It looks like Trump’s view of Iran’s fascist state and a big chunk of the Western Left’s view have basically converged, because they’ve landed in the same ugly place: treating the Islamic Republic as a legitimate adult in the room, and Iranians as background noise.
Trump is out here thanking a fascist regime for “cancelling” execution sentences, as if mass death sentences are a normal administrative policy that can be paused like a bad subscription. As if the regime deserves applause for not doing the thing it had no right to do in the first place. This is how normalization works: you turn the regime from perpetrator into partner, from executioner into negotiator. You take the knife out of the killer’s hand and hand them a microphone.
And then you have Roger Waters claiming the regime “listened” to shopkeeper protests, like this is some responsive government making democratic adjustments. That framing is poison. Fascist regimes don’t “listen” in the same way a society does. They calculate. They tighten and loosen pressure the way a boot shifts on a neck, not out of conscience, but to avoid losing control. A tactical retreat is not reform. A temporary pause is not accountability. A propaganda-friendly concession is not justice.
What’s striking is how similar the emotional payoff is for both camps.
For Trump-world, it’s the fantasy of the strongman deal: praise the regime, get a “gesture,” declare progress, move on. For a slice of the Western Left, it’s the fantasy of the anti-imperialist story staying clean: if the regime can be described as rational, pragmatic, and capable of “responding,” then it can be kept inside the comforting script where the main villain is always Washington, and the people being crushed by the regime are inconvenient footnotes.
Different ideologies, same outcome: the normalization of fascism.
And it’s not accidental. It runs on an old, patronizing, racist habit of looking at West Asia through the same colonial lens, whether it’s Trump or Waters. The lens says: we are the interpreters, you are the interpreted. We decide which deaths count, which struggles are “authentic,” which uprisings are “CIA,” which executions are “internal affairs,” which women’s bodies are “culture,” and which protests are “useful.”
Yes, foreign interference is real. Sanctions are real. Great-power games are real. But the oldest trick in the book is using those realities to downgrade the most immediate reality of all: the regime that beats, imprisons, tortures, shoots, and executes people to stay in power. The Islamic Republic doesn’t become less fascist because Washington is cynical. The prison doesn’t get softer because geopolitics is dirty. A bullet doesn’t slow down because someone can write a clever thread about imperialism.
And here’s where the Western liberal comfort zone really breaks people’s brains. The neoliberal left, especially, can’t grasp the political and intellectual foundations of an anti-capitalist uprising, so it clings to top-down storylines like a flotation device. That’s why they keep repeating “Pahlavi, Pahlavi, Pahlavi,” even though he has no real legitimacy inside Iran. It’s an easy narrative: neat, televised, familiar. A “leader,” a “transition,” a “plan.” Something that looks like their own politics, just in a different accent.
Video: Sabalan Street, Tehran, Thursday, January 8. The East Tehran Tax Administration building, what a symbol, what a place, for tearing down capitalism’s discriminatory “order”…
But they can’t answer the basic question that ruins the whole fantasy: if this was just a scripted project from above, why did thousands of people in hundreds of cities pour into the streets, and why did the regime shoot them? Do you assume these people are ignorant and got fooled? If so, then why aren’t the ones who showed up at the regime’s state rallies counted as the “fooled” ones on the other side?
Because admitting that would mean admitting the script is a lie. It would mean recognizing that the reality on the ground is messier, more radical, more classed, more feminist, more explosive, and far more dangerous to the global comfort order than the TV version they’ve been sold.
We Iranians don’t need Western saviors. It’s actually up to us Iranians today to build an anti-fascist front: rooted in workers, women, students, and the crushed majority; independent from foreign patrons; ruthless about naming the immediate oppressor; and serious about organizing power from below. The West can either stop getting in the way or keep proving, again and again, that it prefers a “stable” fascism to a real liberation.
The Human Shield Script
The Islamic regime’s army chief says, “If our young forces wanted to confront the protesters with the full power of weapons, they could have rounded everyone up in two hours. But because the ‘rioters’ were using ‘human shields,’ our forces defended the country and the people only by risking their own lives.”
This claim is familiar. Over the past two years, Israel has used the same story, saying Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as “human shields”, to justify genocide. The similarity is not an accident; it’s a technique. Fascist-style narratives always look for a moral excuse for violence. They turn killing from a choice into something “forced,” and they reduce the victim from a human being into a “tool.”
When you say “human shield,” you strip people of their names, faces, and right to live, and you turn them into objects in a scene of war and repression. Then the shooter presents himself as the savior: “We could have ended it fast, but we had morals.” That is the truth turned upside down: the killer becomes the victim, and the victim becomes the guilty one.
In Iran, the label “rioter” does the same job as the label “terrorist” does in Gaza. It removes politics from protest, and it removes humanity from the dead body. Then, “human shield” is used to wash responsibility away from every bullet. If a child is killed, if a passerby falls, if bodies are wrapped in plastic, the story is ready: “They hid behind the people.”
This single phrase works like a full machine: it numbs society, discredits witnesses, and dries up empathy. Fascism doesn’t begin with raw hate; it begins with controlling language. First, it takes the words, then it takes the lives.
And today’s fascism is not only boots and batons; it’s a storytelling industry. Media, official platforms, and an army of slogans work together to knead reality like dough: repression becomes “defense,” murder becomes “necessary,” and people become “shields.” This is the logic of impunity: if the victim is not treated as fully human, then no crime is seen as a crime.
That’s exactly why we need a third path: not siding with state repression in the name of “security” and “unity,” and not excusing militarism and state terror in the name of “self-defense.” A third path means standing firmly with ordinary people: women, workers, children, citizens, and refugees. It means politics from below, independent organizing, blunt truth-telling, and solidarity that doesn’t get trapped by propaganda or by states’ narrative wars.
A third path means opposing occupation and mass killing in Palestine, while also opposing repression and mass killing in Iran. It means an anti-war position that can stand with Ukraine without hesitation, and defend Rojava against Islamic reaction. Against dehumanization in every costume.
You can’t defeat fascism by choosing between two lies. You have to break the lying machine, and that takes independent social power, an awake conscience, and real organizations on the ground.
