An open letter in solidarity with political prisoners in Iran, published in The Guardian on Aug. 20 and signed by academics and writers from multiple countries, quickly generated a wave of vitriolic condemnations. Those reactions in turn evoked bewilderment and sorrow among many of those following the matter. As one of the signatories of the letter, and as a former political prisoner myself, I was shocked by their viciousness and belligerence, and now that that wave has subsided, I want to consider three responses to it.
The first is the unfortunate withdrawal by four Arab signatories in the days following the letter’s publication. The second is the sweeping campaign of digital harassment that followed, which appears to have been the strongest impetus behind some of the withdrawals. The third is the response of Iranian activists, former political prisoners and scholars, both inside and outside Iran, to these bullying attacks. But let us start with outlining the letter’s substance.
The letter declares the signatories’ solidarity with our fellow activists, students, thinkers, workers, artists and other political prisoners in Iran, who today find themselves caught between the two blades of a pair of scissors: the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the imperialist and Zionist aggression against Iran. Addressing the prisoners, the letter states: “On one side, you face the Islamic Republic that, from its inception, enforced absolute social and political control based on an exclusionary ideology.” It describes a system that claims to oppose imperial power while reproducing its very logic of domination through incarceration, torture and executions. On the other side, the prisoners face the aggression and violence of the same imperialist and Zionist powers that the Islamic Republic claims to oppose. The United States and Israel, the letter continues, instigate brutal wars, destroy civilian infrastructure, kill innocent schoolgirls and reduce those caught in their attacks to collateral damage in the pursuit of regional dominance. The letter’s condemnation of American-Israeli aggression leaves no ambiguity. One would have to be as cavalier in passing hostile judgments as the academic theorist Hamid Dabashi to claim, in commenting on the letter, that it calls for humanitarian intervention to liberate Iranian prisoners. It does no such thing.
The image of the two blades of the scissors was used by Iranian political prisoners themselves to describe their predicament, as the letter itself notes, as the Iranian activist Farah Mokhtarzadeh explained in a lengthy essay on the reactions to the letter, and as the Iranian scholar Fatemeh Shams reiterated in a more recent essay. Yet the image seems to have been interpreted as positing a symmetry, or an equivalence, between the Iranian government and the American and Israeli aggressors. This charge recurred throughout the attacks on the letter and was invoked by one of the Arab signatories who withdrew his name. But from what standpoint can this be understood as symmetry? If we were conducting a geopolitical analysis of the war, the objection might be pertinent. But from the standpoint of the Iranian regime’s victims, the political prisoners with whom the letter expresses solidarity, it is nothing of the sort.
Are Iranian political prisoners, including those sentenced to death, really expected to suspend their criticisms of the regime that imprisons them, tortures them, subjects them to sham trials and kills them simply because that regime is itself under external attack? Would it not be more appropriate to address this argument to the regime rather than to those who signed a letter in solidarity with its prisoners? To say, for instance, that Iran would stand on more just ground in confronting American and Israeli attacks if it released its political prisoners and developed a just legal system?
The letter was written precisely from the standpoint of solidarity with the victims, not from that of high politics, which seems to be the only standpoint the frenzied attacks on the letter can recognize. This situation raises a question seldom discussed on the global left: Who is the enemy? The habitual, easy answer is capitalism and its derivatives such as imperialism, colonialism and the rest. But what about those who torture and kill and commit massacres while raising anti-imperialist slogans? Why should the victims of massacres be expected to stand beside their executioners whenever a conflict happens to erupt between imperialism and those murderous subimperialisms (a term coined by the Brazilian thinker Ruy Mauro Marini)?
Even from a geopolitical point of view, the Islamic Republic is an imperialist interventionist power. It has pursued a policy of sectarian division in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, and bears a considerable share of responsibility for the crippling of these four countries. The leftist writer Vijay Prashad, one of the most vigorous proponents of the symmetry objection based on the image of the two blades of the scissors, displays no small degree of insensitivity to the suffering of Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis and Yemenis when he speaks of Iran’s use of these four countries as security buffers for its own protection, as though this were simply part of the desirable order of things; as though there were no societies and human lives in these countries; as though victims deserve solidarity only when their killers happen to be the official enemy.
And contrary to Dabashi’s polemic, which repeats three times that Iranian intellectuals were excluded from signing the letter and that it was never shown to any of them, Iranians themselves drafted the letter. Respected Iranian intellectuals wrote it and gathered the signatures. They preferred that the signatories be limited to non-Iranian intellectuals and former political prisoners. This is not merely a matter of respecting the agency of Iranian intellectuals and activists. It is intimately connected to the substance of a letter that understands those imprisoned in Iran as activists, thinkers, artists, workers and others.
The Arab scholars’ withdrawal from the letter was an unfortunate episode that should not have occurred. They were under no compulsion to sign the letter in the first place, as political prisoners in Iran and elsewhere may be compelled to sign “confessions” extracted under torture, or statements of repentance for their political, social and rights-based struggles.
It is unfortunate because those who withdrew their signatures leave us with only two possible judgments, neither of them favorable. Either they did not understand what they had signed and needed a demagogic campaign to open their eyes to the contents of the short text placed before them and read by them; their names had appeared among the signatories before being removed several days later. Or they faltered in the face of disparagement and aggressive denunciation and proved unable to muster the moral courage to stand by their position. The first possibility is implausible: We are speaking, after all, of thinkers, university professors and intellectuals of genuinely high standing. More regrettable still, only one of them explained his withdrawal, citing the misguided logic of the “asymmetry of power.” Those following the matter were left to learn of the others’ withdrawals from the attackers themselves and, of course, from watching the names disappear one after another from the list of signatories.
This raises uncomfortable questions about intellectuals and their political and moral responsibilities beyond the academic sphere or the boundaries of a particular specialization. Do we take a position only when doing so carries no political or moral consequences? Are we free of double standards in our stance toward the victims of imprisonment, torture and massacres, regardless of who the prisoners are, who practices the torture and who commits the massacres? And do we expect the victims themselves to share our position?
Intellectuals are rarely confronted with situations that test their physical courage, unlike Iranian political prisoners and others. But moral courage lies at the heart of what it means to be an intellectual. It is no less important than the ideas and meanings proclaimed in their books and works. Indeed, it was precisely this moral courage that led to their signatures being sought in the first place.
The legendary African-American activist and author Angela Davis, one of the signatories to the letter, responded to the pressure to withdraw her signature in simple terms: She would not. A longtime advocate on behalf of political prisoners worldwide, she said that she stood with Iran against American and Israeli aggression, and with Iran’s political prisoners against the Iranian government. This is a luminous example, and one worthy of emulation.
The second issue concerns what might be called virtual thuggery: frenzied campaigns of disparagement, reputational smearing, insult and obscenity, extending as far as accusations of being agents of NATO and U.S. intelligence agencies. These campaigns are rewarded when people submit to them, which, in this case, meant retreating from a position. Such submission only encourages those behind the attacks to go further, weakening everyone’s position and letting down the victims of oppression and discrimination who expect solidarity. In this instance, withdrawing one’s signature resembles the conduct of a strikebreaker.
Some of those mounting these attacks are what are known as “tankies,” named after those who cheered Soviet tanks as they crushed the Prague Spring in 1968 and, before it, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Most of them subscribe to what is known as campism, which today casts Iran and its allies, among them the late Assad regime in Syria, as a liberatory camp opposed to the imperialist camp.
That the Islamic Republic of Iran has shown itself to be a murderous and expansionist power, both within Iran and in several Arab countries, and that it is, in other words, a subimperial power, seems secondary in the eyes of American-centrists who recognize no struggle other than the struggle against U.S. imperialism. Every other struggle is subordinated to this one, even though, in the case of most of them, one would be hard-pressed to identify any actual contribution they themselves have made to it. If imperialism means the tendency toward expansion and annexation at the expense of other countries and societies, then subordinating every cause to a single great, central cause is itself a form of symbolic imperialism. It deserves radical critique, and the waging of symbolic wars to free ourselves from it.
Faced with the attacks of the tankies and campists, the response has been primarily Iranian. In addition to Mokhtarzadeh’s early article and Shams’ essay a few days ago, supporters of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement addressed a letter of appreciation to the signatories. Feminists for Jina published another letter supporting those who signed the solidarity letter. And roughly two weeks after the publication of the letter of solidarity with Iranian political prisoners, over one hundred Iranian intellectuals, artists and former political prisoners, some of whom currently live in Iran, published a letter of solidarity of their own, speaking in their own name and standing with the signatories of the original letter against digital bullying.
Behind this Iranian solidarity with the signatories of the letter for political prisoners lies a determination on the part of Iranians themselves to name and interpret their struggle against domestic tyranny and colonial domination on their own terms.
And yet it is unlikely that any of this will change these positions. There is something intellectually and morally fossilized in Western tankies — American ones in particular — connected to their inverted imperialism: their subordination of every struggle to one enormous struggle they imagine themselves to be waging.
They show little appetite for complexity. Nor do they develop more complex analyses that might ask, for example: How can imperialism be resisted while independent political organizations are crushed and even voices for social change are suppressed? Or more nuanced approaches that might demand the release of political prisoners and perhaps the formation of a government of national unity in the face of American-Israeli aggression.
Perhaps this is precisely why their limited political effectiveness, and indeed the intellectual poverty of their claims, is only matched by the loudness of their voices.
Translated from Arabic by Fatemeh Shams.
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