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The US American Left and Reverse Moral Exceptionalism: When Do Villains Become Heroes?, by Noor Ghazal Aswad – 7 September 2023 

This article takes the assassination of Qasem Soleimani as a case study that manifests the schism between the realities of those in revolutionary struggle and those on the U.S. American left who might gather in solidarity with them. I explicate “reverse moral exceptionalism” as a nationalistic tendency to insist on oneself as central to every event of significance on the world stage and which positions the United States (U.S.) as a singular source of evil in the world. Based on an ethnocentrism that approaches the world from a position of dominance, reverse moral exceptionalism saturates the space available for others and induces the inability to listen to the testimony of others. Cartesian “either-or” logics situate all non-white state actors as inherently colonized and by extension, all colonial brown actors emerge as apolitical victims. I argue that when whiteness is only understood in racially provincial terms, it distorts understandings of inter-racial collusion in the transnational context. I attend to the unlikely ways in which whiteness and its concomitant forms of exceptionalism permeate U.S. American nationalist subjectivities, setting the groundwork for an anti-colonial discourse that paradoxically justifies oppressive regimes and brings about indifference to grassroots revolutionary discourse and the micropolitics of resistance.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

In the early hours of January 3, 2020, Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, the external operations branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), was killed by a targeted United States drone strike in Baghdad, Iraq. His death was confirmed when pictures of his severed arm with its signature amulet ring on his digitus medicinalis were made public.

In the aftermath of the strike, Twitter exploded with the hashtag #WorldWarIII, concerned that Donald Trump’s actions would cause such a world war. Activist debates raged about the legality of the strike, how it might play into the 2020 presidential campaign, what this intervention would mean for their long-held stance against US American imperialism, and potential consequences for the Iran–US relationship. By the next day, anti-war protests broke out in over seventy cities across the US, with protestors holding Iranian flags in solidarity.

When Iran retaliated by attacking two US American military bases, there was a sigh of relief that no US Americans were killed, after which attention to the incident subsequently died down.

While the “American left” was in a frenzy of skepticism regarding the killing of Soleimani, Syrians, Iraqis, and Iranians celebrated his death. Iranians in the impoverished Sistan and Baluchistan Province celebrated with pizza, congratulating mothers who lost their children at his hands with the hashtag #FreeIran2020. Iraqis rejoiced, taking to the streets in jubilation to celebrate the death of a figure who had just two months prior been responsible for a deadly crackdown on protestors incensed about corruption and foreign Iranian influence. In Idlib, Syrians passed out sweets to celebrate his death.

Syrians were less influenced by the “Trump effect” (i.e., bias due to popular notions of Trump’s tendency toward impulsiveness and rash decision making) as the US American left, and less likely to place the US as the center of analysis. These grassroots expressions were not naive to the fact that President Trump had not acted in their defense, but that for a cataclysmic moment, US American interests had coincided with theirs and justice was served.

Regardless of the reasons behind Trump’s actions and the legality of his behavior, Syrians were incensed at the lack of solidarity, even if only rhetorical, with the actual victims of Soleimani’s repression by a left seen as their likeliest and potentially strongest allies. To some, this marked a blind spot, a collective myopia unable to listen to the tragedy and ironies of conditional solidarity with brown bodies in the region.

In this article, I develop the term “reverse moral exceptionalism” to describe a contemporary nationalistic tendency to vigilantly insist on oneself as behind every event of significance on the world stage. Although dedicated to a critique of the imperiality of one’s nation state, reverse moral exceptionalism exhibits a white western tendency to maintain dominance and unintentionally saturate the space available for the testimony of others.

The assassination of Soleimani is selected not as a source of inspiration for this article, but rather for its manifestation of the detachment between the ontological and epistemological realities of the revolutionary subject and those who might gather in solidarity. This investigation is taken with the explicit intention of underscoring the exigency for privileging the revolutionary subject as the principal locus of suasive conception.

Indeed, after Soleimani’s assassination, Syrians watched the US American left’s sudden apprehension over the region, as if they were not already engulfed in a raging conflict in which an excess of 600,000 Syrian lives had been lost, one of the deadliest genocides of the century.

The hesitancy of Syrians to jump on the “World War III” bandwagon was guided by their intimate awareness of the scale of Soleimani’s atrocities in the region and his sectarian cleansing of their villages and cities. Soleimani was involved in starvation sieges on the rebel-held cities of Madaya and Zabadani, enhanced the Assad regime’s chemical weapons capabilities, and waged brutal assault on Syrians for over eight years.

For Syrians, Soleimani was not just an Iranian general, but a figure who haunted their existence. As a strong supporter of the Assad regime, he had become an influential presence in the country. Riad Farid Hijab, the former prime minister of Syria, stated after his defection that “Syria is occupied by the Iranian regime. The person who runs the country is not Bashar al Assad, but Qasem Soleimani.”

The inability to contemplate the consequences of Soleimani’s life or to engage in a nuanced critique of the assassination was an erasure of suffering at Soleimani’s hands. Those who suffer feel immense pain when sites of repair are neglected by those who might stand in solidarity with them, often experiencing as much:

rage, resentment, indignation, or humiliation in response to the failure of other people and institutions to come to their aid, acknowledge their injury…place blame appropriately on wrongdoers, and offer some forms of solace, safety and relief as victims experience toward the original wrongdoer.

As such, this article is not written to make judgment on the appropriateness of US actions or to prioritize a western perspective on the “East,” but rather to explore the schism that exists between the rhetorics of the US American left and grassroots revolutionaries outside of the US borders. Admittedly, this is a challenging topic considering Trump’s exclusionary discourses, in which he directly appealed to voters’ racial and ethnic prejudices against Arabs, Muslims, Latina/o/x/es, and a host of “others” during his presidential election and subsequent time in office, and of course, the reality of the US as an imperial actor (in terms of its economic, military, and cultural presence) in various countries across the globe.

The time is ripe to address the asymptotic nature of the discourse in which points of principle and points of articulation never meet. In what follows, I theorize reverse moral exceptionalism as a nationalist ideology culminating in a hermetic sealing indifferent to the grassroots revolutionary subject. I overview literature in the field on how whiteness operates within US American nationalist subjectivities. I then detail the discourses of revolutionary subjects on the occasion of Soleimani’s assassination.

Here, I foreground the Syrian revolutionary subject as a primary source of rhetorical texts. This provides a frame of reference through which reverse moral exceptionalism may be deciphered in the reaction of the US American left. It is intended to be situated against, read alongside, and juxtaposed with, a cross-section of the US American left’s discourses on the assassination. Drawing these together, I reflect on the limits and absences that occur when revolutionary subjects are not centered to theorize reverse moral exceptionalism.

Reverse moral exceptionalism

In what follows, I explicate the key term “reverse moral exceptionalism” as a nationalistic ideology, which reflects a tendency to place oneself as the cause of every world event of significance. Although dedicated to a critique of the imperiality of one’s nation state, reverse moral exceptionalism exhibits a white western proclivity to establish dominance and saturate the space available for the testimony of those outside the nation state.

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Noor Ghazal Aswad is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Alabama. Her research bridges political communication, cultural studies, decolonial studies, and transnational liberation movements, with a focus on grassroots activism in the Middle East. Her research has appeared in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Environmental Communication, and Presidential Studies Quarterly, among other venues.

This article was originally published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech and has been reproduced in full by Antidote Zine.

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