Let’s be blunt. Kidnapping, arresting, or killing a political figure of one country by another state is defined as illegal in international law, not because powerful states suddenly became humane, but because even ruling elites after World War II understood that if this logic isn’t contained, competition between states turns into permanent chaos and endless war. Those rules were written to manage war between states, not to protect people.
And that’s exactly why enforcement was never equal from day one. For the weak, the law is a whip. For the powerful, it’s a display case. Where real force backs it, the law bends. Where it doesn’t, it gets applied with full “principle.” So if someone is now complaining about “violations of international law” with a moral pose, they should first answer one simple question: who enforces the law, with what power, and with what balance of forces?
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Here’s the point: a lot of the same people crying crocodile tears for “international law” today stayed silent for years, or made excuses when those exact rights and that so-called “universal human rights” were being crushed in oppressed countries. When there was domestic repression, prison, torture, executions, and physical elimination, they either called it a “security issue” or hid it under a geopolitical umbrella.
This isn’t just a moral slip-up; it’s a political failure. Because the result is that even in their own countries, real politics gets pulled away from society, the field gets handed to the right and the security crowd, and the right sells war and policing at home by building a “monster” abroad.
When you erase oppressed people, you basically hand your opponent their best weapon: they point and say, “See? These people don’t even understand the victim’s pain,” and then they use that excuse to push military budgets, security laws, and war projects. That’s the inside-outside connection: failing to name repression over there strengthens political defeat and disorganization over here.
So let’s drop the slogans and talk power. “International law” without social agency, without organization, without pressure from below, is just a word. The real question is: where is your social power to stop this process? People in Iran and much of West Asia are being crushed at the same time by internal authoritarianism, a looting economy, and foreign intervention.
They don’t have free media, independent unions, the right to protest, or even basic safety. Expecting the same people who are struggling to survive day to day to also carry the burden of stopping the global war machine is a bitter joke. And if in the powerful countries themselves real movements, strong unions, and class politics have been weakened, the outcome is obvious: states turn “rights” into tools, they decorate with them when useful and kick them aside when not.
There’s another contradiction that gets conveniently ignored. Yes, Western states commit crimes, impose sanctions, start wars, and sometimes even justify genocide. But the political structure inside those countries is not comparable to an eliminationist authoritarian system. There are still legal, media, and institutional spaces for struggle there; here, struggle gets answered with prison, torture, and physical removal.
This distinction is not an excuse for anyone’s crimes, it’s a basic requirement for serious analysis. If you erase this difference, you end up normalizing authoritarianism, and then you try to build an anti-war politics using the same language of normalization. It won’t work.
Any reasonable person in those societies will ask: why should a current that stays silent about repression elsewhere, or rationalizes it be trusted to represent freedom here? That one question collapses the whole anti-war performance. And that collapse isn’t just about losing “credibility.” The cost gets paid by the very people under bombs and under repression.
This is where the real problem shows itself: parts of the Western left, because they’re hollowed out at home, move the battlefield somewhere else. They reduce Iran to “foreign war” and “ready-made replacement projects,” because confronting their own state and their own war machine requires real social power, not just vibes and hashtags.
When you don’t have agency, your analysis becomes watching states play chess and choosing between two poles. But emancipatory politics starts exactly here: putting people back at the center, and fighting both machines at once — the machine of internal repression and the machine of foreign war. If you can’t see both at the same time, your “exposés” fall apart with a few basic questions.
And lastly: I’m not here as an influencer chasing likes with a few photos and clips. I’m here because I have an argument and a critique. No matter how many people reading, I’m trying to make one thing clear: politics isn’t a clean, low-cost moral game. Politics is balance of forces, organization, and defending people’s lives without excuses. Any discourse that erases people will sooner or later end up serving the very power it claims to fight.
On the dirty moral logic of imperialism
They buried the brutal killing of protesters on January 8–9 under ready-made labels: “foreign interference,” “Mossad,” “CIA.” In other words, instead of naming the killer, they blamed the victim. That’s the classic job of ideology: turning people’s blood into a “security file,” and turning politics into the management of crime. And don’t forget the earlier massacres too, and the cold indifference toward the progressive Woman, Life, Freedom movement.
But now, when a fascist dies at the hands of that same war machine, suddenly they’re mourning. Suddenly they’re doing “moral concern” and giving fancy speeches about “Iranians’ right to live.” As if the right to live is a conditional privilege: if you fit inside the story power wants, you count as “human.” If you don’t, you’re either an “agent” or a “necessary cost.”
This is political division of labor in service of the existing order. Imperialism needs a “good victim” to justify intervention, and a “bad victim” to justify silence. Left or right, it doesn’t matter, the double standard is the same: in one place, killing protesters is dismissed as “propaganda”; in another place, mass killing is sold as “preemptive self-defense.” The result is always the same: people have to die so the plan can move forward.
The world needs a different left, a left that speaks from the standpoint of real people and class, not from the angle of states and ideology or oligarchs. A left with a consistent standard, not one that changes with flags: against war, against repression, against the killing of civilians, against both machines: the machine of internal repression and the machine of foreign war.
For years, the Western left has replaced real organizing and real solidarity with moral performance and political poses. And the “Iran case” has exposed that bankruptcy in full daylight. Iran isn’t just a “topic.” It’s a test. Any force that goes silent in front of real blood, or ends up repeating the language of power, has kept only the name of emancipatory politics.
Long live the left, except the Western one…
