>From a FB friend - One of the greatest moral failures of sections of the international left is their willingness to romanticise dictatorships simply because they posture as “anti-US.” In doing so, they erase the people actually living under those regimes- the thousands of prisoners, the tortured, the executed, the disappeared. The Kurds are being demonised once again for celebrating the death of the brutal Ayatollah and seen as agents of Western imperialism. As if our decades-long grievances hold no legitimacy, no historical grounding, and no moral claim to justice or self-determination.
Today I see leftists waving the flag of the Iranian Islamic Republic as if it were a symbol of resistance. It is not. It is the flag of a regime that for 47 years has imprisoned, tortured, and killed dissidents and systematically targeted minorities- especially Kurds, Baloch, and Baha’i communities. From Tehran to Sina, from Kermansha to Ilam, people have resisted this regime at enormous cost. They have filled prisons. They have filled cemeteries. And now they are celebrating because they lost 40,000 of them in a week at the hands of this regime! As Kurds, our political position has been consistent for decades: Jin, Jiyan, Azadi (Women, Life, Freedom, an ideology we introduced the rest of Iran to). Democracy. A confederal system in which oppressed peoples can govern their own lives, bodies, and lands. We also do not accept you replacing one tyrant with another. We do not trade clerical authoritarianism for nationalist authoritarianism. As Kurds, we are also not naïve: we know that when regional and global powers clash, it is often Kurdish lands that become battlefields. We have seen it in Rojava. We have seen it after the killing of our Jina Amini. We have seen it across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Our children are always among the first to die in wars we did not start. So when Kurds, and many Iranians of all backgrounds, express relief at the end of a ruler who presided over 36 years of repression, that reaction does not make us agents of imperialism. It makes us human, who have suffered immensely. You can oppose foreign intervention and still recognise that people have the right to breathe when a regime that brutalised them weakens or collapses- even when it is by means and methods outside of their control and authority. And surely we can see how hard they tried to topple the Iranian regime for years now! Did you not see the thousands of their bodies lined up on the streets of Iran?! What we reject, equally, are would-be replacements such as Reza Pahlavi, who promise “stability” while threatening to crush Kurdish democratic aspirations in the name of territorial integrity even before they have come to power. We have resisted authoritarianism from Tehran, Ankara, Baghdad, and Damascus. We will continue to resist oppressors, new or old, for as long as our human rights are denied. The blood of our martyrs is still soaking through the lands we live on, and we have given up too many of our best and brightest, our most revolutionary and courageous, to forgive and forget their sacrifices for us! As a stateless people, we have long been the easiest and the first to be sacrificed in the games of states. We do not ask the world to choose our oppressors more wisely. We ask it to stop choosing them at all. So stand with the women. Stand with the minorities. Stand with those building democratic life from below. Stand with the people who have paid for freedom in blood- not so another dictator can come into power, or so we can have endless discos and nightclubs across Iran (yeah, they are important too), but so that we can have dignity, women’s rights, democracy, inclusion, human rights, peace, stability, economic development, and equality for ALL, and not just certain elite sections of Iranian society! Anything less is not solidarity, but colonialism, orientalism, and violence by another means. Listen to the people, but especially the minorities who have been the most sacrificed, the most martyred, the most erased, the most silenced of all peoples of Iran. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40882): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40882 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/118074222/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
