Iranian protesters don't owe us an explanation

Without anti-authoritarianism, 'anti-imperialism' is just conservatism with left-wing aesthetics

1.

In the 2024 documentary Celluloid Underground, a young Ehsan Khoshbakht, the director, is screening movies at his local university in Tehran. His passion for films is palpable, moving, and often heart-wrenching. Cinephilia in post-1979 Iran can be a dangerous thing, and despite being a mere student, he was constantly followed by the secret police which was, he tells us, “the first to come to my screenings, the most attentive and most silent of my audience.”

After a screening of The Cow, the 1969 film by Dariush Mehrjui (written by Gholam-Hossein Saedi) which explores the relationship between an Iranian farmer and his cow (his sole property), an audience member yelled at Khoshbakht that “we didn’t give martyrs for you to screen Marxist films.” The martyrs here refer to the officially approved ones, those who did not challenge the Ayatollah’s absolute hegemony post-1979. They are the ‘we.’ The Marxists, leftists, nationalists and others who also paid the ultimate price to get rid of the Shah dictatorship did not make the cut, their martyrdom lacking the sort of purity that the Ayatollah declared necessary. Probably unbeknownst to this Islamist who complained about a Marxist film being screened in post-1979 Iran is the fact that he had one thing in common with the Shah regime — which, after all, banned The Cow.

The comment left the room speechless, and Khoshbakht reports being stunned. He cried. “Everyone stayed silent, and I left in silence.” The comment, it seems like, came like a splash of cold water. It ruined something hopeful that we could see in Khoshbakht’s eyes when we see him talk about his love for movies. It animated him, connected him to a world out there, the world that the Ayatollah’s men were now busy isolating the country from. The next day, the Islamic republic’s morality police shut down the film club.

To those who know anything about the Islamic republic, this is a familiar story. As Khoshbakht himself put it, “the heroes of Monday, fallen by Tuesday, executed by Wednesday.” The revolution ate its children, the Ayatollah’s men busy consolidating power at all costs to defend their vision of the revolution, a vision which left no room for anyone else to breathe. Exit the Shah, enter the Ayatollah.

One impression I often get when watching Iranian films like Celluloid Underground is how matter-of-factly the regime’s oppression is described. By that, I mean that it would be absurd, nonsensical, to deny that the regime is a deeply corrupt and brutal one. It would make no sense to watch Jafar Panahi’s films and conclude anything else. Why else would This Is Not a Film, co-directed by Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, need to be smuggled out of Iran on a flash drive while Panahi was under house arrest? Why would Panahi be banned from leaving Iran as we see in No Bears? Why would the human rights lawyer Nasrin Soutoudeh, who we see in Taxi, be repeatedly arrested along with her husband, and their son beaten up by government forces while trying to visit his dad in prison?¹

2.

None of this would be breaking news to anyone with direct or indirect experience dealing with the Ayatollah’s regime, but this does not seem to have reached those outside Iran who hold on to the farcical notion that the Iranian regime is at the forefront of a global resistance against Israel. That the regime is an ultra-conservative one which shares more in common with the Christian far right, particularly when it comes to gender apartheid, than it does with even surface-level understandings of ‘the Left’ seems to have made no difference to those who call themselves anti-imperialists — and who somehow have convinced themselves that anti-imperialism could be anything other than anti-authoritarian if it does not want to reproduce the very power dynamic that it ostensibly stands against.

What is the price of ‘the cause’? When is the price too high? And who gets to decide who pays that price? The Iranian regime can murder people in their tens of thousands mere months after executing so many prisoners that UN experts described the Islamic republic as “conducting executions at an industrial scale,” and yet somehow it continues to convince so-called anti-imperialists that, no matter the scale of repression, the Islamic republic is on the right side of history.

Whenever Iranians take to the streets to protest the Ayatollah’s totalitarianism, my online feed, which evidently curates ‘left-wing’ content to me, gets filled with popular accounts taking a break from declaring their support for Palestine to make shit up in defense of the Iranian regime. One video shows people searching for loved ones in a Tehran morgue filled with corpses that have clear signs of torture, while another video features some influencer who has taken it upon themselves to tell me there is a global propaganda campaign led by the US and Israel to demonise the Iranian regime.

That both could be true does not cross their minds. There is evidently a propaganda campaign going portraying the Iranian regime as a mass-murdering criminal enterprise. This is true. What is also true is that the Iranian regime is a mass-murdering criminal enterprise. The Ayatollah could have chosen not to make the propagandists’ job easier by not being a mass-murdering lunatic. Believe or not, but you don’t have to send tens of thousands of people to an early grave to combat foreign propaganda. That's a political decision made by a state that knows it does not have popular legitimacy. If the Americans or Israelis do attempt a regime change against the Iranian state at some point, no one would have made their job easier than the Iranian state itself.

Despite all the Ayatollah’s declarations about the Israeli regime’s imminent end, two things are true: One, the Islamic republic remains the biggest killer of Iranians since Saddam Hussein and two, Palestine is nowhere near free. When the Islamic republic finally does collapse - and it absolutely will collapse - the question will remain: was this model really the best one available? Did the serial execution or exile of dissidents including Marxists make Iran a better fighter for Palestinian rights, or a worse one? Does keeping your boots on Iranians’ throats get better if you also shove “Free Palestine” down them?

Apologies to those reading these words and thinking “obviously, the regime never cared about Palestinian lives anyway.” I hear you, and I know — but as obscene as it is, this question is what is often implied in these reflexive, if heartless, defenses of the regime. Some outright deny that the regime executes and slaughters humans more effectively than it does most other activities, but others — probably a majority of such people, although I cannot tell for sure — concede that while the Islamic republic is, to put it mildly, flawed, it must nonetheless be defended for reasons. Gaza is still being annihilated and Hezbollah was brought to its knees, and there are people who still believe that the Ayatollah is going to lift a finger to do anything other than save his own regime no matter how many thousands of Iranians are killed in the process?

This is a real problem. Anti-authoritarianism cannot be optional. Internationalism cannot be reduced to when the baddies are easily identifiable within a traditional anti-imperialist mindset that limits itself to Western forms of imperialism.

3.

‘Anti-imperialism’ is today rarely anything more than an excuse for authoritarians with left-wing aesthetics to reaffirm their demand that Iranians shut the fuck up about their own dreams and aspirations. “We” don’t care about what “they” want because, surely, our projected fantasies ought to govern how millions of others live their lives.

Iranians don’t have to explain why living under clerical fascism is unbearable. They do not have to accept to live under the Ayatollah’s boots just because others have constructed a fantasy of ‘the resistance’ that is utterly disconnected from reality. Iranian leftists imprisoned, tortured, exiled by that mass murdering regime of ultra-conservative misogynist clerics should not also have to constantly explain that the regime that declared war on leftists is not a friend of the left.

It shouldn't need explaining that the patriarchal and regressive dress code imposition is regressive bullshit, or that having a morality police in the first place is Orwellian perversion. It shouldn't be complicated to understand that ethno-supremacy is not just bad when the Zionists do it against Palestinians but also when the Ayatollah's goons do it against Kurds or Ahvazis. It should also be self-evident that the regime spending billions on its wilayat al faqih disaster of an experiment while Iranians struggle to meet basic needs is downright criminal.

No one should have to explain why people taking to the streets over and over again despite brutal repression shouldn’t also have to pass a purity test for so-called anti-imperialists to support them. The fact that every other social media post by a leftist supporting the protests is met by the usual brain-dead comments painting absolutely everything as part of a global conspiracy is in itself a profound failure of internationalism.

1. I'm probably going to write a longer review of Celluloid Underground at some point. I highly recommend checking it out. I watched it on the Criterion Channel.