By Elica Le Bon
Over the last 48 hours, thousands of imposter scholars (people who use “academic” and “scholar” in their social media bio’s, but have never navigated the rigorous academic undertaking to justify such a title) have taken to the internet, armed with disinformation, lack of understanding, and propaganda to herald the concept of “atrocity propaganda,” branding the Iranian revolution as a baseless fallacy. In the wake of their defiling of our revolution, a question emerges as to why–despite the millions of voices of Iranians emanating both inside and outside of Iran–do they remain incredulous as to the actual truth? Why do they erase our voices and supplant them with their own, despite knowing nothing about our history, culture, and reality?
As previously discussed, the concept of “orientalism” posits that westerners, particularly western “academics” (and other non-Iranians)–in their cursory evaluation of all things Middle East related–view countries such as Iran through a prism of degeneracy. As such, they perceive their own intellect and western scholarship as superior to Middle Eastern accounts of their own experiences. This is an ironic form of veiled supremacy, where the same voices that decry the revolution as rooted in western imperialism and supremacy, usurp our voices with their own counter-narrative that delegitimizes our lived experiences and replaces it with their fragmented and confused understanding of Iran.
To substantiate this premise, let’s dive into the evidence.
Over the past two months, the Iranian diaspora has worked tirelessly to highlight the real life atrocities that have taken place inside the borders of the Islamic Republic of Iran (hereinafter, “IRI”). First, let’s rewind and consider that the existence of millions of Iranians in the diaspora de facto supports our accounts, as asylees, refugees, immigrants, and exilees who fled persecution after our own family members were violently and brutally tortured, raped, dismembered, lacerated, and publicly hanged from a crane in a method of torturous strangulation that lasts 20-30 minutes, intentionally using unsophisticated and cheap lynching methods to maximize slow and excruciating torture. Their crimes? some as negligible as simply possessing literature that criticized the regime, spearheaded by the supreme clerical leader, “vali-e faghi,” the Ayatollah Khomeini, succeeded by Ayatollah Khamenei.
Notwithstanding that these are our stories, our accounts, our realities, straight from the horses mouth, their orientalist mindsets stubbornly refuse to believe that Middle Easterners could possess the intellectual sophistication to understand what is happening to them, leading them to mass-gaslight Iranians, and deputizing themselves with the task of explaining our experiences back to us through a distorted account that lacks both a nexus to our land and proximity to our cause.
Next, after our personal accounts are whitewashed and erased, the reality of Iranian history is cast aside as “atrocity propaganda,” violently controverting the real atrocities that have plagued our motherland through the top-down Islamisation of Velayat-e Faghi, “guardian of the Islamic jurist,” a rudiment of the Islamization of Iran that expunged our native religion, Zoroastrianism from our culture, history, and identities.
So let’s unpack some of those real atrocities. As many of you may now understand, notwithstanding the performative trials that take place in Iran’s kangaroo courts under thinly veiled theocratic governance, the supreme clerical leader, “Valie-e faghi,” rules by “divine mandate,” meaning that his word is the final word on capital punishment and executions in Iran.
In 1988, the supreme leader (then, Ayatollah Khomeini), ordered the mass execution of up to 30,000 protesters (convicted of “political dissidence,” a crime punishable by death in the IRI as falling under a “war on God,” I.e. sedition against the divinely mandated ruler). The volume of executions was so obscene that the innocents had to be broken off into groups and hanged in 30 minute intervals (remember, it can take up to 30 minutes for their unthinkably torturous strangulation to result in death). This is what is known as “precedent” in the legal parlance, meaning that judicial sentencing schemes for similar acts are considered at best influential, and at worst binding in determining the fate of the current 15,000 detainees.
Were the heinous mass executions of 1988 and beyond not “atrocious” enough for naive onlookers? Now, let’s imagine that this incident suffered no iterations (in mass executions as recent as 2018-2022, including 1,500 innocents murdered in 2019), are these unimaginable atrocities alone not enough to call for an end to the regime, without waiting for the mass execution of 15,000 more to punctuate the violent inhumanity of the IRI?
Because they cannot take the voices of “unsophisticated Middle Easterners” at their word, their default response is to gaslight Iranians, systematically deny our executions, or brand those atrocities as “not that bad” to justify their faulty counter-narrative.
While far-removed and misinformed ideologues speculate about some “hidden agenda” drawing eyes onto Iran, one of their main claims is that solving Iran’s crisis involves the removal of economic sanctions that are the “real” cause of Iran’s crisis. Since the death of Mahsa Jina Amini, hundreds and thousands of protesters have poured into the streets of Iran, particularly women, chanting “marg bar dictator” (“death to the dictator”) and “marg bar jomhouri-e Eslami” (“death to the Islamic Republic”). In order to believe Iranian women, courageously fighting to rebuke their violent oppression at the hands of the IRI, you’d first have to believe them. Believing them literally means believing them. It means setting aside your misogyny and trusting that they understand the source and nature of their own oppression, instead of parroting regime propaganda that frames their “illusory” plight as derived from “western and Israeli lies.” This hybrid display of misogyny and orientalism posits that Iranian women (and people in general) don’t have the sophistication to understand what is happening to them, and what has happened in front of their own eyes–to their sisters, children, fathers, mothers, and relatives. This rhetoric also weaponizes the history of holding education ransom in Iran, soft-pedaling the narrative that we simply can’t know, so they have to explain it back to us. Under the illusion of such authority, they usurp native chants with an alternative narrative: “death to economic sanctions, that’s what you really want!”
False. Here’s why. While Iran is rich in natural resources, the millionaire Mullahs have, for the past 43 years, pocketed the oil revenues that should have streamlined into the country to support economic and social development through an obscene display of administrative embezzlement. That means that, with and without sanctions, the country remains insolvent because of the bulwark that is the clergy’s pockets. So while economic sanctions may indeed exact a toll on Iranians, their lack of freedom and the daily threat of death hanging over them like the sword of Damocles is their chief complaint. But of course, that would require actually believing Iranian women. That would require putting human life before misguided ideology. That would require believing that Iranian people know what it means to taste, feel, smell, and live the experience of being Iranian–a concept highly objectionable to the snobby orientalist.
To everyone that has poured into our comments in droves to tell us that “we don’t understand” what’s happening to us, that this is exaggeration, lies, and Western imperialism. You are the poison. You are the Eastern imperialist cancer that justified the top-down Islamization of IRI, systematically suffocating innocents under a fundamentalist chokehold. You are complicit in their deaths.
Listen to Iranian voices. Believe Iranian women. Or if you refuse to do any of that, just get out of our way.
Iranians on Death Row 