A recognizable conditioned reflex has been triggered within a specific segment of the Western public. It is not immediate solidarity, but caution. Not empathy, but suspicion. The obsession lies in one question: “Who is pulling the strings?” Faced with regime propaganda that brands every act of dissent as a “hybrid war” orchestrated by the CIA and Mossad, a vocal minority in the West ends up—more or less consciously—acting as an echo chamber for that very narrative.
The Conditioned Reflex: Between Solidarity and Suspicion
Let’s clarify the parameters immediately: the majority of the Western Left stands on the right side of history, as demonstrated by its support for the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. But the problem isn’t just the vocal minority actively cheering against the protesters. There is a vast gray area—a pervasive “unspoken” sentiment. These are people who do not support the regime, certainly, yet fail to muster any enthusiasm when a people rise up against an enemy of America. Theirs is not hostility, but emotional paralysis. It is an inability to connect with real suffering because that suffering does not fit neatly into their geopolitical framework.
The Repressed Lesson of 1979
There is a repressed historical precedent, a “primal scene” that explains this current blockage: Iran in 1979. When the revolution overthrew the Shah in February 1979, the Marxist Left was not marginal; it was the backbone of the uprising. The Fedayeen guerrillas controlled the streets, maintained offices across the country, and enjoyed immense prestige; the Tudeh (the pro-Soviet communist party) controlled key sectors of the oil industry. They had paid for decades of struggle against the Shah with prison time and blood.
Yet, when Khomeini seized power, the majority of that Left committed conscious political suicide. They chose to support the clergy. The logic, dictated by the Tudeh leadership, identified Khomeini as a religious reactionary, yes, but also as a man mobilizing the masses against the American “Great Satan.” Therefore, he was perceived as an anti-imperialist ally. The priority was to armor-plate the revolution against the USA; class struggle and civil rights could wait.
The outcome was grotesque. The Tudeh officially espoused the so-called “Imam’s Line.” They voted YES in the March 1979 referendum that established the “Islamic Republic” (juridically handing the country over to the mullahs). They denounced Amnesty International as a “tool of imperialism” when the NGO began documenting the first summary executions. They even betrayed the workers: the party sabotaged the shoras—spontaneous workers’ councils born in the factories—because Khomeini viewed them as a threat to central power. The Tudeh, faithful to Moscow’s line which preferred an anti-USA Islamist Iran to a socialist unknown, helped the regime disarm its own social base.
The West was not immune to this blindness. While intellectuals like Michel Foucault celebrated the “political spirituality” of the revolt, much of the European Left suspended judgment. Even when women were forced under the veil, even when the firing squads began for the Kurds, criticizing the regime felt like “playing the CIA’s game.” That conditioned reflex—tolerating internal butchery so as not to weaken an enemy of America—was not born today. It was born there, among the rubble of Tehran. And history presented the bill: in 1983, the regime, by then consolidated thanks to that silence, disposed of the “useful idiots.” The Tudeh was outlawed, its leaders forced to confess on TV to being spies, and thousands of left-wing militants ended up in the mass graves of 1988.
Post-Iraq Paranoia and the Overcorrection
The second element explaining the current paralysis is not ideological, but traumatic. The invasion of Iraq was a catastrophe founded on fabricated evidence (the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction), fought with brutality, and culminating in the disintegration of a state. Then came Libya in 2011. The NATO intervention, sold as a “Responsibility to Protect” civilians in Benghazi, rapidly transformed into regime change and ended with the total collapse of Libyan society: militias out of control, open-air slave markets, and endemic instability in the Mediterranean. No one should weep for a Saddam or a Gaddafi, but the sensation that popular discontent was weaponized for American strategic interests is difficult to deny.
These events generated a paranoid overcorrection. In the minds of a segment of the Western Left, a faulty algorithm has been installed: if a regime is an enemy of the West and faces an internal crisis, that crisis must be externally directed. Facing a public square filling with people, the first question ceased to be political (“What are the people asking for?”) and became forensic (“Who is funding them?”). It is a reaction born of previous burns, but it produces a perverse outcome: we end up applying an impossible standard of proof to unarmed activists, while granting the regime the benefit of the doubt. We accept the dictator’s narrative (“they are foreign agents,” “hybrid war”) because it confirms our bias that America is always the puppeteer.
Double Loneliness and the Palestinian Taboo
Masih Alinejad, the exiled Iranian journalist and activist, has frequently described this wound as a “double loneliness.” For her, the greatest pain was not discovering the brutality of the regime—that was expected—but seeing parts of the Western Left treat dissidents as suspects. It is as if protesting against a theocratic regime were automatically, in the eyes of some, “doing the bidding of the United States.” The result is that protesters felt betrayed by the very people who should have been their allies. The consequence of this reflex is that every demand for freedom, if it occurs in the “opposing camp,” is downgraded to a potential Trojan Horse of imperialism.
Palestine is the third element locking this unease in place. Iran arms and funds Hamas and Hezbollah and is the pivot of the self-styled “Axis of Resistance.” For much of the Left, criticizing Iran therefore represents a tactical taboo. The calculation is brutal: if Tehran is the only state militarily aiding Gaza, attacking it means doing a favor to Israel.
The cost of this calculation is the erasure of Iranian protesters. Women burning their veils become “inconvenient.” Tortured students become collateral damage. A hierarchy of victims is created where anti-Americanism holds more value than human rights. The worst betrayal is the feminist one. Iranian women found themselves alone facing a “Turbaned Patriarchy” that, solely by virtue of being an enemy of the USA, enjoys an inexplicable immunity among the very Left that should be closest to them.
The Bitter Conclusion of Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee
From Evin prison, Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee challenged Western hypocrisy with reasoning that allows for no rebuttal. In her clandestine letters, she asked what has changed since the 1970s: when people demonstrated against the Shah, the global Left called the dissidents “comrades”; today, when they demonstrate against the Islamic Republic, it calls them “naive.” Her conclusion is bitter: only the jailer has changed. Now that the oppressor is an enemy of America, for some, that is enough to make him less of an oppressor.
The fundamental problem is structural: for a slice of the Left, anti-imperialism has become an identity, not a method of analysis. They have stopped looking at real power dynamics, social classes, and economics. In their place is a rudimentary binary algorithm. The enemy is America, and anything that opposes the USA deserves the benefit of the doubt. Consequently, anything the West likes is, by definition, suspect.
This tribal posture divides the world into two camps (West vs. Anti-West) and demands one choose a side. This is not an ideological vice; it is a tribal one. The Right practices it the same way, defending whatever its allies do, ignoring crimes if committed by “friends.” But when this mechanism hits the Left—which historically defines itself as internationalist and on the side of the oppressed—it produces a particularly jarring short-circuit: people who speak of liberation end up justifying tyrants.
This moral compass is apparently convenient because it spares the effort of case-by-case analysis and allows one to prosper within their own clique. But the price is incredibly high: it impoverishes analysis, dissolves moral coherence, and erases entire populations.
This is anti-imperialism without the people. An anti-imperialism that has forgotten that regimes can be brutal regardless of their geopolitical alignment, and that Iranian women protesting are no less legitimate than the Chilean women who protested against Pinochet—even if the enemy this time is not pro-American, but anti-American.