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this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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Omg some of the responses here are so disregulated. Guys, it's not that difficult, two things are true at once:
The Iranian regime is horrible, it violates human rights, it stifles the legitimate aspirations for freedom and democracy of progressive Iranian people using brutal methods. The people at the business end of Iranian state violence deserve our sympathy and solidarity.
The US and Israel should be defeated out of their illegal murderous war against Iran, and should be made to pay reparations for the horrible crimes they inflicted on the country.
In fact, motherfucker, the US and Israel are strengthening the Iranian regime's political position. They are literally making it impossible for Iranian patriotic progressives to fight for a better Iran.
So yea, if we're talking about the Iranian army kicking American and Israeli asses? Good on them. If we're talking about the Iranian police and guard busting Iranian skulls? Fuck them to hell.
Don't be campists kids, just don't.
Thank you. People are so incapable of nuanced takes.
"The Iranian regime is horrible" but how do we know this? You say this as if it's a fact. As if you believe every mainstream article you read since you were a kid. As if you've allowed yourself to be shown only the most extreme anecdotes.
But worst is that you talk as if it's your business. It's not. It's the Iranian people's business.
The more you support anti-Iranian propaganda, the more hardline Iran has to become. The US and CIA couped Iran once, now tried a second time very openly, but they are constantly supporting "non-profit pro-democracy organizations" which are just there to destabilize. THIS you don't seem to understand. It's like a bully constantly punching someone weaker and when they fight back by cracking down on spies and foreign funded organizations meant to destabilize their nation, you come and say "Oh how horrible! They poor people only wanted freedum! I can be your white savior and explain democracy to you!"
Ok ok, I went way overboard there lol, sorry. Nothing against you. But this is the general mechanism. Destabilize with color revolutions, paint a picture in imperial media, then condemn when the "shithole country" defends itself.
Don't forget, there has never been any evidence that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon even CIA admitted that. And yet still the iranian people have faced crippling sanctions which ultimately destroyed the middle class which is important to build a more robust democracy. US Empire doesn't like democracy, definitely not in countries which natural resources it wants to steal.
So frankly no, two things aren't true at the same time. One is much truer than the other. One is what you and your empire or alliance does. The other thing is what you heard about a foreign, far away country which resources we want to steal from their population. Leave Britney alone!
You're making a bunch of very condescending assumptions about where I get my info. For many years I have personally interacted with many Iranians from Iran. I'm not talking Shah supporters who left in '79, I'm talking folks born in Iran in the 80s-90s-00s who have families back home. I have friends and colleagues who were part of movements from the 2011 green protests all the way to the Mahsa Amini protests. Friends on whom I checked when there were big protests back home and now whenever the Americans and Israelis bomb their city of origin ("is your sister/mom/home OK?"). These are people whose heart bleeds for their home and are furious at the regime. So, you know, back off buddy.
Ok ok fine, sorry, you have some rare second hand though anecdotal evidence.
But I simply do not want to hear how bad Iran is and this both sideism and lets talk every monday about how the regime in Iran is a dictatorship (wrong) and so on. Because we know where it leads. Sanctions, agitation, and now war.
With both-sides-bad you're STILL attacking Iran while they are defending against the USA. You're helping the imperialists. That is the effect of stories like OP.
Iran is a country that has been under siege, under economic attack by the USA and everyone the USA controls. When the USA does sanctions, they threaten sanctions against anyone who breaks their unilateral sanctions. And still they are not just hanging on but managed to fight back the unprovoked and illegal US and Israel attacks.
And again, they MUST go hardline on protesters. What other choice do they have? Surrender to the USA? Killing a few hundred protesters is unfortunately preferable if that prevents a regime change. Do you think they like it? I'm sure they don't. But they feel they must, to keep in power, which is absolutely their duty. They are at war, and the sanctions are explicitly meant to create unrest.
I wish the Iranian people more freedom and peace. Personally not a fan of Islam. I wish I could see how they would do without being under attack by the largest superpower in the world.
Oh boy.
Dont be campist
Let the imperialist present both sides bad here and then let them vote for pro genocide party because muh less evil
Calling other campist is a trick by libs to lighten off the guilt they have for genocide they have carried out
US brainrot much? What pro-genocide party am I voting for bud?
Most probably the libs of canada
Go touch some grass eh.
turth hurts eh. Imperialist
I've been reading this propaganda continuously since I was old enough to pick up a newspaper.
Practically every Muslim nation gets this treatment to some degree. But countries we're at war with get it extra bad.
Anecdotal I know, but I'm friends with several Iranian people, good friends with some of them. Every one of them and their families has nothing but bad things to say about that government. They're a horrible dictatorial power that completely suppresses women's rights, religious freedoms, and bodily autonomy. They rule on fear and terror and are genuinely awful.
They are still supported by small groups of extreme religious conservatives who will threaten and call the police on any woman exercising autonomy because that is what they believe their imaginary space friend wants.
This is not propaganda when it comes from people, especially women, who've lived their whole lives in fear of this regime and couldn't wait to get out. Could my knowledge be skewed by only having spoken to Iranian emigrants? Yes, sure. But the facts they've talked about are still true.
I saw plenty of interviews with this kind of person at the CPAC rally. I even knew a few that attended. I periodically get AI Slop videos from a coworker, insisting that people are waving comically oversized Iranian flags in every city in the world (alongside miniature Israeli flags for some reason).
I have heard simultaneous claims that Iran has killed north of 90k of their civilian population in a matter of weeks, and that reports of the girls school getting bombed by the US are fictious or Iranian state propaganda.
It is absolutely propaganda. And it is being fed to people who hate the government and are that much more willing to believe crazy bullshit because they hate it.
Much like American liberals biting on The Pee Tape hook, line, and sinker, it's bait for a population of expats hungry to believe the worst things about a government they hate.
I think there's a little bit of conflation happening in terms of the demographics each of us is trying to talk about.
The conversations I'm talking about are pre-war, when there wasn't even hint of the US or Israel attacking Iran. Some of these people are very new to my city at the time, they moved less than a year ago. They are currently devastated at what is happening to their home country.
The girls school was definitely bombed by the US and Israel. That is undeniable fact and anyone who wants to deny that cannot face the truth.
There is a lot of propaganda around this war, and around any war. But I do not appreciate you trying to invalidate the voices of people who were born and raised in that country, spent the vast majority of their lives there, still have family and friends there, and personally experienced the kind of hatred and violence that comes from a religious government. I don't mean to attack you personally but you're demonstrating a complete lack of recognition of the moral complexity. That the current Iranian government is terrible and has committed horrific crimes against its own people, but that does not justify foreign powers attempting a racist coup for their own benefit and spreading propaganda about it.
:-/
Yeah, executing political prisoners and gay people and shooting protestors in the face is good, actually!
Huh, you conflate the Iranian regime with the Iranian nation. That's not a reasonable thing to do. Hey, quick aside, why do you think middle eastern countries are mostly autoctacies? It's not Islam, not by a long shot. Albania and Bosnia are majority Muslim. Who benefits from keeping the populations in the MENA countries muzzled up? Huh?
No, I don't
Go ask Mohamed Morsi. Ask Mohammad Mosaddegh or Chadli Bendjedid. Ask Thomas Sankara. Hell. Ask Ismail Haniyeh. Ask all the Middle East liberals what happened following the Arab Spring.
"Why is a country that's perpetually under siege and threatened with regime change so militaristic and obsessed with self-policing?" should be self-explanatory. Particularly when "we're under attack by evil outsiders, please surrender all your civil rights!" is a line I hear regularly in Western Media.
I guess I can bat the question back to you. Why are so many NATO member states autocratic oligarchies?
Oh yes you absofuckinglutely do. You literally changed the noun here:
I wrote regime, you wrote nation. It's literally right there for everyone to see.
Ah, but you misunderstood my question. You focus on the "anti-imperialist" side of the ledger, whereas I asked about all MENA countries. The "anti-imperialist" autocratic regimes are all degenerate cases that resulted from the defeat of movements, as a way to contain the population while continuing to exist in the imperialist order. Go and see what all the "anti-imperialist" autocrats, without fucking exception did to the communists, to the labour movement, to the radical youth. In Syria, in Lebanon, in Iran, etc. They all parrot/ed "anti-imperialist" platitudes while actually brutally suppressing the Left in all its expressions. And everytime a campist fool sings their praises, what they're actually doing is revelling in the murder, torture and brutalization of Leftists. As if Iranian labour activists and feminist radicals owe your sorry ass to sacrifice themselves for your "anti-imperialist" abstractions.
Then broaden your view a little. Why are the western allies also autocracies? Qatar, UAE, Saudi, Jordan. Who do they also suppress? Right: the Left, the socialists, the labour movement, the radical youth. The same apparatus doing the same thing. If you boil it really down to brass tacks, none of these fuckers really care about imperialism, they care about their own regimes positioning themselves in the imperialist order. And how do you do that? Suppress the commies and the pinkos, suppress labour, suppress the youth. Same story, everywhere, whether with an "anti-imperialist" stick or a "royal" stick or a "national" stick.
If you actually want to be anti-imperialist, and live in the West as I assume you do, stop glorifying these assholes, focus on the class war in the imperialist core. If your heart bleeds for Iranians, stand in solidarity of the actual people bleeding from both american/israeli bombs and basij brutality, and if you can't do both, if you can't handle the heat, gtfo the kitchen.
That question is a gotcha only in your foolish campist framework. You really think I'm interested in ...defending them?
The nation is its people. You don't get to wiggle out by saying "I just hate the government, not the popular movement that formed the government". Iran isn't being occupied from the top by an invading army. It's a super-majority Muslim nation that is governed by a popular clergy and democratically elected bureaucracy.
The pattern of imperial conquest, ethnic divide-and-conquer governance, and villainization of popular politics isn't unique to occupied MENA states. What sets Iran apart from Saudi Arabia or Turkiye or Jordan or Egypt is its unaligned status.
What Americans claim they hate about Iran and Yemen but can't be bothered to care about in Dubai or Kuwait or Azerbaijan is a series of tropes drummed into them by Christian Fascist national media.
Iran isn't a leftist or socialist state in any meaningful sense. They're as draconianly anti-socialist as any Saudi government. That's a big reason why you have crowds of Iranian civilians gulled into supporting a nepo-baby from Maryland as their US-sponsored savior (which the US secretly backed a return of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a western proxy). This is not a conflict between Western liberals and Eastern socialists. It's a fight between Western Christian Imperialists and Eastern Muslim Nationalists.
Thought-Terminating liberalism at its finest.
You accuse me of ...liberalism when you have swallowed hook line and sinker the romantic nationalism that is the foundation liberalism. I mean this is just out in the open:
Ein volk, eh?
There is basically zero marxism in your diatribe. The only thing that has a "red" tint in what you're saying is the word "imperialism", but your framework differs extremely little from Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. You use left-wing vocabulary, but the structure of your analysis is nationalist and civilizational rather than class-based.
I don't see any point in continuing this discussion, we're using fundamentally different paradigms and value systems here.
???
Scaring yourself by reading words in German will put you out of whole branches of modern political philosophy.
Lol, just to clarify, because your American(?) mind probably cannot understand what I wrote, and you respond with "???":
You think I'm calling you a liberal because you support human rights and NGOs or whatever. I'm calling you a liberal because your basic unit of analysis is the nation. "The nation is its people" is not a Marxist statement. It's a liberal-nationalist one, romantic nationalist: Mazzini, Fichte, Michelet, Paparigopoulos. Marxists don't accept the "nation" as the unit of analysis. We ask where are the class antagonisms, political conflicts, and repressed social movements. Where did this go when you collapsed them all into "the nation"? In the "anti-imperialism" dualism, the clash of civilizations. Huntington, nationalism, clash of civilizations and romanticism. That's the paradigmatic disagreement.
Bye.
You forgot about the third thing that is most true: Iran is defending the entire region against genocide and imperialism from terrorist attacks by the West.
And if you truly think that the start of another Western genocide is the time to criticize the government of the genocided then you are fully on board with it.
The main point is that Iran was on the nose until Demented Donny made them into some sort of underdog hero. Totally underestimated them and screwed the world all for ego (and probably the Epstein files).
You're throwing around the word genocide like it's candy to the point where you're conflating genocide with imperialism and terrorism. Sit down.
When the West starts off by bombing girls schools, hospitals and civilian infrastructure they are not waging war. All Western "wars" focus on destroying civilian infrastructure and raking maximum civilian casualties. Iraq, Afghanistan. all of them. That is why so many brave resistance fighters stand up and risk their life against the terror occupation instead of living a semi-comfortable life under the boot. Because the West murders their family they it "radicalizes" them into becoming "terrorists". Is that language more familiar?
They are not "wars". They are all genocides will be recorded in future history books as such.