To those on the Left who speak fluently of genocide, apartheid, and colonial domination — this letter is addressed to you.
There is a spectacle unfolding within segments of the self-proclaimed radical Left that would be laughable were it not so morally disfiguring. With righteous fury, you denounce the siege of Gaza, the expansion of West Bank settlements, and the normalization of far-Right ethnonationalism. These condemnations are justified. Yet when that same analytical machinery encounters the Islamic Republic of Iran — a clerical state consolidated through mass executions, sustained by routine imprisonment and torture, and enforced through gender apartheid and religious policing — the machinery suddenly stalls. What follows is not complexity but evasion masquerading as sophistication. Your failure is not merely moral; it is epistemological. It reveals a mode of analysis in which power is condemned only when it wears the recognizable insignia of Western Empire. Domination that emerges from non-Western actors is rendered theoretically opaque, as though Western imperialism were the sole historically operative structure capable of producing systemic violence. Such a framework does not analyze power — it provincializes it. Let us dispense immediately with the comforting fiction that your evasion is born solely of ignorance. It is not. It is the product of a deliberate theoretical substitution — one in which geopolitical hostility to the United States and Israel is elevated above any substantive commitment to emancipation. Your politics collapses into a barren syllogism: if a regime positions itself against Western power, it must therefore be defended, or at minimum shielded from serious critique. Oppression becomes tolerable to you so long as it is administered by the correct enemy. This substitution marks a profound degeneration of anti-imperialist thought. Imperialism, once understood as a historically specific mode of accumulation, governance, and coercion, is transformed into a moral talisman — a signifier so totalizing that it abolishes the need for further inquiry. What remains is not Marxist analysis but a vulgarized Third Worldism, emptied of its original attentiveness to class struggle and mass emancipatory politics and reduced instead to a crude aesthetics of state opposition. Classic Third Worldist traditions, at their best, insisted on popular agency — peasants, workers, women, the colonized acting against both imperial domination and indigenous ruling classes. What now passes for Third Worldism in much of the Western Left is its hollowed-out caricature: a state-centric geopolitics that treats regimes as theatrical avatars of resistance. This is not anti-imperialism; it is nationalist fetishism that not only excuses state violence but embraces it wholeheartedly. Culpability with the mass slaughter in Iran also rests squarely on you. This is campism in its purest and most degraded form — a worldview in which history is flattened into two opposing blocs and all internal contradictions are declared irrelevant by fiat. Your logic is infantilizing: cheer for whoever happens to be punching the larger bully, even if that same figure is simultaneously beating women, hanging dissidents, and grinding workers into submission. In this schema, the oppressed are no longer subjects of struggle but symbolic currency — reduced to objectification — invoked only when their suffering can be leveraged against Western villainy. >From a theoretical standpoint, campism represents the return of an unacknowledged realism — a residue of Cold War geopolitical thought smuggled into left discourse under the banner of radicalism. States become the primary agents of history. Power is measured by posture rather than social relations. The internal composition of regimes disappears, replaced by an external orientation that substitutes for analysis. The actual history of the Iranian state shatters your fantasy, which is precisely why you abstract it away. This is a regime that, in 1988, carried out the mass execution of 30,000 political prisoners in a matter of weeks — leftists, communists, trade unionists — many of whom had already served their sentences, murdered through secret tribunals whose members still occupy positions of power today. It is a regime that has spent decades dismantling independent labor organizing, from the imprisonment of Tehran bus drivers to the repeated arrests and floggings of the Haft-Tapeh sugar-cane workers for demanding unpaid wages and worker control. It is a regime that enforces compulsory veiling through armed morality patrols, criminalizes same-sex intimacy with punishments up to death, and coerces queer people into state-sanctioned medical violence to preserve clerical doctrine. These are not historical footnotes. They are the structural conditions of rule. To ignore this history is not simply to miss facts; it is to abandon any serious theory of the state. The Islamic Republic is not an accidental deviation from emancipation but a coherent political formation — one that fuses clerical authority, security apparatuses, and nationalist ideology into a durable system of domination. Its violence is not reactive; it is constitutive. Any Marxism, any Leftism that cannot recognize this has collapsed into state fetishism. When popular resistance erupts, the pattern is unmistakable. In 2009, millions took to the streets during the Green Movement, only to be met with bullets, mass arrests, and televised forced confessions. In 2019, fuel-price protests were drowned in blood as security forces killed hundreds in a matter of days. In 2022, following the murder of Mahsa Amini in morality police custody, women tore off their hijabs, workers struck, students occupied campuses, and entire regions rose in defiance — and were met with executions, disappearances, and prison sentences designed not merely to punish, but to terrorize a generation into silence. These cycles of revolt and repression are not anomalies. They are evidence of a state that understands popular mobilization as an existential threat and responds accordingly. Any Left analysis that treats these uprisings as secondary to geopolitical positioning has abandoned the most basic commitment of socialist theory. And yet, when these uprisings occur, many of you respond not with solidarity but with suspicion. The agency of Iranian women, workers, and students is immediately interrogated. Their rebellions are reframed as covert NATO, U.S., and Israeli operations. Their dead are mourned by you conditionally, if at all. Their movements are evaluated not by their articulated demands — bodily autonomy, labor dignity, freedom from clerical domination — but by whether they align neatly with your preferred geopolitical script. What cannot be assimilated into your campist logic is treated as contamination and disregarded wholeheartedly. Your posture reveals a deeply authoritarian bent — one inherited from statist dictatorships and reinforced by anti-political habits of geopolitical thinking. It is a mode of analysis that claims to oppose domination while reproducing it at the level of interpretation — denying all agency to the oppressed whenever it disrupts your comfort. This is not simply hypocrisy. It is a catastrophic theoretical failure. A critique of imperialism that refuses to analyze non-Western authoritarianism is not radical — it is analytically incoherent. It reproduces the very state-centric logic it claims to oppose, mistaking opposition to U.S. power for emancipation itself. Violence is excused when it is rhetorically anti-Western. Resistance is romanticized without reference to its social content. Domination is tolerated so long as it wears the correct ideological costume. At this point, your so-called anti-imperialism ceases to function as a critical method and becomes an identity — one that polices discourse, disciplines dissent, and forecloses solidarity across inconvenient lines. What remains is not politics but orthodoxy. Most damning of all is the systematic erasure of agency — an erasure in which many of you are now complicit. Iranian feminists who reject both U.S. and Israeli bombs and clerical rule are rendered unintelligible. Iranian workers who oppose sanctions because they devastate the poor, yet also oppose the regime that jails them, are dismissed as contradictions rather than comrades. Iranian queer activists who resist both theocracy and Western caricature are reduced to abstractions. The existence of people who refuse the false choice between empire and tyranny exposes campism as the intellectual fraud that it is — and so you outright ignore their struggle. This erasure performs ideological labor. It stabilizes a worldview that cannot accommodate multiplicity, contradiction, or autonomous struggle. It is easier for you to deny their agency than to revise theory and history. When politics is organized primarily around animus toward the United States rather than solidarity with the oppressed, moral judgment atrophies. Hatred replaces analysis. Reflex replaces thought. Anti-imperialism is emptied of emancipatory content and refashioned as a cynical posture — one that manages suffering rather than confronting it and excuses domination rather than abolishing it. Any serious engagement with anthropology, political economy, or historical materialism should have inoculated you against this error. Power is plural. Domination is not the exclusive property of any one civilization or empire. Empires produce violence — yes — but so do revolutionary states, clerical hierarchies, nationalist movements, and bureaucracies that rule in the name of resistance. A politics incapable of holding this simultaneity is not radical. It is brittle, lazy, and morally bankrupt. If you genuinely oppose genocide, authoritarianism, and oppression in all their forms, then abandon the childish comfort of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” That slogan is not analysis; it is abdication. It sacrifices principle for alignment, coherence for convenience, and real human beings for the illusion of geopolitical clarity. A Left that cannot stand with the oppressed has already forfeited its claim to emancipation. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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