A Revolution That Is Dead, A Discourse That Is Alive

"We revolted/ What a mistake we made" has been one of the slogans heard in recent protests in Iran; protests that directly target the legitimacy of the Islamic Revolution and question its very essence. An intuitive understanding of what is happening in Iran will also support the claim that the Islamic Revolution is dead. However, the reality is that as confidently as one can assert the death of the Islamic Revolution, one can equally testify that the discourse of 57 (the year of the revolution) is still alive. In fact, the effort of this piece is to differentiate between the Islamic Revolution and the discourse of 57 and the necessity of confronting the latter; why confronting a concept that is no longer alive is nothing but a waste of time. The Islamic Revolution was one of the outputs of the discourse of 57 and, of course, its "dominant" output. This discourse had other branches that were crushed under the wheels of the Islamic Republic, and this event placed them in a heavy halo of victimhood, confronting their record with a historical embarrassment. However, the crushing in the gears of the Islamic judicial system and the necessity of respecting human rights in the name of humanity should not lead to the neglect of recognizing those currents and the need for media struggle against them. Those currents, each of which were fragments of the discourse of 57, are still alive and seriously breathe in the political space of Iran, and their representatives sometimes appear in the media as public prosecutors. It can be said with confidence that "anti-imperialism" or, as Marxists would say, "anti-imperialism" has been the central point and "central signifier" of the discourse of 57. This anti-imperialism present in today's political space of Iran, which has caused many victims of the Islamic Republic to seek refuge in it, has an immediate root in the discourse of 57. The fact that for some activists in Iran's political space, anti-Americanism holds more value than the quest for freedom is a repetition of the same story from those years; with the difference that it is hard to speak of public favor towards it. There is no need to repeat the volume of anti-American statements made by Ayatollah Khomeini as the undisputed leader of the Islamic Revolution. Khomeini's anti-Americanism was much more pronounced than his opposition to the Soviet Union or Western Europe. Even before the victory of the Islamic Revolution and during critical days in Paris, when negotiations between revolutionaries and the Carter administration were ongoing, Khomeini did not retreat from his anti-American slogans and alongside naming Mohammad Reza Shah as the first obstacle to Iran's progress, he labeled America as the "second barrier" to Iran's advancement and a factor of backwardness. The leftists of that era were also in agreement with Khomeini on this issue. For example, consider the statement of Vida Hajabi, one of the most prominent Marxist activists before the revolution: "Did we accept freedom during the revolution? Which of the leftist activists in Iran accepted freedom? Now, let alone which ones supported or did not support the regime. Freedom was bad in our view. Freedom was seen as liberal and human rights were sanctioned... In the protests against the mandatory hijab, many, including myself, did not participate. Because we thought the hijab did not matter and we were only thinking about getting rid of the Shah... We considered the anti-imperialist struggle to be more important than anything else." And who does not know that the embodiment of imperialism for the leftists of that time was the United States? Based on this, it is not so unclear why these so-called opponents of the Islamic Republic were not in solidarity with the protesting people in December 2017. People who consider the established government their "enemy" and say: "Our enemy is right here/ They are lying, it's America," people who turn their backs on the Friday prayer leader selected by Khamenei and bravely say: "Back to the enemy/ Towards the homeland," people who explicitly said in the street: "Where is our money going/ Iraq, Yemen, or Syria," are not people who can satisfy the anti-imperialist sentiments of these individuals. An opposition that mourns anti-Americanism for August 1953, two years before Iran 1400, and whose fundamental view of foreign policy and international relations does not differ significantly from that of the rulers in Tehran, is not an opposition that can consider itself in line with the above slogans. As they showed in December 2017, they are silent companions of the Islamic Republic in suppressing people who do not chant their desired slogans. National suffering for them, at best, takes a secondary position, and initially, it is these ideological criteria that serve as the ruler for their decision-making on whether to support or not support the protesters. This spectrum, due to historical and political reasons - which cannot be elaborated here - lacks the capacity to present affirmative theses in the realm of political change. Their emotional/political dependency on the principle of "elections" in the Islamic Republic clearly illustrates this point. The "elections" that the leadership of the Islamic Republic, along with its appointees, directs but gives this spectrum the illusion of influence. However, this spectrum has destructive power; it has the ability to create obstacles. Clouding the analytical space and blaming "imperialism" for the current miserable state is daily issued by representatives of this spectrum on social media. In the final confrontation, they are soldiers of the sacred regime. As evidence of this claim, one can refer to May 2018. In this month, this "opposition" issued a statement regarding the transfer of the US embassy to Israel - which has no connection to the fate of Iranians - and that too in Persian, while they did not even write two lines of condolence for the victims of December 2017. The important point is that most signatories of this statement are either yesterday's guerrillas/today's tie-wearers or belong to the "reformists" and their close tendencies; some of them also try to maintain their distance from the "reformists" under the guise of "seeking transformation" based on a politically opportunistic suspicion; but ultimately, like the second Khordad continuity seekers, they are in search of a "moderate leadership." However, if you set aside all these differences and "family disputes," you can trace the footprints of all of them in the discourse of 57 through a political-historical tracking; a position where they all line up and bow their heads at a threshold. Those who present themselves as opponents of the Islamic Republic and appear in the media under this title, but in reality, are representatives of the discourse of 57 across the water. This discourse must be targeted, and in its place, an Iran-centered, secular, and democracy-seeking discourse must be introduced, whose main demand is to change the discriminatory and corruption-inducing laws of the Islamic Republic and in this path, it seeks international support and pressure as well. As Vaclav Havel - the late leader of the Czechoslovak freedom movement - explicitly stated: "It can be clearly said that any support from abroad is legitimate and can be accepted. Dictatorial regimes often tend to claim that their opponents are puppets of intelligence services or foreign capital or that they receive money from an imperialist power. But we who know that these claims are meaningless." The views expressed in this note do not reflect the views of Radio Farda.