The intensification of mass killings, repression, and social suffocation in Iran has been accompanied by a parallel violence in discourse. This violence takes two dominant and seemingly opposed forms, each racist in its own way, each denying Iranians political subjectivity and the right to self-determination.
One emerges from both western liberalism and the far right, cloaked in the language of “liberation” but grounded in militarism, monarchism, and imperial alignment. The other comes from sections of the contemporary left, where Iranian suffering is filtered exclusively through a supposedly anti-imperialist lens but which ultimately mirrors the ideological logic of the Islamic Republic itself. Though these positions present themselves as antagonistic, they converge in their erasure of Iranian agency and lived struggle.
Imperialist militarized “Salvation” and the Denial of Self-Determination
Whether its MAGA on one end, or EU leaders on the other, both far-right and liberal discourse on Iran frame Iranians not as political actors but as a population to be rescued, disciplined, or reconfigured through external force. This racism relies less on overt dehumanization than on a paternalistic denial of political maturity. Iranians are imagined as incapable of overthrowing tyranny without Western intervention, dynastic restoration, or alignment with imperial power.
The monarchist project embraced by sections of the Iranian diaspora exemplifies this logic. It represents a fundamental rupture with any politics of transnational solidarity. Reza Pahlavi’s official visit to apartheid Israel during an ongoing genocide was not a symbolic misstep; it was a declaration of political allegiance. That alignment with settler-colonial violence, Western militarism, and the global security order reveals the true contours of this project. It is not about collective liberation, but about the reinstallation of power through imperial sponsorship.
This alignment is not incidental. The Pahlavi camp is deeply enmeshed in U.S. weapons industries, security contractors, and pro-Zionist political networks. Its vision of “democracy” is inseparable from sanctions regimes, militarization, and regional domination. Such a project demands that Iranians accept their own disposability – bombing framed as a pathway to freedom, mass death rationalized as collateral damage for “regime change.” This is racism dressed up as concern: a worldview in which Iranian lives are expendable so long as geopolitical objectives are met.
For Iranians, liberation has always been double-sided. It is simultaneously anti-imperialist and anti-dictatorial. Any politics that demands resistance to clerical authoritarianism while endorsing imperial violence abroad merely replaces one form of domination with another. Bombs do not weaken systems of power; they fall first on workers, women, children, and the most marginalized, while providing the state with renewed justification for repression. There is no emancipation in serving imperial power, and no future for Iran in alliances with apartheid states, arms dealers, or dynastic fantasies.
The Racism of a Certain “Left”: Reduction, Conspiracy, Erasure
If the far right denies Iranian self-determination through militarized domination, sections of the left deny it through epistemic erasure. This form of racism operates by reducing Iranian uprisings to mere byproducts of Western interference, intelligence operations, or abstract “anti-imperialist contradictions.” In this framework, Iranian suffering is never allowed to speak for itself; it must always be explained away.
As some Iranian writers have exposed this ‘leftist’ posture treats Iran as an object rather than a site of lived struggle. Popular uprisings are met not with solidarity, but suspicion. Mass protests, feminist resistance, labor organizing, and youth rebellion are reframed as conspiracies, psy-ops, or media fabrications. In doing so, this discourse reproduces the Islamic Republic’s own narrative, that dissent is foreign-engineered, illegitimate, and therefore disposable.
This is not anti-imperialism; it is a selective conscience. It positions Islamic Republic as a perpetual victim of Western aggression while rendering its victims invisible. Iranian women resisting compulsory veiling, workers striking under lethal conditions, prisoners facing execution, and families mourning the murdered are all subordinated to a geopolitical abstraction. Their demands for freedom are treated as inconveniences to a rigid ideological framework.
This stance is racist because it denies Iranians the complexity routinely afforded to Western subjects. It assumes that people living under dictatorship cannot generate genuine political movements, cannot think beyond imperial scripts, and cannot articulate emancipatory futures on their own terms. Iranian voices are either instrumentalized or dismissed, never taken seriously as theory-producing, history-making agents.
Against Erasure: Toward a Politics of Shared Liberation
For huge numbers of the people rising up, the uprising is neither a nostalgic appeal to monarchy nor a proxy battlefield for great-power rivalry. It is mainly a rejection of systems that deny popular agency – clerical authoritarianism, imperial intervention, and dynastic restoration alike. Monarchy, as a political form, stands in direct contradiction to the principles animating Iran’s popular movements: collective self-determination, class struggle, feminist liberation, and radical democracy.
True transnational solidarity begins by refusing both forms of racism. It requires listening to Iranians as political subjects, not symbols. It demands a politics that is anti-imperialist without excusing dictatorship, and anti-authoritarian without embracing imperial violence. Iranian liberation cannot be delivered by airstrikes, sanctions, or crowned exiles, nor can it be postponed indefinitely in the name of geopolitical purity.
Iran’s future will be built through struggles that are inseparable from the shared fights of oppressed peoples everywhere – from Iran to Palestine and beyond. Any framework that asks Iranians to choose between opposing domestic repression and opposing imperial violence is not emancipatory. Liberation is indivisible, or it is not liberation at all.
