Sirantos Fotopoulos - Open Letter to the Anti Imperialist Left

To those on the Left who speak fluently of genocide, apartheid, and colonial domination, this letter is addressed to you.

There is a spectacle unfolding within segments of the self-proclaimed radical Left that would be laughable were it not so morally disfiguring. With righteous fury, you denounce the siege of Gaza, the expansion of West Bank settlements, and the normalization of far-Right ethnonationalism. These condemnations are justified. Yet when that same analytical machinery encounters the Islamic Republic of Iran, a clerical state consolidated through mass executions, sustained by routine imprisonment and torture, and enforced through gender apartheid and religious policing, the machinery suddenly stalls. What follows is evasion masquerading as sophistication.

Your failure is epistemological. It reveals a mode of analysis in which power is condemned only when it wears the recognizable insignia of Western Empire. Domination exercised by non-Western actors is treated as theoretically opaque, as though Western imperialism were the only historically operative structure capable of producing systemic violence. A framework like this provincializes power and leaves its operations unanalyzed.

Your evasion follows from a deliberate theoretical substitution that elevates geopolitical hostility to the United States and Israel above any substantive commitment to emancipation. Your politics collapses into a barren syllogism: if a regime positions itself against Western power, it must therefore be defended, or at minimum shielded from serious critique. Oppression becomes tolerable so long as it is administered by the correct enemy.

This substitution marks a profound degeneration of anti-imperialist thought. Imperialism, once understood as a historically specific mode of accumulation, governance, and coercion, becomes a moral talisman, a signifier so totalizing that it abolishes the need for further inquiry. The result is a vulgarized Third Worldism, emptied of attentiveness to class struggle and mass emancipatory politics and reduced to a crude aesthetics of state opposition.

Classic Third Worldist traditions, at their best, insisted on popular agency: peasants, workers, women, the colonized acting against both imperial domination and indigenous ruling classes. Much of the Western Left now performs a hollowed-out caricature: a state-centric geopolitics that treats regimes as theatrical avatars of resistance. In practice, it becomes nationalist fetishism that excuses state violence and, often, embraces it. Culpability with the mass slaughter in Iran also rests squarely on you.

This is campism in its purest and most degraded form, a worldview in which history is flattened into two opposing blocs and all internal contradictions are dismissed by fiat. Your logic is infantilizing: cheer for whoever happens to be punching the larger bully, even if that same figure is simultaneously beating women, hanging dissidents, and grinding workers into submission. In this schema, the oppressed lose their standing as subjects of struggle. They become symbolic currency, invoked only when their suffering can be leveraged against Western villainy.

From a theoretical standpoint, campism smuggles Cold War realism back into left discourse under the banner of radicalism. States become the primary agents of history. Power is measured by posture rather than social relations. The internal composition of regimes disappears, replaced by an external orientation that substitutes for analysis.

The actual history of the Iranian state shatters your fantasy, which is precisely why you abstract it away. This is a regime that, in 1988, carried out the mass execution of 30,000 political prisoners in a matter of weeks: leftists, communists, trade unionists, many of whom had already served their sentences, murdered through secret tribunals whose members still occupy positions of power today. It is a regime that has spent decades dismantling independent labor organizing, from the imprisonment of Tehran bus drivers to the repeated arrests and floggings of the Haft-Tapeh sugar-cane workers for demanding unpaid wages and worker control. It is a regime that enforces compulsory veiling through armed morality patrols, criminalizes same-sex intimacy with punishments up to death, and coerces queer people into state-sanctioned medical violence to preserve clerical doctrine. These are structural conditions of rule.

Ignoring this history amounts to abandoning any serious theory of the state. The Islamic Republic functions as a coherent political formation that fuses clerical authority, security apparatuses, and nationalist ideology into a durable system of domination. Its violence is constitutive. Any Marxism, any Leftism that cannot recognize this collapses into state fetishism.

When popular resistance erupts, the pattern remains unmistakable. In 2009, millions took to the streets during the Green Movement, only to be met with bullets, mass arrests, and televised forced confessions. In 2019, fuel-price protests were drowned in blood as security forces killed hundreds in a matter of days. In 2022, following the murder of Mahsa Amini in morality police custody, women tore off their hijabs, workers struck, students occupied campuses, and entire regions rose in defiance, and they were met with executions, disappearances, and prison sentences designed to terrorize a generation into silence.

These cycles of revolt and repression reveal a state that treats popular mobilization as an existential threat and responds accordingly. Any Left analysis that treats these uprisings as secondary to geopolitical positioning abandons the most basic commitment of socialist theory.

And yet, when these uprisings occur, many of you respond with suspicion rather than solidarity. The agency of Iranian women, workers, and students is immediately interrogated. Their rebellions are reframed as covert NATO, U.S., and Israeli operations. Their dead are mourned conditionally, if at all. Their movements are evaluated by alignment with your preferred geopolitical script rather than by their articulated demands: bodily autonomy, labor dignity, freedom from clerical domination. Whatever fails to fit campist logic gets treated as contamination and discarded.

Your posture reveals a deeply authoritarian bent, one inherited from statist dictatorships and reinforced by anti-political habits of geopolitical thinking. It claims to oppose domination while reproducing domination at the level of interpretation, denying agency to the oppressed whenever it disrupts your comfort.

This amounts to a catastrophic theoretical failure. A critique of imperialism that refuses to analyze non-Western authoritarianism becomes analytically incoherent. It reproduces the state-centric logic it claims to oppose, mistaking opposition to U.S. power for emancipation itself. Violence becomes excusable when it is rhetorically anti-Western. Resistance becomes romanticized without reference to its social content. Domination becomes tolerable so long as it wears the correct ideological costume.

Your so-called anti-imperialism then functions as an identity that polices discourse, disciplines dissent, and forecloses solidarity across inconvenient lines. The result is orthodoxy.

The systematic erasure of agency follows from this posture, and many of you now participate in it. Iranian feminists who reject both U.S. and Israeli bombs and clerical rule are rendered unintelligible. Iranian workers who oppose sanctions because they devastate the poor, while also opposing the regime that jails them, are dismissed as contradictions rather than comrades. Iranian queer activists who resist both theocracy and Western caricature are reduced to abstractions. People who refuse the false choice between empire and tyranny expose campism as an intellectual fraud, which is why their struggle gets ignored.

This erasure performs ideological labor. It stabilizes a worldview that cannot accommodate multiplicity, contradiction, or autonomous struggle. Denying agency becomes easier than revising theory and history.

When politics is organized primarily around animus toward the United States rather than solidarity with the oppressed, moral judgment atrophies. Hatred replaces analysis. Reflex replaces thought. Anti-imperialism loses emancipatory content and reappears as a cynical posture that manages suffering rather than confronting it and excuses domination rather than abolishing it.

Any serious engagement with anthropology, political economy, or historical materialism should have inoculated you against this error. Power is plural. Domination belongs to no single civilization or empire. Empires produce violence, and so do revolutionary states, clerical hierarchies, nationalist movements, and bureaucracies that rule in the name of resistance. A politics incapable of holding this simultaneity remains brittle, lazy, and morally bankrupt.

If you genuinely oppose genocide, authoritarianism, and oppression in all their forms, abandon the childish comfort of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” That slogan amounts to abdication. It sacrifices principle for alignment, coherence for convenience, and real human beings for the illusion of geopolitical clarity. A Left that cannot stand with the oppressed has already forfeited its claim to emancipation.

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Sirantos Fotopoulos

January 23, 2026