When Colonial Politics Failed Iran Again
This moment could mark the beginning of the end for the regime-change industry and its colonial view of politics in Iran. But the collapse of an illusion does not reduce the danger. Islamic fascism has been wounded. A regime like this takes revenge for its external defeat on the people of Iran.
The danger of a massacre of political prisoners is real. The danger of a new wave of arrests, executions, and street repression is real. This is already happening. The experience of the late 1980s is still in front of us. A regime humiliated outside its borders looks for defenseless bodies inside the country.
At the same time, the release of millions of dollars inside a corrupt and non-transparent structure is no reason for optimism.
This is why the political struggle in Iran continues. Foreign bombing did not replace it. Backroom deals did not replace it. The bankrupt regime-change industry will not replace it either. The real force for change is still the same society that has survived under war, poverty, prison, and repression.
There is another defeat that must also be named: the defeat of Western currents that spent years treating themselves as the authority on understanding the world. Colonialism understood nothing serious about Iran. One camp saw Iran as a testing ground for its bombs. Another translated the Islamic Republic into the language of resistance. Both erased Iranian society.
This erasure is not accidental. It is rooted in Western political narcissism. They are used to understanding the world from their own centre. If an Iranian does not fit their ready-made narrative, that Iranian becomes a problem. If an Iranian opposes the Islamic Republic but does not want Iran bombed, they are useless to the Western right. If an Iranian is anti-imperialist but refuses to call Islamic fascism, they are unbearable to the campist left.
This level of intellectual vulgarity should not be criticized politely. It should be treated with contempt. A current that still does not understand that being anti-war has no liberating meaning without opposition to domestic repression has no right to teach politics. A current that cannot distinguish between the people of Iran and the Iranian state has no right to lecture anyone about imperialism.
A current that does not see the Iranian woman, the Iranian worker, the protesting teacher, and the political prisoner, but suddenly finds an anti-colonial language when it hears the name of the IRGC, is neither progressive nor radical. It is simply backward.
Iranian communist sounded this alarm decades ago. They said Islamic fascism was not only an internal Iranian issue. They said theocracy, security capitalism, misogyny, the repression of workers, and hostility to freedom were parts of one political order. Colonialism has no ears that’s why the West refused to listen.
Now we are once again standing on the front line. We are forced to fight Islamic fascism, foreign warmongering, the regime-change industry, and the bankrupt, foolish left identities that still cannot tell the difference between anti-imperialism and repressive fascism.
The West must live with its own contradictions: the claim of freedom alongside indifference to the repression of Iranians, the claim of anti-fascism alongside hesitation before Islamic fascism, the claim of humanism alongside the use of the Iranian people as material for its own analysis.
We did not begin this struggle late.
The colonial West understood it late, or maybe not!
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