Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Screenshot
A RECENT LETTER published in Counterpunch, signed by individuals ranging from Ajamu Baraka to Vijay Prashad, proves a remarkable episode in authoritarian apologia from the left.
In particular, the letter condemns the US’s actions against Iran. But in doing so, the letter ventures into apologia for the Iranian regime in the most glowing of terms. The letter writes, in speaking of Iran:
“What stands before it is not merely a nation, but a civilisation that has weaponised its own DNA—ancient organisational genius fused with 21st-century scientific sovereignty. This is the reality of active deterrence by Iran; a global pole of power that dictates the terms of engagement, forcing strategic retreat by rewriting the very rules of active defence. Now, its adaptive reorganisation, civilisational continuity, and social unity have fused into a singular, unbreakable force.”
If this were not remarkable enough, in depicting Iran in civilizational terms despite these being supposed leftists, the letter then goes on to claim that Iran is literally invincible in the face of the US.
“Iran’s all-encompassing defence and active deterrence represents a golden opportunity to end global hegemony. The historical and civilisational doctrine of Iran is absolute: power does not confer right, and domination cannot serve as a foundation for justice. This is recognised as the bedrock of Iran’s invincibility. The world may avail itself of this historic turning point, drawing upon this very doctrine of liberation, to bring an end to domination and oppression wherever they may exist.”
One wonders how the view of Iran as invincible is anything in the way of a materialist analysis. Certainly, the US has blundered in its approach to Iran, expending an enormous amount of munitions and being unable to make headway, but this does not mean that Iran is invincible–an argument asserted on the basis of Iran having some kind of ineffable culturalist essence that apparently renders it impregnable to Western militaries.
Indeed, the letter’s view of the US is similarly transhistorical. The letter states,
“For 249 years—spanning the entirety of its existence since 1776—the United States built a record of atrocity that belonged to a darker, pre-civilised age; the predatory empire erected on the corpses of nations; from the genocide of nearly 5 million Indigenous peoples, to the brutal enslavement of over 4 million Africans, to the lynching of more than 4,000 Black citizens under Jim Crow.”
It is, of course, correct to point to colonialism as the foundation for the establishment of the US, as well as to highlight the long history of racism in the US. But this is only brought up in the letter to juxtapose the US, in civilizational terms, as having inherently been evil since its origins, while by contrast, Iran is depicted as having always been a force for good in the world, presumably back to antiquity. There is not much else to this viewpoint besides an assertion that the US is and always has been evil, while Iran is and always has been a force for good. The facile nature of this Manichaean argument is evidenced in that the US more or less claims similarly about its enemies.
All this proves the usual hand-wringing from Western leftists whose insularity stems from the fact that they see the world only in the mirror reflection of the US. Any non-Western context seemingly at odds with US imperialism is immediately idealized, never mind that it may merely be another authoritarian regime.
But it is still remarkable that the praise of Iran seen in the letter is close to nationalistic fascism, with its long lines about the inherent cultural and civilizational superiority of the Iranian regime. There is a failure to reckon not only with the fact that Iran is a modern nation-state run by a theocracy, but that the regime has little pretense to leftism–and this is praised by individuals who claim to be leftists.
Indeed, it proves grotesque to see not even a single mention of the tens of thousands who are thought to have been killed by state security forces in Iran in past months, with little attention from the rest of the world because of how effective the Iranian regime has been in carrying out such killings under the cover of Internet outages. Presumably, if not ignored, the deaths of such individuals would be dismissed by the signatories as simply color revolutionaries, fomented by the US, deserving of their deaths. Or the deaths would themselves be dismissed as Western propaganda, and having never taken place. Even if one expects little from the signatories of the letter by now, it is astonishing to see nominal leftism so quickly transform into blood-and-soil authoritarian apologia.