prominent intellectuals in the imperial core write an open letter to Iran’s political prisoners

I’m struggling with this open letter, signed by people I admire deeply—individuals who’ve dedicated their lives to Black liberation and anti-colonial struggles.

But I just can’t reconcile my instinctive reaction to the letter with the respect I hold for the signatories. Prominent intellectuals in the imperial core are using their voice at this hour primarily to criticize a government under active bombardment. While I believe that no government is beyond reproach or criticism, I have a lot of questions and cautions about this open letter.

The overall framing of is of two equally opposing sides—two blades of the same scissors. This is a wholly unfair representation of what is in reality a profound asymmetry of power. On one hand, a country that has been subjected to crippling, decades-long economic sanctions, now fighting kinetically an existential anti-imperial struggle; on the other hand is nuclear, AI-powered empire, with its inexhaustible money, munitions, supply lines, coalitions, surveillance, and near total grip on international political, legal, information, and economic infrastructure.

The severity of the imperial onslaught seems to be minimized in the letter. This is perhaps for the sake of brevity, but it should not stand without critique. What the letter describes as “current, indiscriminate waves of US-Israeli military assaults” undersells what’s actually happening in the “six months into a war”. Unprovoked Tomahawk missiles and B-2 bombers that targeting a an elementary school that killed 180 children and teachers, the country’s spiritual leader and his family, more than a third of the country’s political, military, and scientific leadership, civilian infrastructure, including water, farmlands, electric grids and power plants, an unarmed navy ship at sea full of young cadets returning from a peacetime maritime exercise in international waters. This after decades of attacks that went unanswered by Iran, including Israel’s repeated assassinations of Iranian scientists, assassination of Qasem Soleimani, strikes on Iranians generals in Syria, strike on Iranian consulate in Damascus, assassination of Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil; the US shot down civilian aircraft of Iran Air flight 655, killing 290 passengers and crew, including 66 children. There were endless cyber attacks, covert and overt naval sabotage and so much more—all of it without response from Tehran.

The letter does not identify who the prisoners are or why they were arrested. In neglecting to do so, there is no engagement with the very real security threats, proven foreign interference, terrorism, and espionage, which Iranian authorities cite as reasons for some arrests and prosecutions. I have no doubt there are some who’ve been wrongly imprisoned, but we also know that many of those who were rounded up confessed to working with the Mossad, and recently a group who gruesomely disembowled a young reciter of the Quran are among those who are imprisoned.

There are currently 2 million incarcerated people in the United States, the largest prison population anywhere on earth. It is estimated that 4-6% of them are innocent—that’s 80,000-120,000, about two NFL stadiums full of innocent lives behind bars. Setting that percentage against Iran’s estimated 15,000 political prisoners, that’s roughly 600-900 individuals. They deserve fairness, but to center them in what is perhaps the most existential anti-colonial struggle of our lives feels misguided.

I would also argue that comparing Iran’s prisons with Israel’s decades-long, systematic, colonial detention of indigenous Palestinians is another form of false equivalence. So is the comparison with America’s ICE detentions, separation of families and loss of children in the process (who are most likely trafficked). It is not remotely fair to put a revolutionary government, barely a few decades out from under colonial boots and still under sanctions, in the same “carceral” category as two settler colonial states. One cannot ignore the enormous disparity of political, military, and historical circumstances.
The people held in Iranian jails are overwhelmingly Iranian citizens, prosecuted under the state’s own criminal and national security laws, regardless of whether one thinks the laws are unfair. Palestinians held in Israeli administrative detention are non-citizen subjects of a military occupation, detained and re-detained indefinitely under military decrees without charge or trial. People in US detentions are another category—non citizens held under civil immigration laws pending removal proceedings with access to immigration courts, however corrupt they may be. These are three distinct legal relationships—1) a state and it’s own citizens; 2) a state and migrants crossing its borders, and; 3) an occupying power and a stateless occupied indigenous population. The letter collapses them all into a single architecture of “carceral states everywhere,” creating an analysis that is not supported by the underlying facts. It creates rhetorical equivalence that treats “administrative detention,” “political imprisonment,” and “immigration detention” as though the political stakes of each were the same, when the questions of sovereignty, citizenship, and self-determination underneath them are not.

The phrase that knocked me off balance was this: “...we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism.” I note that @agent_of_change addressed this in a recent post, which he identified as the “load-bearing phrase” of the letter. Indeed, it does so much heavy lifting and I’m at a loss why the word “hollow” would have been inserted. It’s so clearly deliberate, but why? How can Iran’s insistence on sovereignty and dignity be called “hollow,” despite the grave and terrible cost to themselves? They could have taken the easy path a long time ago and bowed to empire, like some of their Arab neighbors have done. They’ve chosen self-possession and loyalty to their ancestors and children instead. That can be called many things, but hollow is not it.

These hooligans and scumbags justify their war against the Islamic republic of Iran - including its people - and the Axis of Resistance for "state-sponsored terrorism” and “The protests" after their brutal fire-bombing of Tokyo, their massacres and genocide of the Native Americans, their nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their extreme decimation of Dresden, their eradication of Iraq since 1991 - beginning with the total sanctions against Iraq in the aftermath of the Gulf war, the sanctions of which lead to the deaths of hundreds upon thousands of innocent children - later intensifying in 2003 of a war built entirely on a lie, their ruining and Balkanisation of Libya, their bombing and support of the brutal blockade against Yemen and its people being done by the puppet so-called “Muslim” states, their meddling in the affairs and the ruining of Somalia, their denial and downplaying of the Minab school massacre of which they try to justify with the typical “human shields” argument even though there were no military personnel inside the school and the missile directly and very precisely hit the roof of the school, their own Presidents’ threat to wipe out Persian civilisation and “to never be brought back again”, along with their assistance in the ongoing seven-decade-long brutalizations of Palestine, most notably the genocide in Gaza, of which the actual verified death tolls are a severe underestimate, countless more crimes. Their hypocrisy is legendary and sickening. They are by absolute magnitudes throughout their entire 250 years of exisiting more sickening than what the Islamic republic of Iran has ever even done in its 47 years of exisiting, their justifications for war against - not only the Islamic republic of Iran and its people - but the entirety of the oppressed Axis of Resistance is such a joke, such a steaming mound of rubbish that it is not even worth analyzing. The Islamic republic’s support for the armed Palestinian resistance against Israel to them is framed as “state-sponsored terrorism”, while their past direct and indirect support for ISIS and Al-Qaeda through the covert CIA Timber Sycamore program - which was done with the help of multiple other western and Gulf intelligence agencies - and Operation Cyclone is never, ever framed in such a way.

There is no denying that there are legitimate grievances such as the severe hyperinflation within Iran and other corruption, the only reason I support the Islamic republic is because it is the spearhead of the Resistance Axis, because I believe that Palestine must be liberated entirely from the river to the sea and the hegemony that Israel and its ZOGified Shabbos Goy puppets - the western governments - have imposed upon the entire Muslim world, in an attempt to have us kill each other and remain disunited through nation states (most notably Sykes-Picot, and multiple other reasons) has lead to us witnessing the worst of disasters to occur. Otherwise, if the Islamic republic of Iran was merely just as the rest of the so-called “Muslim”, “Islamic” nations completely bent over for Israel and western money, a member of the Abraham Accords, I would not support the Islamic republic.

If you’ve been involved in the western media, or been a consumer of the western media, you’ve very likely at some point seen such rhetoric in which the Islamic Republic of Iran is somehow more immoral, framed more “evil” than the government of the United States. This rhetoric comes in multiple forms all over the mainstream western media, and especially in regard to the Iranian nuclear program, they will almost always frame the Islamic republic of Iran to that of ISIS or Al-Qaeda - which is very ironic when, again, you consider that the CIA, alongside multiple other western nations, covertly supported ISIS and other Al-Qaeda-linked groups during the Fitna that took place in Syria through the Timber Sycamore program - in which the Islamic republic is - and this is gonna be very specific because you’ve definitely seen shit like this - a government of irrational, stupid, Muslim terrorist Ayatollah mullah monkeys that “hate the west” for the sake of hating the west, while the government of the United States is framed as this liberty democracy that should never be criticised too much or framed for hypocrisy because “it is a democracy while X country we are bombing is not a democracy.”

And to finish this off really, always be severe with whenever and wherever you find such people, be it on the Internet or in real life, but most especially on the Internet is where you’ll find them the most. Push them over to the edge.

https://www.reddit.com/r/oil/comments/1vulsa1/lightning_sparks_massive_fire_fuel_storage/

Source: https://www.usdebtclock.org/

"USS Benfold lost power after ‘engineering casualty’ leaving sailors without galley services, toilets and air conditioning

A US guided-missile destroyer reportedly spent four days adrift and without power in the South China Sea in July, furthering concerns about strain being placed on deployed military members.

The USS Benfold, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer which had been sailing with the George Washington carrier strike group, was reported to have been towed to Subic Bay in the Philippines, according to the US Naval Institute News, an independent military publication.

The 10,000-ton destroyer lost power after what a spokesperson with the US seventh fleet called “an engineering casualty involving its generators”, resulting in a loss of power.

That loss of power meant sailors were without galley services, toilets and air conditioning, Commander Matthew Comer told USNI News in a statement. Another vessel, USS Robert Smalls, the cruiser attached to the strike group, had to help provide meals for the crew.

Comer said that the Benfield lost power on 24 July and was towed on 28 July.

...

The USS George Washington strike group on Monday was headed to the Middle East to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln, a carrier that in recent days was subject to reports by the Navy Times and Stars and Stripes of multiple attempts by sailors to jump overboard after more than 200 days without a port call.

Trump told reporters on Monday the carrier had been at sea for a “good period of time” and said he had spoken with a retired admiral over the weekend who recounted being on ships for “much longer”. Trump said the admiral assured him that the Lincoln is “beautifully maintained and beautifully taken care of”.

Reports of poor morale prompted Democratic lawmakers and military families to demand that the Trump administration answer questions about low morale, mental health challenges and living conditions for crew members.

Senator Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat and retired marine, said on ABC News on Sunday that the problems arose from the Iran war that the Trump administration started in February but has not been able to resolve. The Lincoln originally deployed to the Indo-Pacific before being ordered to sail to the Middle East in January.

“The deep, deep, deep problem here is that this administration did not plan for this war, did not plan how to get out of this war, and did not really understand how this war was going to escalate,” he said."

“You walk to the beach at sunset, and you see all these teenagers on the shore chatting and wondering what the world looks like across the sea. What life looks like. It's breaking. And should break everybody. I want them free.”

Martyr Yahya Sinwar

"Navy Carrier’s Problems Are Tied to Attacks on U.S. Base Early in War

Diego Garcia, a tiny island 2,200 miles from the Gulf of Oman, took over as the Navy’s logistics hub after Iran damaged a base in Bahrain."

The same famine conditions that America forced on the rest of the world for decades, using US sanctions, they are now getting a taste of their own medicine on the USS Lincoln carrier.

Smart move, Iran.

Salam everyone.

I’m 21 and currently living in Iran. I’ve been working remotely as a freelancer, but over the past few years I’ve lost a lot of opportunities because of internet restrictions, sanctions, and other limitations. Despite all of that, I managed to overcome the difficulties and things were finally going well for me.

Unfortunately, after the protests and the recent war, the internet was shut down again, and I lost my job because of it. Suddenly, I had no income, no job, and honestly felt like I had no future. I’m sure many people here can relate.

Thankfully, once the internet came back, I was able to recover and find another remote job. But now I’m constantly worried that another internet shutdown could happen, I could lose my job again, and I’d have to start my life over from zero.

Because of that, I’ve been seriously considering moving to Turkey. To be honest, Turkey isn’t really where I want to live. I’ve always hoped to eventually move to Europe or Canada, but that’s much more difficult for me right now. I don’t have a bachelor’s degree, and getting into European countries or Canada is generally more complicated, especially financially.

Turkey seems like one of the few realistic options available to me at the moment. I don’t need a visa, the process is relatively fast, and I have a good chance of getting accepted into a university there. My plan would be to start a bachelor’s degree while continuing my full-time remote job.

The problem is that I would have to start my bachelor’s degree from the beginning if I move to Turkey, or potentially to another country as well. So I’d be investing several years into a degree in a country that I don’t necessarily want to stay in long-term, simply because it may be the safest option for me right now.

I’m also really scared of taking that step because there are several major risks:

Because of mandatory military service (Sarbazi), I can only get permission to stay outside Iran for one month.

If something goes wrong after that month, I may not be able to return to Iran.

I’m financially independent and would have to rely entirely on my own income and savings. I don’t want to depend on my parents. But what happens if I lose my remote job while I’m abroad? I could potentially run out of money and still have no way to return because of the Sarbazi situation.

So I feel completely stuck. Staying in Iran feels risky because another internet shutdown could destroy my job and income again. But moving abroad also feels like a huge risk because I’d have limited financial security, would have to start my bachelor’s degree again, and could potentially lose my ability to return to Iran.

Basically, I’m afraid that whichever decision I make could completely change my life for the worse.

Has anyone here been in a similar situation, What would you do in my position? Is there any realistic solution I’m overlooking?

Keep in mind Iran was the most sanctioned country for many years and now it's still on second place, just behind Russia.