge as the decisive winner of the war. That’s all. Please make our voices heard. Don’t be overwhelmed by the left or by the propaganda of the Islamic Republic’s terrorists in the West. Do not leave us alone with this terrorist government.

Why don’t people understand that for Iranians, this round of war actually began on the 8th and 9th of January, when the regime opened fire on unarmed civilians and killed tens of thousands within two nights?

…from 1997 to 2019—twenty-two years—we tried exactly that path: searching within the system for someone who could both prevent the country from collapsing and normalise relations with the world.

We tried. It failed. That option does not exist.”

1. I am still working on a long-form essay on the history of Iran from the late 19th-century and the end of the Qajar Dynasty through to the present, so these actors will be explained in more detail there. For now, the MEK was the People’s Mojahedin Organisation, an Islamoleftist opposition group, and the Tudeh Party was the largest Marxist-Leninist party in Iran: both collaborated with the Islamists in the Islamic Revolution.