[The international left should affirm Iranian protesters’
feminist and democratic message of “Women, Life, Freedom.” If we
don’t, we risk ceding the public discourse to neoconservatives and
liberal hawks who will use the protests for their own purposes. ]
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IRANIAN PROTESTERS DESERVE THE UNWAVERING SUPPORT OF THE
INTERNATIONAL LEFT  
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Khosrow Golsorkhi
November 5, 2022
Jacobin
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_ The international left should affirm Iranian protesters’ feminist
and democratic message of “Women, Life, Freedom.” If we don’t,
we risk ceding the public discourse to neoconservatives and liberal
hawks who will use the protests for their own purposes. _

Nasibe Samsaei, an Iranian woman living in Turkey, cuts her ponytail
off during a protest outside the Iranian consulate in Istanbul,
September 21, 2022. , ASIN AKGUL / AFP via Getty Images

 

For more than a month now, anti-government protests have been
spreading throughout Iranian society — in the streets, on university
campuses, at high schools and middle schools, in front of coffee
shops, on the metro and other public transit, and most recently among
workers in the oil and petrochemical industries. While it is always
prudent to approach the Western coverage of these events with
suspicion, it’s clear that the Islamic Republic is facing its worst
crisis of legitimacy since its inception forty-three years ago.

For decades, the Iranian state has responded to eruptions of public
anger with brutal repression. In July 1999, security forces attacked
university students
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protesting the closure of a pro-reform newspaper. The retaliation
sparked a week of unrest across the country, which was met with a
systematic campaign of arrests and killings. A decade later, in the
aftermath of the 2009 presidential election, millions poured into the
streets
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contest the suspicious outcome. In response, the country’s military
and security apparatus arrested thousands of protesters and activists,
killing several others.

In that sense, today’s protests and the state’s response are a
repetition of earlier dramas in Iranian political life. Still, there
is something observably different this time around. It’s astonishing
to witness a movement led by girls and young women bravely rising up
against forty-three years of institutionalized gender repression. The
international left should affirm its feminist and democratic message
instead of ceding the public discourse to neoconservatives and liberal
hawks who want to use the protests for their own purposes.

Women, Life, Freedom

September 13, 2022, will forever mark a pivotal moment in the history
of Iran. That evening, outside a train station in Tehran, Mahsa Zhina
Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman visiting her family in the
capital, was confronted by the so-called morality police — a
religious force tasked with reprimanding, arresting, and detaining
people who flout the country’s religious dress code. The morality
police are widely disliked in Iran, even drawing criticism
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in 2010 from the conservative then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Three days after the morality police approached her in Tehran, Mahsa
died in a hospital under deeply suspicious circumstances. The women
who had ridden along in the detention van with her would later tell
her family that she was beaten while in custody.

In the days following Amini’s death, thousands of women took to the
streets, symbolically burning their headscarves, cutting their hair,
and chanting “Women, Life, Freedom,” “Death to the dictator,”
and “Down with the oppressor, whether it’s the king or the supreme
leader.” Photos and videos began to stream out of the country
showing high schoolers and university students, predominantly women,
joining the protests in their classrooms and on university campuses.

True to form, the Iranian government responded swiftly and brutally.
Security forces were immediately deployed to major cities, where they
violently attacked and killed protesters and arrested journalists,
athletes, and lawyers alleged to be provoking unrest.

Inside Voices

It’s not easy to reach friends and family inside Iran these days.
With every new rumbling of protest, the regime shuts or slows down the
internet to stall communications between people living in Iran and
advocates living abroad. This breakdown of communication often creates
an informational and epistemic vacuum, making it hard to know whose
expertise to consult and which voices to trust and amplify.

“The expatriate monarchists outside the country do not represent
us,” writes an Iranian friend in a private message on Instagram,
requesting anonymity for fear of reprisal. She’s referring to the
sizable community of monarchists — ostensibly led by the Crown
Prince Reza Pahlavi, who fled Iran right around the 1979 revolution
— who often carry large sums of stolen public wealth with them.
“We just want what is ours, basic human rights,” she tells me.
“We don’t want the exiled prince to return and rule the country.
We just want to bequeath a better future to the next generation.”

Coverage of Iran in the US media is often filtered through the lens of
US national security interests, promoting an image of a society mired
in religious zealotry and backwardness. But in holding steadfast to
this framework, American media has created an incomplete picture of
Iran as a society totally controlled by irrational Islamists. In
reality, Iranian society has undergone complex changes
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decades, witnessing the emergence of robust social movements led by
women, students, and workers.

While the women of Iran have long struggled against patriarchal
strictures, something about these protests is palpably different.
There are at least two attributes that separate this most recent wave
of protests from earlier iterations of popular unrest.

First, the protesters are very young. In video after video, we see
Iran’s Gen Z, the so-called _daheye-hashtadia_, intrepidly taking to
the streets to protest a regime armed with guns and bullets. Nika
Shakarami, a protester whose body was found at the back of a courtyard
a week after Amini’s death, was just sixteen years old. Sarina
Esmailzadeh, who was killed when security forces beat her on the head
with batons at a protest in Alborz province, was also sixteen. As
countless other victims remain missing or unnamed, it’s likely that
there are more teenagers among them.

These protests are being largely led by the girls and young women of
Gen Z. “Gen Z does not necessarily follow a political ideology or
theory,” a woman in Tehran tells me over Twitter, also requesting
anonymity. “They are technologically savvy, highly educated, and are
tired of the regime intruding into their lives. Like Zoomers
elsewhere, they want to freely express themselves, wear whatever they
want, get tattoos, dance, make music, and party. They don’t care
about ideology or politics and therefore do not fear the regime in a
way that perhaps our generation has. That is precisely why the regime
cannot contain them.”

Second, unlike previous protest movements, these protesters have no
fealty to any particular leader but are rather animated by an image
and an ideal, captured in the tragic figure of Mahsa Zhina Amini.
“Some have remarked that the movement doesn’t have a leader,” an
Iranian writer tells me, also requesting anonymity, “but I would
argue the leader is Zhina/Mahsa. And she is the perfect leader: a
sinless, nonpolitical young woman. She cannot be defamed, imprisoned,
house arrested, or exiled.”

The security apparatus in Iran appears increasingly incapable of
responding to the protests because, for the first time, they can’t
harass or intimidate a leader into silence. “For every youth killed,
many more are animated,” the writer says. “Every funeral and
remembrance procession becomes another protest.”

Outside Choices

Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister
whose government was overthrown in a CIA-engineered coup, famously
said of his return to political activism in his old age, “If I sit
silently, I have sinned.” What can we, those on the outside with a
commitment to justice, offer in support of those courageously taking
to the streets?

As the protests in Iran enter their second month and show no sign of
subsiding, the international left must formulate a way to effectively
express solidarity with those on the inside without inadvertently
falling prey to the imperialist maneuvering of Western actors and
their allies. This task is hardly straightforward. Naturally, many on
the Left are apprehensive about participating in a discourse
traditionally overdetermined by state-sponsored propaganda. But it is
imperative that we not remain silent in the face of observable
oppression.

While, in recent years, the Iranian state has nominally allied itself
with the leftist governments of the Global South, inside the country
things have gotten more politically and socially dire, as a young
population grows restless under the weight of economic sanctions,
systematic internal corruption, and social repression. How can a
government claim to uphold the values of justice internationally while
responding to democratic demands at home with bullets, metal pellets,
beatings, killings, and abductions?

We can’t abandon Iranians to struggle in isolation, and we can’t
cede the public debate to neoliberal and neoconservative actors whose
interest in the fate of Iran and Iranians is entirely driven by their
desire for global capitalist market expansion and US hegemony. We must
vocally condemn the actions of the Islamic Republic while
simultaneously rejecting the calls for more indiscriminate economic
sanctions from the interventionist West. We must begin to lay the
groundwork for a grassroots network of solidarity, through which we
can engage and learn from the people inside about their vision of a
free and democratic Iran.

The shape that such forms of outside support might concretely take is
open for debate. One approach is to adopt the calls for boycotts of
the state institutions of the Islamic Republic, as proposed
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Freedom. Whether or not we adopt this approach, socialists should at
minimum publicly express support for the protests and protesters. We
should not hesitate to embrace and echo the rallying cry coming out of
Iran: Women. Life. Freedom.

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* Mahsa Zhina Amini
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* Iranian Women Protests; Support for Iranian Women;
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