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Greek political analyst Sirantos Fotopoulos is one of the more insightful commentators I’ve read on the current Iranian predicament. (His “Open Letter to the Anti Imperialist Left” was published on Triple Ampersand (&&&) back in January.) Alas, much of his writing is restricted to Facebook posts. Two recent pieces, one from March 7 and the other from March 5, are especially lucid and helpful. The first discusses, in useful detail, western leftist responses to Iranian activism — a theme often broached here in the Ukrainian context; the second, the ambiguity of bedfellow-allies when a people is struggling against authoritarian rule.

I’m sharing these posts by permission of the author. You can follow more of his writing at facebook.com/sirantos.fotopoulos.

March 7 (by Sirantos Fotopoulos)

A Left politics that instructs the Iranian feminist to defer her liberation to the requirements of the anti-Western imperial struggle is not offering her solidarity. It is offering her a transaction. It is saying, in the bluntest terms available, that her body, her autonomy, and her survival are negotiable instruments in a geopolitical calculus she did not author and was not consulted about — and it is saying this in the name of the very internationalism that is, on every other occasion, invoked as the movement’s crowning moral achievement.

There is a sentence circulating from Tehran — written, let us be precise about this, beneath active bombardment — that ought to discomfort anyone who has spent the past several years choosing camps rather than principles: “everyone wants peace, but no one dares to demand it.”

The people who should have made the demand for peace imaginable — the formations, the parties, the journals, the platforms — have instead spent years informing their supposed constituents that to call for an end to the theocracy’s war on women is to capitulate, to hand victory to the enemy, to become, by the alchemy of sectarian logic, objectively complicit in imperialism. This is the identical argument deployed by every warmongering government in the history of governments that make war. The fact that it now issues from people who would describe themselves as anti-war is not a paradox.

The Stop the War Coalition in the UK is perhaps the most obvious institutional case. In the aftermath of Mahsa Amini’s murder in September 2022 and the Woman Life Freedom uprising, StWC’s public output was almost entirely oriented around NATO, Ukraine, and Western militarism, with virtually no solidarity statement for the Iranian uprising. When the coalition does address Iran, it has historically framed it primarily through the lens of US sanctions and the threat of Western military intervention — the Islamic Republic’s internal repression, its systematic violence against women, its execution of protesters, treated as secondary or contextually complicated. This is not incidental. It is structural to how the coalition assigns moral weight.

The Party of the European Left and several of its constituent parties — including Die Linke in Germany and La France Insoumise — have been notably muted or explicitly evasive on Iran’s internal repression when it conflicts with their anti-NATO, anti-sanctions postures. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, LFI’s dominant figure, has repeatedly foregrounded Western imperialism as the primary frame for Middle Eastern politics in ways that leave little room for solidarity with populations resisting their own states.

Jacobin Magazine, the most widely read socialist publication in the Anglophone world, published pieces during the Woman Life Freedom uprising that were contested internally and externally for their reluctance to offer unambiguous solidarity — subordinating the uprising’s meaning to anxieties about how solidarity might be instrumentalized by hawks. The journal has also published defenses of engagement with the JCPOA framing that treat the Islamic Republic as a rational state actor in ways that bracket its gender apartheid. Monthly Review and parts of the New Left Review ecosystem have longer and more distinguished records of treating the Islamic Republic primarily as a target of imperialism rather than as a perpetrator of internal political violence.

Tariq Ali is perhaps the most prominent individual case. His record on Iran consistently prioritizes the anti-imperialist frame — Western sanctions, the threat of military attack — over the internal feminist and democratic resistance. During the 2009 Green Movement and again during Woman Life Freedom, his public interventions were notably more energetic on Western conduct than on the Republic’s killing of its own citizens.

Jeremy Corbyn and his immediate circle during the peak Corbyn years had documented ties to Press TV, the Islamic Republic’s English-language propaganda channel, for which Corbyn himself was paid to appear. This is not merely guilt by association — it reflects a consistent tendency within that milieu to treat the Islamic Republic as a legitimate interlocutor in ways that made genuine solidarity with its internal opposition structurally awkward.

Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s director of communications and a Guardian columnist, has written extensively in ways that subordinate non-Western authoritarian states’ internal politics to anti-Western geopolitical framing. His positions on Iran fit this broader pattern.

In the American context, The People’s Forum in New York — closely aligned with ANSWER Coalition and with documented ties to states hostile to the US — has been essentially silent on Iranian feminist resistance while vocal on US foreign policy. CodePINK, though well-intentioned on anti-war grounds, has repeatedly issued statements on Iran that center sanctions and the threat of US military action while treating the internal democratic movement as a complication to be managed rather than a cause to be championed.

There is a further and more egregious category that deserves its own accounting: those formations on the Western Left that have not merely remained silent on the Islamic Republic’s crimes, but have actively and openly expressed solidarity with the theocratic state itself. The communist parties of the old Stalinist lineage — the Communist Party USA, the Communist Party of Britain, and their continental equivalents, many of them still organizationally and ideologically tethered to a Moscow-centered worldview that has simply substituted Tehran for Moscow as the relevant anti-Western pole — have at various points treated the Islamic Republic as a progressive or at minimum legitimate anti-imperialist force deserving of defense. This is not a matter of inference or uncharitable reading. It is visible in the pages of People’s World, the CPUSA’s publication, and in the Morning Star, the CPB’s daily, where the framing of Iran has for decades centered Western aggression while the execution of trade unionists, the stoning of women, and the hanging of gay men from construction cranes has been either omitted entirely or attributed, with breathtaking cynicism, to Western provocation and destabilization.

The intellectual genealogy here is not complicated, though it is ugly. The Stalinist tradition’s habit of subordinating every local struggle to the requirements of a global anti-Western alignment did not die with the Soviet Union. It metastasized. What was once disciplined loyalty to Moscow became, after 1991, a free-floating anti-Americanism that could attach itself to any state — Venezuelan, Syrian, Iranian — willing to position itself in opposition to Washington. The Islamic Republic, whatever its relationship to Marxism-Leninism (which is to say, an openly hostile one — the Republic executed tens of thousands of Iranian leftists in the 1980s, a fact these formations have found remarkably easy to absorb without revising their sympathies), qualifies on the only criterion that now matters to this tendency: it stands against the United States. That Iranian feminists, Iranian workers, Iranian LGBT people, and Iranian leftists are the ones paying the price for this geopolitical convenience is, on the available evidence, a price these parties have decided they can live with.

The Iranians who have fought their own government — at costs that should, if nothing else, command the attention of people who claim to admire courage — did not organize for years, did not go to prison, did not transmit information through encrypted channels under active surveillance, in order to become acceptable casualties in someone else’s regional strategy. They were fighting the Islamic Republic before most of their current would-be champions had formed a view on the subject. They have been fighting it continuously since. They are, additionally, now being bombed. And the Western Left’s response to this accumulation of facts has been, in too many quarters, to search for the correct framing that permits continued silence against the theocracy’s suffocating rule.

Consider what that silence has cost. Those doing first aid in the rubble right now have rendered a political verdict more coherent than anything produced by the international formations that should have stood with them years ago. The families outside the hospitals have a clearer grasp of what solidarity requires than the commentators who have explained, at considerable length, why the strikes must be understood in their proper context. The organizers transmitting information through Telegram — because the state broadcasts only hymns and approved casualty figures — have demonstrated, by the fact of their continued organizing, that they have absorbed the lesson their supposed allies have failed to learn: that principles are only principles when they are applied to the people in front of you, not to an abstracted geopolitical schema in which those people appear as variables.

This is not, it should be said, a new failure. It has a long pedigree and a distinguished roll of dishonor. What is new is the completeness of the self-refutation. A politics that claims internationalism as its highest value, and that then spends years telling an Iranian woman that her liberation must wait, has not merely failed the Iranian woman. It has destroyed the only conceivable foundation for the international solidarity it claims to represent. You cannot rebuild the thing you have used as a bargaining chip. You cannot recover the credibility you surrendered in exchange for the comfort of a simple narrative. And you cannot, having spent years looking away from what the Iranian state has done to its own people, subsequently present yourself as a reliable witness to what is being done to them from the air today.

What remains — and this, against considerable odds, is the more important point — is that the people beneath the bombs are still building. In the debris, in the rubble, in the encrypted channels and the hospitals, something is being assembled that does not require permission from the Western Left and has long since stopped requesting it. We are not your pawns. The sentence arrives as a rebuke, which it is. It also arrives as a statement of fact. They are not pawns. They never were. The tragedy is not that they have arrived at this conclusion. The tragedy is that it took the Western Left so long to give them sufficient reason to say it out loud.

Today is the eighth of March — International Women’s Day — and it is worth pausing, for just a moment, to remember what that date actually means, before the corporations finish burying it in flowers and platitudes. On this day in 1917, women textile workers in Petrograd took to the streets demanding bread and peace, ignoring the explicit instructions of male Bolshevik party leaders to keep calm and avoid provocation — and in doing so, they did not merely make a protest. They made a revolution. The Tsar fell. The old order cracked. And the date was fixed permanently in the calendar not as a gesture toward women but as an acknowledgment, however belated, that women had been the ones who moved history when the men were still drafting memos about the proper conditions for action.

One might have expected that inheritance — radical, insurgent, earned in the streets of a city under imperial collapse — to produce, a century later, a Left politics capable of standing with the women of Tehran as they fight, again, beneath bombs and beneath a theocratic state that has never stopped regarding them as the primary problem to be managed. One might have expected that. And yet here we are, on the anniversary of the day women started a revolution the men had not yet dared to begin — still waiting for the Western Left to find its nerve.

March 5 (by Sirantos Fotopoulos):

We Greeks did not expel the Ottoman Empire by waving olive branches and reciting Pericles. After 4 centuries of subjugation, we found that courage alone was insufficient against imperial artillery. It was the intervention of outside powers, most notably France, that tipped the balance during the Greek War of Independence. Our independence day this coming March 25th will be our 205th.

Yet the result remains inconvenient to tidy moralists: a people yearning to breathe freely were aided, decisively, by states pursuing their own interests.

The same uncomfortable arithmetic appears again in the story of the American Revolutionary War. The fledgling United States did not defeat the British Empire through pamphlets alone, stirring though Thomas Paine may have been. It was the Bourbon monarchy of Louis XVI — hardly a paragon of democratic virtue — that supplied money, ships, and soldiers. Without that assistance, the rebellion might well have been strangled in its crib. Thus the republic that now lectures the world on liberty was midwifed by an absolutist king. History, once again, refuses to conform to the moral geometry of those who believe that liberation must only arrive via morally immaculate hands.

Nor is this pattern confined to the 18th or 19th century. When the struggle against apartheid metastasized across southern Africa, it was the small Caribbean state of Cuba that dispatched soldiers to fight in Angola against the racist forces backed by the apartheid regime of South Africa. At the climactic Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, Cuban troops helped blunt Pretoria’s military ambitions and shifted the strategic balance that would eventually contribute to the dismantling of apartheid itself.

During the First Indochina War, the fledgling Vietnamese communists under Ho Chi Minh received critical military and logistical assistance from China, despite a long history of mutual suspicion and territorial disputes. Beijing’s support — arms, advisors, and sanctuary — was not granted out of affection for Vietnamese independence, but out of its own strategic calculations to expand communist influence and secure a friendly buffer state. The Vietnamese, with their own nationalist ambitions, would later chafe against Chinese domination, yet in that moment of existential crisis, Chinese power proved indispensable to the birth of a liberated Vietnam.

Again, no one pretends that all the actors involved were saints. States rarely are. But oppressed people have seldom had the luxury of waiting for perfect allies when they are yearning for liberation from their oppressor.

Which brings us, uncomfortably but inevitably, to present events in Iran. If the clerical despotism of the Islamic Republic of Iran begins to crack under the pressure of forces that include a detested imperial power like the United States, the temptation on parts of the Left will be to recoil in theatrical purity — declaring that any liberation touched by Washington must therefore be illegitimate. History shows, repeatedly, that liberation movements often receive assistance from powers whose motives are mixed at best and predatory at worst. To acknowledge this is not to cheer for empire; it is merely to refuse the childish hypocrisy that demands oppressed people reject the only hammer available because it was forged in an imperial workshop.

And yet there is, amid the wreckage of geopolitics, a glimpse — fragile but unmistakable — of another possibility. Should the clerical edifice of the Islamic Republic of Iran finally collapse after nearly half a century of suffocating rule, the consequences could be electrifying for the people of Iran themselves. A society long throttled by theological absolutism might at last breathe the air of civic life: women no longer policed by piety squads, students unafraid of prison for dissent, and a public sphere liberated from the suffocating grammar of the mosque-state. One can already imagine, and in some cases already see, the scenes of jubilation that accompany the downfall of autocrats — the spontaneous crowds, the bonfires of portraits, the sudden and intoxicating realization that history’s jailer has fled the premises.

None of this requires us to entertain illusions about the motives of the United States or Israel, whose interests in the region have never been reducible to the philanthropic export of liberty and more often resemble the familiar appetites of power: strategic dominance, resource control, and the maintenance of regional hegemony. But if those governments truly wished to claim even a fragment of the moral credit they so readily advertise, the test would be simple: the moment the Iranian people themselves finish evicting a theocracy that has oppressed them, the bombs should fall silent and the war should end. Liberation, after all, is not the same thing as occupation — and the difference between the two is precisely the measure of whether one supports freedom or merely the rearrangement of empire.

And yet, let us not delude ourselves: under the tandem incompetence and hubris of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, any hope that imperial assistance will align with the genuine liberation of the Iranian people is virtually impossible. Their vision is not freedom but spectacle — an orgy of capital, oil, and regional domination, where the screams of the oppressed serve as a backdrop to self‑aggrandizement. Liberation under such architects would be a farce, not an emancipation.

In the best-case scenario, the chaos of imperial overreach might paradoxically serve the cause of liberation. Trump, mercurial and attention-deficient, will grow weary of the Iranian quagmire — tired of Netanyahu’s hawkish ambitions, pressured by a domestic electorate hostile to another Middle Eastern misadventure. In that narrow window of disinterest and political calculation, the war grinds to a halt just as the Iranian people, through their own courage and determination, overthrow the clerical despotism that has suffocated them for decades. But let’s not hold our breath.