Since 28 December 2025, millions of Iranians have been fighting the Islamic dictatorship across the country. Protest actions have unfolded in hundreds of locations, spanning all provinces, and have been met with lethal repression. Thousands—including children and teenagers—have been killed; many more have been beaten, attacked by security forces, and arrested[1]. These protests are not just feminist, nor are they oriented toward a single demand. They are directed against the totality of the regime. This is a revolution in the making. The feminist movement, nationwide demonstrations, environmental sit-ins, revolutionary uprisings, and workers’ strikes are not discrete causes; they are interconnected political struggles to reclaim collective agency.
The current uprising has also brought the return of older political discourses, including the name of Reza Pahlavi. This may unsettle parts of the left, but discomfort is not analysis. The left’s obligation is simple: respect for the masses, whether their political vocabulary matches ours. Revolutions do not arrive in the language we prefer; they arrive in the language people can speak under repression. What we are witnessing today is not simply another cycle of protest. It is the culmination of nearly five decades of trials and errors, defeats and achievements by the people themselves—and a rupture in contemporary history: the return of revolution, with its strategy, its method, and its risk, after decades marked by political cynicism, non-movements, and structurally impotent mobilizations.
I write this piece rejecting right-wing politics of any kind, while fully acknowledging the historical and cultural conditions that have weakened the Iranian left as a political force, above all, forty-seven years of systematic repression under the Islamic regime. But this history does not license contempt for the masses. It does not permit us to dehumanize revolutionaries as a “human herd” from the safety of theory, nor to gaslight the suffering of a people who are overthrowing a regime precisely because that regime stages its legitimacy through antagonism with the West. When anti-Westernism becomes the measure of legitimacy, revolt itself becomes unintelligible. If the realities unfolding at the level of states no longer fit inherited narratives, then it is the left’s framework—not the revolution—that must be adjusted. Constant self-reflection/rectification is among the most basic lessons Marx left us.
This essay does not seek to prescribe strategy or to speak on behalf of those engaged in struggle. Its intervention is diagnostic rather than programmatic. It is directed at left discursive formations that have repeatedly rendered mass uprisings unintelligible by subordinating them to geopolitical alignments or state-centred frameworks
What it gestures toward is not a blueprint imposed from above, but a reconsideration of internationalism as a shared horizon of struggle—one grounded in trust in historical processes, respect for mass agency, and opposition to elite substitutionism in all its forms. The emphasis on egalitarian forms of organization follows from this commitment, not as a prescription, but as a refusal of any politics that treats the masses as objects to be managed, disciplined, or spoken for. The task posed here is therefore limited but precise: to reclaim internationalism not as alignment with foreign states, but as struggle wherever one stands, oriented toward a common emancipatory horizon, rather than outsourcing the fate of emancipatory politics to foreign states, geopolitical blocs, or so-called camps of resistance.
This essay addresses two audiences at once: Western anti-imperialists who confuse opposition to U.S. power with solidarity, and a small group of Iranian Marxists who mistake geopolitical campism for revolutionary patience. Every time these currents converge, the Islamic Republic tightens its digital noose. The current revolutionary wave is no exception. As I write this, the regime has imposed a near-total communications blackout, cutting internet and phone access across the country. Past shutdowns have shown this tactic’s purpose clearly: to intensify killings, executions, and persecution beyond the reach of documentation[2]. While the regime silences Iranians, much of the left remains silent. And while parts of the Western left hesitate, the right rushes in with its familiar language of intervention. To those who fall eerily silent, I ask: are camaraderie, sisterhood, and solidarity merely sentimental words applied conditionally, reactively, and arbitrarily? If so, they begin to resemble the moral grammar of the very regimes they claim to oppose. Is this resemblance not itself a symptom of a deeper failure in contemporary left praxis and its ethical imagination?
Are Iranian lives simply not trendy enough? Iranians are neither subaltern enough to excite sectarian identitarianism nor exotic enough for media spectacle. We burn our scarves; we refuse the keffiyeh—symbols the regime has already weaponized for control and display. Yet the same regime, responsible for massacres and repression, enjoys sympathy from segments of the Western left—not for its actions, but for its anti-Zionist and anti-American posture. Apparently, that alone seems sufficient for absolution. It is conceptual bankruptcy: the substitution of solidarity with a campist reflex. If our lives do not trend, do they simply not matter?
Segments of the contemporary left—Western and Iranian alike—have reduced critique to a posture of negation. Silence, contrarianism, and reflexive opposition are mistaken for radicalism. But what passes for anti-imperialism here is no longer a critique of political economy; it is an empty negative gesture, detached from material struggle and historical necessity. Negation requires no analysis of social relations, no account of history or class consciousness, and no theory of political form or power. It operates purely at the level of alignment and refusal, mistaking reactive opposition between states for emancipatory politics.
This left is not engaged in anti-capitalist politics. It is an elitist project in the accumulation of social capital, moral recognition, and ideological purity within insulated discursive fields. Were this not the case, it would recognize the transformation of the Iranian political system not as an obstacle to class struggle or anti-imperialism, but as precisely their historical necessity and continuation. A left that opposes political transformation in the name of either has abandoned both, retaining only the vocabulary. The result is a politics that confuses geopolitical alignment with emancipation and treats the masses as disposable variables in a theoretical equation.
Beyond Binary Thinking Toward Real Dialectics
There is another silence on the left—distinct from open campism or apologetics—marked by hesitation, evasion, and retreat. Many who would otherwise speak against oppression remain wary when it comes to Iran, treating it as perpetually “too complex,” too saturated with history and ideology to address with confidence. In an era marked by unprecedented circulation of information, this excuse no longer holds. Anyone committed to justice should know that Iranians have resisted this dictatorship from the very first weeks of the Islamic regime’s establishment in 1979.
For others, silence is produced not by uncertainty but by fear of cancel culture and adherence to a blind political correctness. Much of the Western left fears being branded Islamophobic for criticizing political or fundamentalist Islam. A language of “tolerance” has curdled into a language of intolerance, eager to cancel anyone whose analysis does not conform to liberal-progressive orthodoxy. Whether out of conformism or comfort, many leftists refuse to confront Iran’s Islamic regime or any form of right-wing political Islam. In this flattened discourse, one is either “respectful of diversity” or “Islamophobic”—no dialectic allowed. The same voices that freely condemn right-wing Christianity or Zionist messianism often fall silent when faced with clerical fascism in Iran. Critical race and post-colonial frameworks, incisive when deployed against Western domination, frequently go mute when the oppressor appears draped in Third-Worldist symbolism. This is what I call benevolent racism: the patronizing suspension of critique in the name of cultural sensitivity.
The Islamic regime of Iran must be called what it is: a capitalist, theocratic, expansionist dictatorship that governs through necropolitics. To avoid this naming is not prudence but complicity; not caution but abdication. It bears no relation to the language of “armed resistance,” the “progressive left,” or the “global left”—terminology that too often serves to excuse the absence of an authentic socialist force and to indefinitely postpone its emergence. In practice, this interpretive generosity has served the Western left far better than the people living in other zones of resistance. If the left academics and intellectuals, especially those who proclaim their commitment to anti-imperialism, wish to oppose U.S. imperialism or apartheid, they might begin by doing so through their own struggles and on their own terrain. Treating distant conflicts as moral surrogates for domestic political inertia is not solidarity; it is the comfortable consumption of violence with a moral alibi.
Opposition to U.S. imperialism is repeatedly mistaken for a politics of liberation. This confusion licenses silence, ambivalence, and even praise for the Islamic Republic, even as the regime fires missiles abroad while sacrificing its own population at home through repression, proxy warfare, and catastrophic acts such as the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 in 2020. This is moral contortion sustained by intellectual laziness: a refusal to move beyond binary thinking. It is both possible and necessary to be anti-Zionist and to condemn Iran’s brutal theocratic-capitalist state. Any framework that insists otherwise has abandoned dialectics in favour of camp.
The Enemy of My Enemy Is Still My Enemy
Some argue that while Iranians oppose the Islamic Republic’s domestic repression, they may nonetheless support its regional and international policies, particularly when those policies are directed against shared enemies such as Israel or the United States. This is the familiar logic of the axis of resistance, which reduces politics to the crude maxim that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” In practice, this logic has aligned segments of the left not with Iranians, but with the micropolitics and war machinery of the Islamic regime itself. That alignment is not strategic patience; it is political opportunism. It refuses the elementary dialectical insight that a state can oppose the U.S. or Israel and still be tyrannical. In the case of Iran, this insight reveals something simple but decisive: the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy.
What is often missed is that this campist reasoning is not external to the Islamic Republic; it is one of its core ideological operations. Through state-controlled media, religious institutions, think tanks, and international propaganda networks, the regime presents itself as sovereign and morally legitimate precisely through comparison with Zionist or Western imperial power. This staged antagonism functions as an excuse: it is mobilized to justify repression at home and militarism abroad. Campism, in this sense, does not merely excuse the regime; it reproduces the regime’s own self-understanding.
Inside Iran, people have long rejected this rhetorical trap. One of the most common protest slogans of recent years—“Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I will sacrifice my life for Iran”—is not a chauvinist or xenophobic rejection of international solidarity. It is a refusal to be sacrificed in the name of an opportunistic, imperialized version of anti-imperialism. It is also a direct inversion of the regime’s founding slogan, “Neither East nor West, Islamic Republic,” and its project of dissolving the nation into an abstract Islamic ummah while exporting violence beyond its borders to enforce a Shiʿa imperial doctrine rather than any emancipatory project.
Yet even among Iranians committed to transnational and universalist politics—feminists, Marxists, anti-colonial intellectuals—solidarity with Palestine has never translated into support for the Islamic Republic. These groups understand that the regime’s so-called “resistance” is not emancipatory. They reject its nuclear ambitions, its regional militarism, and its instrumentalization of Palestine as ideological cover. This understanding is not marginal; it is widespread across the political spectrum.
The regime compensates for this rejection through political theatre. One of its key ideological rituals is the annual anti-Israel and anti-American rally, staged for both domestic discipline and international consumption. Loyalists are mobilized, footage is montaged, and images from previous years are recycled to fabricate the appearance of popular enthusiasm. To fill the ranks, the regime recruits from the surplus population it has itself impoverished, offering sacks of potatoes or free meals in exchange for participation. These spectacles are then circulated globally as evidence of mass legitimacy.
In a similar act, this week the regime attempted to silence and bribe citizens by providing free goods. In one of the cities with the highest poverty rates, protesters looted government-affiliated stores and tossed bags of subsidized rice into the streets. Their refusal to accept free goods, despite soaring prices, is a powerful demonstration of human dignity and proof that their resistance targets the legitimacy and core of the regime. Iranians know perfectly well that this is the same regime that executes, persecutes, hangs, murders, tortures, rapes, interrogates, kidnaps, imprisons, expels, and exiles its own people while simultaneously supporting some of the most brutal and authoritarian governments and actors in the region. Iranians across the political spectrum understand that endorsing the Islamic Republic’s “resistance” discourse often entails justifying silence, ambivalence, or apologetics regarding these alliances.
Anti-imperialism that legitimizes internal fascism is not solidarity; it is abdication. Solidarity means siding with the oppressed, not with states that claim anti-imperial virtue while practicing domination. Those who valorize the Islamic Republic simply because it presents itself as standing “with the oppressed” either downplay the oppression of Iranians or elevate abstract geopolitical positioning over lived suffering. This is the outcome of campist logic: a world reduced to binary alignments, where being anti-American is enough to be considered emancipatory. Ironically, this logic reproduces a Western, Americanized egocentrism: the United States functions as the sole negative measure of emancipation, so that being anti-American is enough to be considered liberatory. The left must relearn how to think dialectically. We must stand with the brutalized in Iran, the besieged in Gaza, and the invaded in Ukraine, not with their oppressors, patrons, or proxies. Critiquing one form of fascism does not excuse another. Anything less is not internationalism; it is abandonment.
Iran ≠ Gaza: Breaking the Analogy
I reject any shortcut that equates the Gaza–Israel war with the Iran–Israel war. Gaza is the textbook case of settler-colonial occupation: land seizure, demographic engineering, apartheid law. The Islamic Republic of Iran, by contrast, is an imperial theocratic dictatorship. To analyze the Iran–Israel confrontation through the same post-colonial or decolonial framework used for Palestine is to force two fundamentally different political forms into a single analytic lens. This conflation not only muddies analysis; it undermines both causes. On one side, we confront a classic settler-colonial project; on the other, an expansionist theocratic state. Only by holding this distinction firmly in view can we grasp the radically different relations that Zionism and the Islamic Republic sustain toward Israel and toward their own subject populations.
This is where Sigmund Freud’s notion of the narcissism of minor differences becomes instructive, a concept in psychoanalysis often invoked to account for racial, national, and sectarian antagonisms. The most violent conflicts do not arise between absolute Others, but between formations that are structurally close. The threat lies in the unsettling possibility of overlapping identities; each side sees in the other a distorted reflection of itself and must expel that resemblance to secure its own coherence. What most disturbs us is not the radically Other but the near-identical, the subtle distinction that provokes disproportionate hostility.
I extend this insight to a new terrain. The Zionist project and the Shiʿa doctrine of Welayat-e Faqih crystallize this very dialectic. Their shared monotheism, iconoclasm, law-bound ethical systems, and messianic horizons—distinct from Sunni political theology—render their antagonism less a clash of civilizations than a struggle between mirrored political-theological projects. The closer the resemblance, the more violently differentiation must be enforced.
The Islamic Republic seeks no genuine emancipation of the oppressed; it codifies a Shiʿa imperial doctrine. At its core lies Ayatollah Khomeini’s theory of Welayat-e Faqih (Guardianship of the Jurist). Breaking with Shiʿa quietism, Khomeini vested ultimate religious and political authority in a qualified jurist during the occultation of the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi (the redeemer). This constituted a decisive rupture in Shiʿa political theology: messianic expectation and divine sovereignty were transformed into permanent, institutionalized state power. Capitalist social relations were thereby cloaked in sacred legitimacy. Far from democratic, the Islamic Republic is a theocratic oligarchy. Supreme authority resides in the Supreme Leader, who dominates the judiciary, legislature, executive, and armed forces, producing a closed, circular hierarchy under divine pretense.
Both Zionist and Shiʿa regimes thus sacralize territory, weaponize prophecy, and bind sovereignty to messianic time. The Islamic Republic emerges as a mirrored rival: a gender-apartheid regime that executes, censors, and exiles its own population while exporting violence beyond its borders to expand its Shiʿa reach through proxy wars. Its missiles may be launched in the name of Palestine, but its politics follow an imperial script oriented toward survival and regional hegemony. The confrontation with Israel is not an extension of Palestinian resistance; it is the instrumentalization of that resistance. Any framework that fails to draw this line allows the regime’s imperial ambitions to masquerade as emancipatory politics.
The doctrine of Welayat-e Faqih is inseparable from the notion of jihad al-Asghar, the lesser jihad—the external, physical struggle sanctified through martyrdom. In Shiʿa theology, being itself is hierarchically ordered. The Infallibles occupy a superior ontological rank above ordinary human existence, and martyrdom functions as a privileged mode of transcendence through which the believer may ascend this hierarchy. Sacrificial death is not incidental but constitutive: only by dying in righteous struggle can the martyr move closer to the Infallibles and partake in a higher mode of being.
The Islamic Republic appropriates this ontological architecture and converts it into a political technology, transforming metaphysical ascent into a regulated economy of sacrifice in the service of clerical power. Under clerical rule, lesser jihad becomes the motor of proxy warfare, imperial ambition, and domestic terror. Militias are cultivated as expendable bodies, glorified not for liberating the oppressed but for dying in the service of clerical power.
What makes this configuration especially disturbing is its structural mirroring of Zionist imperialism. Zionism and Shiʿa imperialism are not opposites but parallels: both organize sovereignty around eschatological myths, sacralize land, and claim exclusive access to redemption. In one case, domination is justified through occupation and apartheid; in the other, through proxy warfare and sacrificial militarism. The theological grammar differs, but the imperial logic converges.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei banned the import of U.S.-made vaccines, invoking the paranoid conspiracism typical of authoritarian rule: that Western states were using vaccines to test on other nations. Iran’s Red Crescent subsequently cancelled the import of thousands of donated doses. At the same time, senior regime officials were vaccinated with those very American vaccines, while a secondary elite paid privately to access them. The population at large was left with domestically produced vaccines whose scientific credibility was widely disputed. Iran ultimately ranked among the ten countries with the highest COVID-19 death rates[3]. This was not a failure of capacity imposed by international sanctions, but a deliberate exercise of necropolitical power by the regime’s clerical–military oligarchy: life allocated according to proximity to power.
The regime’s relentless pursuit of nuclear power—even at the cost of sanctions and economic collapse—must be read through this lens. Integration into the global economy would erode clerical monopoly, displacing power toward technocratic and capitalist factions beyond religious control. The regime’s resistance to neoliberal integration is not anti-capitalist but oligarchic: it seeks to monopolize capitalism under sacred authority. Diplomacy is refused not in the name of justice, but to preserve a theologically sanctioned, expansionist mode of accumulation.
Under the Shiʿa dictatorship, women’s bodies are governed through compulsory hijab and juridical penalties. The hijab functions not merely as internal discipline but as a competitive display aimed at the broader Islamic world: a visual claim to religious supremacy, staging a society of perfect obedience in which Islamic law appears fully realized and uncontested, with women’s bodies serving as its primary proof. The Islamic Republic, alongside Afghanistan, remains one of the only states in the world where hijab is legally mandated. Through this performative piety, the regime positions itself as the sole custodian of “true Islam,” claiming not just regional leadership but religious election. In sum, the Islamic Republic is not a site of resistance but a theological empire in its own right. Its messianic vision, martyr-based militarism, and monopolization of Islam reproduce precisely the forms of domination it claims to oppose. No volume of anti-Zionist rhetoric can conceal the fact that this is a state built on repression, not redemption.
Nuclear Ambition Meets Necropolitics
It may disappoint some corners of the left, particularly parts of DSA, that Iran’s nuclear threat is not a fabrication. There is a fatal error in this line of thinking: it treats the Islamic Republic as a normal state reacting defensively to external pressure, while ignoring its internal necropolitics. If you trust a regime that executes teenagers to responsibly wield ideology, sovereignty, or deterrence, your anti-imperialism has already collapsed into moral bankruptcy.
Iran is one of the wealthiest countries on Earth in terms of oil and gas reserves. And yet more than 30 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. This condition is not solely the outcome of sanctions. It is also the direct result of the regime’s nuclear ambitions. The clerical state has poured billions into uranium enrichment and regional militarization while inflation spirals, basic goods become unaffordable, workers starve, and infrastructure decays. Nuclear aspiration here is not an abstract strategy; it is material redistribution upward, away from life and toward death.
Iranians are neither confused nor indifferent about this reality. They have repeatedly taken to the streets to demand an end to corruption, repression, and the regime’s belligerent international posturing, and they have been massacred for it. During the Bloody November uprising of 2019, security forces killed approximately 1,500 protesters in just three days[4]. According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, the regime executed at least 1,922 people in 2025 alone[5]. These are not anomalies. They are the regime’s governing logic in full display: the routine, large-scale administration of death to preserve power and expand the reach of its necropolitics.
My critique of the axis of resistance and campism does not align me with U.S. hegemony. It insists on treating Iran’s nuclear project not as a geopolitical abstraction but as a material extension of the regime’s theocratic-imperial necropolitics, a threat directed not only outward, but first and foremost inward, against the Iranian population itself. A genuinely anti-imperialist position opposes all death machines, without exception—whether American, Israeli, or Islamic.
The Left’s Task
The left will not reclaim its future by choosing between American drones and Iranian missiles. We must not confuse vengeance with justice, or jihad with liberation. I write this not in despair but with defiant love: love for a left that dares to be truthful, for a politics that refuses to kill in God’s name, and for an Iran that might yet be free and self-sovereign.
The demand of Iranians for the overthrow of the dictatorship and for the just trial of its criminal agents must be recognized on their own terms and realized only through the forms of resistance they themselves pursue. No coups, no invasions, no drones, no foreign agendas. No partitionist blueprints, no no-fly zones, or no Washington-brokered “managed transitions” designed to fracture the country.
The pressing danger today is not whether the global right will install a compliant successor in Iran, but whether it will instead become complicit with a regime that the Iranian people have actively and repeatedly rejected for decades. The left must confront an uncomfortable fact: the Islamic Republic is, in practice, one of the most advantageous adversaries the United States can have in the Middle East. Its permanence stabilizes regional antagonisms, legitimizes militarization, and sustains the circuits of global capitalism far more effectively than a nationalist, secular, right-leaning political order ever could. Any agreement with this regime does not weaken imperial power; it consolidates it. Each diplomatic normalization, each handshake with the oligarchy of ayatollahs, reinforces the exhausted bloc of so-called “resistance” while betraying the thousands of Iranians who sacrifice and risk their lives year after year in defiance of it. At a time when the United States and Israel have appropriated the language of “regime change” to legitimize their own military actions, it is all the more important for the left to distinguish popular overthrow from imperial intervention.
Our criticized comrades must finally confront the complexities and subtleties of Iranian life and stop laundering the oppressive reality of the Islamic dictatorship. We must rupture the vicious cycle of either-or thinking that stabilizes the status quo and reproduces moral paralysis. The left must continue to name foreign interference for what it is: imperial opportunism clothed in humanitarian language. At the same time, it must abandon the lazy position that sanctifies the Islamic Republic through the slogans of “the enemy of my enemy” and the so-called “axis of resistance.”
Campism here is not an alternative to statism; it is structured by the same logic. Where statism demands loyalty to sovereign power, campism demands loyalty to geopolitical alignment. Both displace political judgment onto blocs, camps, and axes. Both subordinate people to states and convert lived suffering into a variable within a global chessboard. Campism, in this sense, does not overcome imperial domination but redistributes it. It replaces a single hegemon with competing centers of power while leaving intact the same structures of repression, militarization, and necropolitics. What is presented as resistance thus becomes a defence of state violence by other means.
The Western left must finally confront the lived reality of Iranians who have practiced resistance not as abstraction but as survival itself; anything else is either empty theory or moral theatrics. For over four decades, Iranians have practiced resistance not as an abstract theory but as a daily reality: with every lock of hair drifting defiantly out from under the imposed hijab, with banned books, forbidden kisses, songs, dances, and whispered calls to reclaim woman, life, and freedom. How many photographs, names, hashtags, and bodies must circulate? How many decades of sacrifice for women, for life, for freedom must accumulate before the woke anti-imperialist and the campist stop typing “respect for the Islamic Republic” from the safety of comment boxes? How many sit-ins, how many unarmed bodies facing repression, how many lives given for the living and the dead must be ignored before it becomes clear that this posture is not prudence but complicity? Against this, my political ethics are simple. First: do not speak for people, especially when they are already speaking. Second: respect for the masses is not conditional on political convenience. Third: Woman, Life, Freedom is not a slogan. It is the horizon of any politics of emancipation.
This horizon exposes the poverty of campist fantasies. Iran, and to some extent Venezuela, demonstrate that campism is often nothing more than statism redistributed: a rearrangement of sovereign power that leaves exploitation, repression, and necropolitics intact. To mistake this for internationalism is to confuse the multiplication of states with the emancipation of peoples. A genuinely international socialism must break decisively with this logic. A universalist socialism that is not culturally reductionist, one that refuses both erasure and relativism, is not only possible but necessary. It creates the conditions for solidarity without ventriloquism and for universality without abstraction. Anything less is not anti-imperialism; it is resignation.
Dictatorships and totalitarian regimes demand political responses specific to them, not the projection of abstract loyalties or inherited ideological habits. The precondition of any left politics is the collapse of tyrannical regimes that hijack emancipatory language and hollow out mass mobilization. Only through such ruptures can collective class consciousness move toward a left horizon. For this reason, securing a democratic transition from the Islamic dictatorship to a free and egalitarian Iran matters far beyond its borders. A genuine struggle against militarist imperialism cannot be waged through a mirrored, criminally ruthless rival. Solidarity must be egalitarian, anti-militarist, anti-elitist, and anti-capitalist—without exceptions, without apologies, without double standards. It must reject the reflex that confuses anti-Americanism with anti-imperialism and abandons the oppressed to fascism in revolutionary disguise.
An authentically emancipatory, anti-imperialist socialist force will not arise from loyalty to states, blocs, or axes. It will emerge only from the collapse of regimes that rule through death, discipline, and sanctified domination. Only when their oligarchic, capitalist, theocratic, and imperial logic is exposed and dismantled can socialist internationalism revive.
Notes
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-protest-death-toll-over-12000-feared-higher-video-bodies-at-morgue/
[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/01/internet-shutdown-in-iran-hides-violations-in-escalating-protests/
[3] https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/01/12/iran-khameneis-reckless-ban-covid-19-vaccine
[4] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/special-report-irans-leader-ordered-crackdown-on-unrest-do-whatever-it-take-idUSKBN1YR0QO/
[5] https://www.en-hrana.org/at-least-nine-prisoners-executed-in-iran-on-december-30/
Paria Rahimi is a Ph.D. candidate in Theory and Criticism at Western University (Ontario, Canada). Her fields of research lie at the intersections of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and political theology.
This article was first published on Paria Rahimi’s Substack.
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