On 20 August, the Guardian published a so-called ‘open letter’ entitled: ‘To Iran’s political prisoners: trapped between two blades of a scissors’. Although supposedly addressing Iranian political prisoners, the letter was written in English and first published in a British newspaper.
Appended by around two dozen signatures, mostly from American university professors, the message of the ‘open letter’ was that in the midst of the brutal US/Israeli attack on the Iranian people and their government, progressive humanity should beware of siding with Iran and should instead continue to support regime-change activists.
The Iranian people, according to the authors, are caught between “two blades of a scissors” – ie, between the brutality of US imperialism and the equal brutality of their own government.
It is not the intention of this article to analyse the contents of the ‘letter’ in detail, for the simple reason that it is just a rehash of the same dull nonsense we have heard a thousand times before. With the possible exception of the prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal, there is no signatory worth mentioning by name – and serious doubts have been raised as to whether he did, in fact, put his name to the document.
Be that as it may, the argument it outlines is a commonly expressed one amongst left social democrats in the imperialist countries – even amongst those who identify their essentially pro-imperialist politics as ‘socialist’, ‘Leninist’, ‘Bolshevik’ and so on. Indeed, this false argument and the failure to combat it has fatally hamstrung virtually all attempts at building solidarity campaigns to defend not only Iran but also Syria, Libya, the Donbass, socialist Korea and countless other nations facing military and economic attack by imperialism.
A genuine anti-imperialist must be able to tell the truth about these countries, explain the real reasons they are being attacked and express full support for their resistance to imperialist aggression without worrying about the various reactionary slurs (‘tankie’, ‘Stalinist’, ‘islamo-left’, etc) that will be thrown their way.
A plague on both your houses?
At first glance, it seems incredible that anyone should still have the nerve to promote the notion that ‘America and Iran are two equal evils’. This is the same US imperialism which, on the very first day of its savage bombing campaign, deliberately targeted a school and massacred over 160 schoolgirls. And which went on to attack several other schools and sports clubs, killing many more children.
This is the same imperialist/zionist camp that intentionally obliterated the crowded al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza in October 2023, murdering over 500 civilians – an atrocity that served as the opening act for two years of genocidal slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women and children.
It is the same imperialist/zionist camp whose storm troopers were widely reported by doctors on the ground in Gaza to be raiding hospitals and deliberately smashing the equipment to maximise civilian suffering and death.
It is the same imperialist/zionist camp that has carpet bombed southern Lebanon and wiped dozens of towns and villages completely off the map. Locals are still forbidden to return to their lands or the ruins of their homes – those who try are routinely shot at or targeted with drones.
It is the same Anglo-American imperialism whose ghastly crimes in Libya, Syria, Yemen and throughout the region – not to speak of their crimes elsewhere – will blacken the pages of history for generations to come.
What exactly has the Iranian government done to justify being equated with such vicious war criminals? Enforce a public dress code that disproportionately affected women? Repress violent Kurdish separatist forces? Imprisoned those it caught spying or, in the worst case, applied the death penalty to those convicted of treason? Are any of these remotely comparable to the terrible crimes of Anglo-American imperialism/zionism in the region, to any reasonable observer?
We can be certain that even the Russians cannot be accused of anything close to such brutality during four and a half years of military operations in Ukraine. For if the Russian army had bombed and destroyed a hospital with 500 people inside, or flattened a school filled with schoolgirls, or committed any crime even close to this level, the US and EU imperialist media would be screaming it from the rooftops.
The worst ‘Russian war crimes’ alleged to have been committed were the executions of a handful of adult male prisoners in the town of Bucha (most likely a Ukrainian false flag to justify prolonging the war), and the supposed ‘abduction’ of children living in an active war zone (otherwise known as evacuation/rescue of civilians). Clearly the dreaded ‘Russian imperialism’ – putting aside the inconvenient fact that Russia fulfils none of the economic criteria to be described as such – is obviously nowhere near as murderous as the real imperialist powers, in particular Britain, France, Germany and the United States of America.
As obvious as these day-and-night differences may seem to reasonable people, there remains a bizarre tendency amongst the self-identifying ‘western left’ to dismiss any consideration of scale or context and to insist abstractly that “both sides are bad”, “we must oppose all oppressors on principle” and similar grandstanding claptrap.
But it’s like claiming that a violent rapist and his victim are “both bad” because “she is a cow” and “I don’t like her on principle”. Would you respect the ‘principled stance’ of someone expressing such a view? Obviously not – you would revile them as a rape apologist.
So what should we think of someone who makes the same vile false equivalency not just about individuals but about entire nations?
Clearly, there can be no parallel drawn between the aggressive violence of an imperialist alliance and the defensive violence of the country resisting that aggression. That should be obvious to any rational observer. The real question is not whether the western left’s position is correct, but how such a patently ridiculous position gained so much traction in the first place?
The chauvinism of the western populations
The answer is chauvinism: the implicit belief that most westerners have been imbued with since childhood that on some level we are just inherently superior to the hyperexploited masses of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Typically, this belief is held subconsciously, without our being fully aware of it, and is accompanied by a subconscious racism – the association of white skin with ‘advanced civilisation’ and of darker skin with ‘backward’, ‘barbarian’ or ‘childlike’ peoples.
Workers living in the imperialist countries have invariably been saturated in racist and chauvinist propaganda since birth, administered via the mass media, the education system, books, films, computer games etc. It is one of the ruling bourgeoisie’s most powerful tools in trying to ensure that no class solidarity ever develops between workers in the west and those in the oppressed, neocolonial world.
The higher standard of living enjoyed by the workers in the imperial core – a bribe paid for from the massive superprofits that the imperialists rake in from their superexploitation abroad – is held up as proof of European people’s supposedly higher degree of civilisation and humanity.
Our trade union and working-class movement leaders are bribed from these same superprofits but even more generously – to ensure their loyal cooperation in maintaining social peace and in helping to perpetuate such racist and chauvinist thinking amongst the working class.
Some may question how this is possible, given that the left is apparently so vocal and active in a myriad supposedly ‘antiracist’ and ‘antifascist’ campaigns. The answer is that the chauvinism of the left – known as social chauvinism – usually does not present itself so blatantly as the crude “P*kis out” supremacism of the right.
Rather, social chauvinism is primarily distinguished by a practical refusal to recognise that the struggle of the masses of oppressed peoples throughout Latin America, Asia, Africa and Oceania to free themselves from imperialist domination is equally important as the struggle for workers’ rights in the imperialist heartlands.
Social chauvinists enthusiastically participate in antiracist campaigns that are focused specifically on the relatively privileged black and brown-skinned people living at home – as well as in campaigns against sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc – but show little to no meaningful interest in anything outside of the bubble of the imperialist countries.
The oppression and exploitation suffered by the peoples of Congo, Sudan or Haiti, for example, is many orders of magnitude more severe than the condition of even the very poorest workers in Britain, but we are encouraged to view it as something irremediable, based in a natural poverty and somehow connected with the inherent backwardness and inevitable corruption of the ‘third-world’ nations.
Such ‘socialists’ are only interested in discussing the activities of imperialism in the neocolonies when it becomes impossible to ignore – for example when refugees come to our shores seeking some respite from the immiseration and/or physical destruction of their homelands, or when Britain is on the verge of openly initiating an aggressive war. Even in these cases, the response of the social chauvinists is condescending and superficial.
Refugees, for example, are portrayed solely as poor defenceless people whom we need to look after and protect from the nasty fascists – an act of bounty carried out in much the same spirit as one might volunteer their time for the protection of abused dogs and cats at the local animal shelter.
The question of why the refugees are fleeing their homeland in the first place, or how the British imperialist regime is involved in creating the situation that makes those countries unliveable, is rarely considered – never mind the question of how we might mobilise the working class to force the imperialists to stop their destructive activities so that the refugees might actually be able to safely return home.
According to this mindset, refugees and migrant workers are not seen as crucial allies in the global struggle against imperialism, but as poor victims to be patronised and protected.
In the case of imperialist military aggression, the social chauvinist left can vary in its tactics. Some will stridently support the aggression “to save the children from [Insert Tyrant Here]” (by bombing them!), performing verbal and mental backflips that Josef Goebbels would have been proud of in order to present such a position as somehow consistent with ‘socialism’.
Most social chauvinists will nominally oppose the war, but on a purely petty-bourgeois pacifist basis – think platitudes about how “war is bad”, “war solves nothing” etc – the arguments of a Lennon rather than a Lenin. Crucially, they will also fully endorse and repeat all the imperialist media’s hysterical demonising and dehumanising propaganda tropes against the targeted country, rushing to condemn anyone who expresses scepticism towards official narratives about “Gaddafi’s Viagra soldiers”, “Assad’s sarin gas”, “Putin’s assassins” etc.
The result is a very weak but apparently ‘principled’ and nominally ‘left-wing’ politics of “Yes, we agree that so-and-so dictatorship is very, very bad and evil, and they are massacring kids like you say, and we hate them as much as you do, but war is bad and imperialism something something (look we are Marxists because we mentioned the word imperialism!) .., so we can’t ever support any military action no matter how many kids that evil dictator is killing.”
Needless to say, this creates an ‘antiwar movement’ that is saturated with imperialist prejudice and incapable of making an objective analysis. Its members, imbued with a sense of smug superiority, are encouraged to sit in (uninformed) judgement over others rather than to understand the economic roots of the war and to recognise in the attacked people a group of fellow workers with whom they should be building solidarity and a common struggle against a shared class enemy.
Rather than learning from the revolutionary struggles of others, they join in with the dehumanisation of the patriotic masses of Libya, Syria, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, DPR Korea etc.
In order to soothe their own cognitive dissonance, they will dig up any ancient case of an allegedly repressive act against workers in the targeted country, often fictitious and always shorn of context, and cry that “true socialists cannot support such a regime on principle”.
It is then very easy for the imperialists to encourage workers to make the last, relatively small jump in abandoning the last thin pretence of ‘principled opposition to war’ – an ‘opposition’ no longer based on anything other than abstract dogma – and becoming open supporters of imperialist wars in the name of ‘fighting authoritarianism’, ‘protecting democracy’, and so on.
This explains why so many of imperialism’s most shamelessly militaristic ideologues today are former Trotskyites who came out of the supposedly ‘antiwar left’. Of course, those still in the ‘antiwar left’ will loudly denounce these figures for their open warmongering and emphasise the supposed contrast with their own ‘antiwar’ politics.
But when we actually speak to such people, we find that there is scarcely anything dividing the self-identifying ‘antiwar left’ from the unashamed warmongers. They express the same dehumanised, infantilised view of the world outside of Europe, the same utter ignorance, contempt and derision towards the peoples of west Asia, Africa, the Indian subcontinent and east Asia. And they show the same tendency to invent an idealised ‘Syrian people’ or ‘Iranian workers’ on whose behalf they ‘advocate’ while disregarding entirely the real views of the real people living in the country concerned.
Dehumanising Iran means failing to build our own liberation movement
Returning to Iran, the vast majority of those on the social-chauvinist western left know nothing of that country or its people beyond what they have heard from self-exiled fanatics in the Iranian diaspora.
They accept imperialist propaganda at face value and remain entirely ignorant about the heroic sacrifices made by the Iranian people in defence of their revolution in the 1980s when under attack from imperialist-backed Iraq.
They shamelessly denounced the patriotic masses who demonstrated in 2009 in support of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the face of the west-backed ‘green movement’ for regime change that was trying to bring down the revolutionary government under cover of the same kind of flowery rhetoric that was deployed by Mikhail Gorbachev and his revisionist gang as they were destroying the USSR.
They ignored the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who poured onto the streets across Iran in January 2026 to face down the CIA/Mossad-trained fascist death squads that were unleashing destruction and chaos. Rather, they repeated the imperialist propaganda line that these were “peaceful protesters being ruthlessly gunned down by the regime”, despite this false narrative being contradicted by virtually anyone on the ground.
(In a useful lesson about how the imperialist psyops machine works, the originator of this ‘eye-witness report’ turned out to be an Indian ‘fashion blogger’-turned-‘activist’ with no apparent link to or source within Iran).
And they ignored the tens of millions of people who flooded the streets of every village, town and city to pay their last respects to their slain revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, following his foul murder by the imperialists.
Likewise, they show no interest in the titanic struggle waged by the heroic Yemenis against imperialism. They show little interest in Lebanon, and when they do, they dismiss the Hezbollah-led resistance and instead celebrate various irrelevant pro-western and US-backed figures whom they insist are ‘real revolutionaries’.
They cheer Palestine because they have to in order to maintain any relevance in today’s environment, but wherever they can they rush to condemn Hamas, the PFLP and any other organisation with organic support amongst the masses, instead urging everyone to support an imaginary, ideologically pure but completely fictional Palestinian Bolshevik party.
When is a principle not a principle?
Ironically, it cannot even truly be said that the chauvinist left does oppose all tyranny equally on principle, regardless of context or scale. This can clearly be seen from browsing any website associated with Trotskyites, revisionists or the wider liberal left.
We find there an endless series of articles attacking targeted countries like Iran, Russia, China or Belarus from a supposedly ‘working-class’ perspective, but we are hard-pressed to find even a single article about workers’ rights in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikdoms – all of which are notorious for their horrific treatment of migrant labour.
Why the lack of interest in the crimes of those governments? Could it be that since they are all aligned with imperialism, there will be no reward for targeting their activities?
Finally, the supposedly ‘principled stance’ of the social chauvinists is very easy to maintain regarding conflicts on the other side of the world, whose consequences can be presented as remote from the everyday concerns of the British working class. But when it comes to dealing with matters on the home front, the same people are quick to discard all such sacred ‘principles’ and endorse the most vicious devils and war criminals in the name of choosing ‘the lesser evil’.
One has only to see their hysterical reaction to the rise of right-wing anti-immigration political parties and candidates. “If you don’t vote Democrat/Labour/SPD/etc, you’re basically helping Hitler to power!” they scream, playing nicely into the culture wars framing of this issue and smoothly glossing over the very real crimes of the parties they are asking us to support as the ‘progressive’ choice.
The takfiri gangs who laid waste to Syria over the 13 years of that country’s brave struggle against imperialist mercenary invasion were far more violent and destructive than any Maga, Restore or AfD. The vile, murderous war criminals of the Democratic and Labour parties have far more blood on their hands from their endless orgy of globalised looting than former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad – even if we accepted the wildest estimates of the latter’s supposed atrocities.
Yet the chauvinists endorsed the west’s hired killers in the name of ‘principle’ and lashed out against any suggestion that President Assad’s government might at the very least be preferable to Isis/al-Qaeda rule.
In the same manner today, ‘on principle’ the chauvinists attack any suggestion that the Islamic Republic’s social and political system might be preferable to the CIA/Mossad-trained monarcho-fascist gangs that are seeking to replace it. Yet they are happy to endorse Democrat/Labour war criminals who oversaw the murder of more young women in Gaza in 45 days than the Islamic Republic by the wildest estimates might have executed in 45 years.
This is the essence of social chauvinism: it is socialism in words, but chauvinism in deeds. It rests in the implicit belief that ‘our’ imperialists, no matter how huge their crimes, are somehow more redeemable than the ‘dictators’, ‘autocrats’ and ‘despots’ of the third world – because westerners are inherently superior people.
Make no mistake, this rancid racism is at the heart of the apparently ‘socialist’ opposition to the building of a mass movement of solidarity with and unconditional support for the Islamic Republic in its titanic struggle against imperialism.
If they are ever to break the chains of their own exploitation by the capitalist-imperialist oligarchs at home, the masses in the west must break free from this chauvinist thinking – no matter how ‘Marxist’ or ‘left-wing’ its presentation appears to be.
We must build a real antiwar movement worthy of the name. One that enables the British working class to stand in unconditional solidarity with the Islamic Republic of Iran, with Ansar Allah-led Yemen, and with the real, fighting resistance forces in Palestine and Lebanon.
