The announcement of a provisional cessation of hostilities between the belligerents around the Strait of Hormuz does not so much as mention the executions that continue unabated in Iran. The European press, hostile to the war, hammered relentlessly that the war aims were unclear, and now it seems to rejoice in a ceasefire that entails no halt to the Islamo-fascist repression of dissidents. The angelic faces of these young people sentenced to death or already hanged, the drawn features of parents in anguish at losing their child or themselves threatened with death or rape, all these faces stream across the Web alongside the regime's infamies, while the sinister faces of turbaned executioners and medal-laden generals in uniform parade past. Day and night! The two faces of Janus, whose temple in Rome stood open in time of war…
The Two Faces of Iran
Iran now has these two faces, opposed in every respect. One, bloodied and tormented, turns full of hope toward a future of peace. The other, lugubrious and noxious, faces the past of a bloodthirsty power that aspires only to avenge itself on the people risen up against its god, indulging the fantasy of annihilating the Great Satan and the Little Satan along with all its opponents. The German believers who abhor war, the unbelievers of France and Navarre who detest Israel, all the credulous of the world over whom Islamist attacks terrify, all support the pax islamica come from Pakistan to save the mullahs' face. But what of all those innocents locked away in Iran in the prisons of the fascist regime, at the mercy of merciless torturers, beaten, tortured, raped, and soon to be executed?
A Cause That Does Not Interest the Right-Thinking
The cause of the Persian people does not truly interest the right-thinking of the world. Bad faith and self-interest dispose of its fate in expeditious fashion on television panels where the ignorant quibble over the situation in the Middle East while already rejoicing at the fall in the price of oil. Disenchanted after so many disillusionments, the militants of every lost cause the world over, in Russia and China, in Cambodia and Algeria, rail against the virtual return of the Shah of Iran without deigning to mention the mass killings perpetrated by the Guardians of the Islamo-fascist reaction, whose crimes, alas, far exceed the horrors committed by the Savak. Perhaps wishing to believe that a revolution worthy of the name took place under the Supreme Leader's direction in 1979, the Marxo-traitors of the West make themselves the objective allies of the mullahs, whose hatred of the Zionist entity they share. For all that counts is the Palestine of their disabused dreams…
Outraged by so much partiality, the politicking right castigates the anticlericalism of this pro-Arab left, which cares no more about the jihadist massacres of Christians in Nigeria or Syria than about the genocide in Sudan. Yet the partisans of Hamas and the PFLP in the West remain just as mute on the genocidal violence perpetrated by the Burmese regime against the Muslim Rohingya minority. The Buddhist Tibetans and the Muslim Uyghurs fare no better, even as the Chinese Communist Party has resolved to launch a fresh campaign of Sinicization to complete the ethnocidal acculturation of these ancestral peoples. This, then, is not a matter of religion. And yet we are indeed dealing with a new faith. Could the "people of the left" in France be indifferent to the fate, in Iran as in Tibet, of a people of the right whose rights would be lesser for that very reason? How can one be anti-Persian, in Europe as in America, to the point of brazenly waving the flag of the Islamist republic that tyrannizes Persia, while laying claim to anti-fascism in demonstrations in favor of a regime that ticks every box of fascism?
An Old Stalinist Tradition
It is an old Stalinist tradition… one untroubled by the Nazi-Soviet pact! Internationalism, since Lenin, knows and acknowledges but a single imperialism; fascism remains firmly on the other side of the wall Stalin built to guard himself against all contamination. Casting red fascism into the oubliettes of history, today's anti-fascism represses the green fascism of the jihadists while fantasizing a Trumpian fascism. Seasoned with a sauce of anti-Zionism, the recipe of anti-imperialism goes on feasting the empty bellies of the deluded, or the "woke", who gorge themselves on threadbare slogans about national liberation movements. At this stage of blindness, the partisan embrace of the Palestinian cause — which drives one to justify the war crimes of October 7, 2023, and to turn a blind eye to the carnage of January 8 and 9, 2026 — looks very much like a variation on the religious illusion that Freud, in 1927, was admittedly wrong to believe had no future. For his over-optimistic prognosis does not contradict the masterly diagnosis of pathological infantilism that may be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the troubling case of present-day partisanship: the marches in the West, with their freight of ideological incantation, now resemble processions that combine to satiety the hallucination of a psychotic order, the singing tomorrows of a paradise regained after the apocalypse of the final struggle, and the neurotic obsessions betrayed by ideas fixed into slogans no less than by conjuratory rituals, such as immolating effigies or burning enemy flags…
This new faith permits itself every contradiction. Comfortably ensconced in a petit-bourgeois life, enjoying to the full the rule of law in the West, the leftist-traitors deny other peoples those "bourgeois" liberties that grant them the right to demonstrate their support for the Nazi-Islamists of Gaza and the mullah-friendly regime. Out of the question, for them, to chant "Woman, Life, Freedom" alongside irresponsible people who consort and compromise with Israel and the United States over some wretched matter of a veil! These ignorant folk lack the global geostrategic analysis of the May '68 pensioners who have marched tirelessly for decades to defend the local cause of the Palestinian people… As if everything were decided there! As if veiling little girls at nine and raping the improperly veiled posed no problem at all! This profession of faith, tipping over into pathological obsession, resembles a senile dementia. Which, indeed, is the good news! The cohort of overwrought youths who had marched for a free Palestine since October 7 has deserted the streets, leaving the field to the old guard, stiffened in their unshakeable faith as new crusaders ready to liberate the Promised Land. Perhaps the mass massacres of this past January in Iran ruffled the fervor of the West's gilded youth? Perhaps the ultraviolence of the ayatollah's dictatorship abruptly shattered the simplistic certainties of these presumptuous young people?
Symbols, Flags, and the Real Question
Quite possibly, but the conviction of being enlisted in the right camp has not been shaken to the point of demonstrating for an end to fascist repression in Iran. For that would mean taking up the cause of people who march beneath the imperial sign of the Lion and the Sun, glad to see the Star of David support their fight. It is a question of symbols displayed on flags whose symbolic meaning, moreover, escapes the common run of demonstrators, young and old alike. What is at stake, in fact, is to be seen in the West taking sides in total ignorance of the ins and outs of a foreign cause. Little does it matter to the secularist zealots of the "left" that the pan-Arabism of the Palestinian flag intertwines, in the marches, with the emblematic Islamism of the tawhid. If it is rightly forbidden to display a swastika and to give the Nazi salute, why is it then permitted, in the West, to fly the colors of the Islamo-fascism practiced by the terrorist militias of the mullahcracy?
The generalized blindness on these questions is every bit as alarming as the recent turn taken by the discussions on the war in Iran. One hears of nothing now but the Strait of Hormuz and the price of fuel at the pump. Would it now be beside the point, in talks and negotiations, to demand of the regime in Iran an end to the arrests, the executions, and the rapes in prison?