My conscience is clear

I was on a walk on Saturday, a couple of hours before Khameini’s assassination by US-Israeli forces was announced, when I came across a pro-war Iranian demonstration in downtown Montreal. If I were to guess, there were probably more Israeli and American flags than Pahlavi flags.

At that point, the number of massacred Iranians was steadily rising. Over 40 children were killed in the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in southern Iran. Videos and photos from the ground of mothers weeping outside the school were circulating, almost identical to scenes from Gaza. A picture of bloodstained backpacks in a pile stayed with me all day. Backpacks probably filled with little pencil cases, small notebooks, maybe some snacks for recess. How many times have we witnessed this exact scene over the past three years? Ten, twenty, thirty years?

I walked past a group of, generously, a few dozen Iranians (admittedly, it is always satisfying to see negligible numbers at Zionist/pro-war/pro-genocide demonstrations relative to Palestine protests). I looked at their faces as they yelled their vitriolic chants with their children at their side- “thank you, Trump and Netanyahu” being a top contender for most wicked. They laughed, smiled, cheered, and celebrated their victory. It’s hard, if not impossible, to recall any other time I’ve seen people this joyful at a “protest.” I’m not immune to naivety. Surely, I thought, a massacre at a girls’ school would disturb the consciousness of reactionary “women, life, freedom” protesters. Surely, the murder of young children, young girls, would jolt liberals, Iranian or not, awake from their delusional military-intervention-for-human-rights slumber. If not the tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza - maimed, orphaned, staved, killed - then, surely, the slaughter of Iranian schoolgirls in a nation you claim must be liberated from growing up under an “Islamofascist regime” must mean something.

Maybe all of us, at some level, carry the hope that at some point, it will be enough. Enough people massacred, enough buildings decimated, enough children starved, enough hospitals bombed, enough bodies buried underneath the rubble. It’s a comforting thought. More convenient than the bitter, almost inhuman truth: that, for some, it will never be enough. For some, it is a passing thought, negligible collateral damage. I’m not sure which is worse. To be seen as an inconsequential means to an end, or to be seen as a “legitimate” target worthy of slaughter. There is enough overlap in rhetoric and material outcome, I think, that neither can be worse than the other. They are effectively the same. They are functionally equivalent.

I’ve seen the videos of people cheering in their high-rise apartments, thanking Trump and Netanyahu for killing Khameini. What is worse are posts insidiously claiming that “nuance” about imperialist warfare is the reasonable position. The “Iranian people” invoked only to make space for the idea that this regime change is good, this one is different, this one is the one that brings us closer to freedom, this one is good for Palestine, actually. The “Iranian people,” an abstraction that not only conveniently erases the reality of Iranians defending their nation against a murderous empire (and, yes, mourning the assassination of a political, religious, and ideological leader), but also categorises them as antagonistic to liberation. Do the hundreds of Iranians massacred by the US and Israel make it into this vague, abstract construction of the Iranian people?

There is no room for nuance, no room for a third option. Anti-imperialism is the guiding principle. My conscience is clear.