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The Aesthetic of Resistance: Why Some Western Leftists Support a Regime Which is Everything They Claim to Hate

(Dedicated with appreciation and admiration to literally every single Iranian person I've ever met for educating me.)

A vocal current within the Western Left has become inept at recognizing abuse of power…when it speaks in the language of 'resistance.'

Objectively, Iran isn't a scrappy underdog challenging imperialism. It's a repressive regime that embodies everything the Left claims to despise.

A Theocracy Run by Religious Extremists

If you believe in the separation of Church and State, the regime isn't an ally.

Iran is ruled by unelected clerics who claim divine authority and answer to nobody.

The Supreme Leader, currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is not an elected politician. He's a religious messianic figure with ultimate say over everything from military policy to women's clothing.

The Guardian Council is all male, conservative religious fanatics who regularly disqualify moderates, reformists, or women from participation in any public matters.

This is textbook authoritarian theocracy, a system where dissent is heresy and religious doctrine is law. There is no religious freedom in the Regime's Iran.

They Stone Women. Yes, Still.

The regime's laws on women would make the Taliban proud.

Women must cover their hair and bodies in public.

They cannot sing solo in public.

Their testimony in court is worth half that of a man.

They need male permission to travel, study, or even get a passport.

And yes, they have been stoned to death for adultery — in the 21st century.

When 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was arrested in 2022 by Iran's morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly, she was beaten to death in custody. Her murder sparked mass protests, which the regime crushed with bullets and mass arrests.

There is no question what the response would be if a US state like Alabama enforced such laws. The outrage would be deafening and justified. So why does that same righteous fire for justice seem to extinguish itself somewhere over the Atlantic? What principle justifies this selective vision?

If you chant "ACAB" as a denunciation of state violence and the enforcement of oppressive norms as a moral principle, consistency demands you cast that same critical gaze towards the Regime and it's morality police.

These enforcers serve as agents of the state's ideological control. They target women for unveiled hair, arrest dissidents for defying religious codes, and violently suppress basic civil liberties.

If your anti-authoritarianism stops at Tehran's border because it feels geopolitically inconvenient to criticize a state opposed to Western influence, you're not anti-authoritarian and are not promoting moral principles. You're just performing selective, aesthetic outrage.

Solidarity, if it means anything, must extend to all those resisting state oppression, not just those who fit your aesthetic of revolution.

They Kill Gay People. By Law.

Iran's government executes gay people.

In public.

For being gay.

As state policy.

Consensual same-sex acts between men are punishable by death. Between women? Up to 100 lashes. The regime often forces gay and trans Iranians into exile, prison, or coerced surgery.

This isn’t some rogue judge. This is the actual legal code of the Islamic Republic.

Iran's LGBTQ+ rights record makes Putin look like RuPaul.

Yet somehow, the same activist movements that cover their feeds in rainbows during Pride Month can't seem to work up a single post about Iran's state-sanctioned homophobia.

If your pride doesn't cross al borders, it's not pride. It's an aesthetic, just branding and performance. You can't claim to support LGBTQ+ liberation while ignoring the regime's brutal state-led persecution...unless your solidarity is only for show.

Real allyship doesn't flinch when it's inconvenient or challenges your preferred villains. Pride isn't pride if it's selective and intersectionality is meaningless if you use it to excuse abuses in one nation...which you'd condemn in another.

They Crush Labor Movements and Workers' Rights

Iran doesn't just jail journalists and students. It jails bus drivers.

Labor unions are illegal. Strikes are illegal. Demanding back pay is treated as "national security sabotage."

Teachers, steelworkers, truck drivers — anyone who organizes is beaten, arrested, or disappeared. In 2023 alone, dozens of labor activists were sentenced to multi-year prison terms for trying to negotiate wages or demand safety protections.

You can't champion the "worker’s struggle" while turning a blind eye to a regime that jails, tortures, and executes labor organizers.

If your solidarity skips over Iranian workers because it complicates your anti-imperialist narrative, that’s not internationalism, it's performative ideological convenience. You don't get to wave the red flag for workers' rights while ghosting the ones bleeding for it under a theocratic police state. Labor solidarity isn't real if it ends where the slogans get uncomfortable.

They Colonize and Militarize Their Neighbors

The Islamic Regime of Iran is not just a local bully. It's a regional empire.

It bankrolls and controls violent militias in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen not to support anyone's liberation, but to spread its own political and religious dominance.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah functions as an Iranian outpost that undermines democratic politics, murders critics, and uses civilians as human shields.

In Syria, Iran helped Assad murder hundreds of thousands of people, including with chemical weapons, just to keep Assad in power as an ally on Israel's border.

In Iraq, Iranian-backed militias have assassinated reformists, hijacked politics, and turned protests into bloodbaths.

In Yemen, Iran arms the Houthis, prolonging one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises so it can poke Saudi Arabia from afar.

If any other country did this, the Left would call it neo-imperialism. When Iran does it? It's "resistance."

You can't claim to stand against imperialism and ignore Tehran's regional warlords. If empire is wrong when it’s Western, it's still wrong when it wears clerical robes and claims to operate under the banner of "resistance."

They Practice Ethnic and Cultural Domination

Iran itself is not a culturally unified state. It's a multi-ethnic empire where Persian Shi'a identity is imposed from the top down.

Kurds are surveilled, imprisoned, and gunned down in the streets.

Baluchis live under occupation-like conditions, with entire towns attacked by the military.

Ahwazi Arabs are denied clean water and education in their own language — in the very province that produces most of Iran’s oil.

Azeris, Turkmen, and others are pressured to assimilate and punished for cultural expression.

Baháʼís, Sunni Muslims, Christians, and Zoroastrians face discrimination, harassment, and systemic exclusion from public life.

The regime bulldozes indigenous cemeteries. Bans non-Persian names. Executes poets and religious leaders.

And yet the Western Left doesn't call this apartheid or colonialism.

If your anti-colonialism skips over this because it clashes with your chosen narrative, then it's not principle. It's just performance.

The Iranian Regime Censors Everything and Jails Everyone

There is no freedom of press. No freedom of religion. No freedom of speech. None.

Journalists are imprisoned for reporting the truth.

Filmmakers are banned or exiled.

Internet access is filtered, throttled, and monitored by the state.

Peaceful protests are met with bullets and mass arrests.

Torture is standard. Forced confessions are routine.

When students protest, they get shot. When families demand answers, they get threats.

Iranian prisons are filled with feminists, union leaders, teachers, students, environmentalists, atheists, reformists, and even children.

Where is the Western Leftist solidarity for them?

You rally for free speech and civil liberties at home, so why the silence when Iran shoots students and jails teachers for demanding the same?

A regime that censors art, criminalizes dissent, and tortures activists is authoritarian.

If your solidarity evaporates the moment it's inconvenient for your narrative, it was never about justice. It was about fashion.

You can't be both pro-liberation and mute about the Regime's prisons overflowing with feminists, filmmakers, and kids. Either stand with the oppressed everywhere or stop pretending you have any moral principles.

If the Regime Wasn't Anti-American, You’d Hate It

The reason some progressives give Iran a pass is because it opposes the US and Israel.

That's it.

If it were a Christian theocracy executing gay people, torturing minorities, and colonizing its neighbors,they'd see it for what it is: a violent, fascist, patriarchal, ethno-nationalist police state.

But because it wears the right aesthetic, they (either through dishonesty or pure ignorance) mistake the Regime as seeking justice.

It’s not.

The Regime Is What the Left Says It's Fighting

It's everything they claim to stand against:

Misogyny

Homophobia

Theocracy

Anti-labor authoritarianism

Militarized ethnonationalism

Colonial violence

Censorship, repression, torture, and propaganda

So the next time someone chants slogans lifted from Tehran, ask yourself: do they know what they’re endorsing? Or are they just cheering for the empire they want to believe is innocent...because that narrative appeals to them.

The regime isn't the voice of the oppressed.

It's just another boot on 90 Million Iranian necks...and millions more in the region.

Sources and Further Information:

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Batman: * enters the room with a bunch of children following behind *

JLA: ???

Green Lantern: Huh

Green Arrow: Batman, who the fuck are these kids?

Batman: Language

Batman: These are my children. Agent A is sick so I had to bring then in

Wonder Woman: I am not acquainted with the hero know as 'agent a'

Aquaman: As long as they don't cause trouble I don't see the issue

Flash: ???

Flash: You don't see the issue? Batman didn't have any kids until not that long ago where did they COME FROM???

Batman: ...

Batman: Oldest one i found in the circus

Batman: Second eldest was born from the shadows

Green Arrow: Wha-

Batman: Third one, i found in the trash

Batman: Fourth one followed me home after I forgot the door open

Batman: And my youngest my ex mailed to me

Aquaman: Mailed??

Batman: I tried to return him but the post office guy said neither Heaven nor Hell wanted him

Batman: Or anyone in Gotham, for that matter

JLA: ...

Flash: ...

Flash: ... sorry I asked

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I'm sorry but it was too good to disable RBs for so I'll take this hit personally

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"Why is it a problem if students use AI to get through college"

Because if you demonstrate to me that you're willing to set aside concern for truth, evidence, and verifying things with your own eyes whenever it happens to be inconvenient for you, I have a solemn responsibility to make sure you don't get into medical school.

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adriana smith who was forcibly kept on life support after being brain dead to incubate her fetus due to anti abortion laws in georgia, usa will be taken off life support this week. she had an emergency c-section today and the child was born prematurely and is in the nicu. her family is raising funds for hospital bills (that the state didn't even pay for despite forcing this "treatment" btw!) and for the new baby. donate if you can. [source]

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Im begging people to do the bare minimum to acknowledge the harm JKR has done to trans men and transmasculine people. Im imploring you to realize that her hatred does not pass over us on her way to other people. The first anti trans tweet that kicked off the whole panic was about language that included trans men in menstruation education. One of her first long winded Terf essays was about how the "evil trans craze was capturing our poor little teenage girls in its dirty slimy claws." Her ideas about pseudoscience like "rapid onset gender dysphoria" paved the way for garbage like "irreversible damage" to be written, which in turn is motivating bans on healthcare. JKR has motivated people into denying trans people their healthcare because she feels like we need to strip trans men of their autonomy in order to protect our confused little girly heads.

She has reduced trans men down to our reproductive abilities and infantilized versions of ourselves in order to keep us trapped in traditional gender roles that exploit us and our bodies.

Fucking acknowledged that, at the absolute least. And stop never talking about us.

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y'all it's about to get really fucking humid and hot

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porn isn't evil or misogynistic you just grew up culturally christian and are scared of sex

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Hey, a little bit about recognizing eugenics. Eugenic logic often consists of 3 steps:

Some people have a trait that makes them less 'productive' or different.

The trait is hereditary / fixed from birth

Actions must be taken to prevent the occurrence of this trait, like preventing the births, killing the current trait-havers or promoting the health and birthrate of the people without this trait and with traits that we like.

And that's bad.

But I see a lot of conversations about whether something is hereditary / fixed from birth, here people assume that the yes/no answer to that is defined by eugenics.

So for clariry: NOT eugenics is:

Some people have a trait that makes them less 'productive' or different

The trait is hereditary / fixed from birth

Being different or less productive is totally fine actually! Everyone has inherent value. Diversity and co-dependency are strengths, even if we can't always see why.

So, ya know, if you see someone arguing that a trait is partly or completely hereditary or fixed from birth, maybe check what value they assign to that before calling someone a eugenicist?

I see some people insisting that any nature/nurture debate must always be settles as 'it's nurture' because anything else would be a slippery slope to eugenics, and that's often just not the case. It's all about what value you assign to difference.

Enforcing a dogmatic insistence that hereditary or unchangeable disabilities or traits don't exist at all isn't the great anti-eugenics strategy that you think it is. At best it's factually inaccurate, at worst the idea that everything must be changeable can lead to the insistence that everyone who is different should just change to become more productive or more normal.

And that's also bad.

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"How can you hate loud noises yet have your headphones on a high volume?"

Because I can control the volume of my headphones and choose what I want to listen to, but I cannot control the volume of external noises nor choose to just turn them off

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Police in China arrest female authors of homosexual novels in crackdown on 'boys love' fiction genre.

July 12, 2025

Female writers have been summoned by police for posting and sharing homosexual romance stories online, in a widespread crackdown on the "boys love" genre in China.

If convicted, they could be subjected to detention, financial penalties or even prison sentences. Many of the targeted writers published their work on Haitang, a Taiwanese website popular with fans of boys love fiction — a genre that features romantic relationships between male characters, often depicting sex scenes.

Three lawyers, representing some of the writers, also posted about the crackdown, noting the scale of action has been widespread, with estimates that at least 100 writers have been affected.

Mr Zhang said authorities may have restarted the crackdown on boys love fiction because it was seen as unfavourable to China's new policies in raising fertility rates.

After decades of forcing Chinese couples to limit themselves to just one child, Beijing has now reversed course and is urging people to have more babies.

"Officials may think that these cases can eliminate the social influence [of homosexual love stories] and give young people a more 'positive' sexual orientation, and in a way promote fertility rates," he said. Mr Zhang explained that China's fertility rates were dropping and many young people were opting out of marriage.

Despite this, he believes China's law on digitally obscene content should be updated to reflect the new social reality.

Read more...

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"The youth will save us." A frighteningly large number of them are puritanical, pearl clutching, nuance free, fascist regime loving Nazis. I'm beginning to doubt that very much.

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I see a lot of “when there's nothing but failure from liberal/centrist parties, of course people are going to turn to the far right” and “don't blame the people who vote far right, blame the liberal/centrist parties who made them feel that they have no other option” sentiment around, and I hate it for a lot of reasons - largely because it completely removes the agency and individual moral responsibility from those who choose (because yes, it is, always, a choice) to support far-right/fascist politics and instead frames it as some kind of choiceless inevitability. It's very “look what you made me do”; it acts as if progressives and centrists are the only people in politics with any agency or free will, and that all the blame for the rise of the far right lies with them for not sufficiently appeasing supporters of the far right.

But also, and here's something I haven't seen that many people bring up, it always makes me want to ask: when you say “people” are inevitably going to turn to the far right, which “people”? Is it people of colour? Is it immigrants? Is it queer people? Is it trans people? Is it disabled people? Is it people from minority faiths? Is it women?

No. It never is. And yes, of course you can find among the far right small proportions of people of colour, women, queer people etc, but let's be real: support for this kind of politics [in majority-white, western nations] is always disproportionately white, male, straight, cis, able-bodied etc. “People” aren't being “pushed” into supporting the far right; a particular subset of the population is choosing to support the far right.

The actual demographics of who ends up supporting what make clear the hostage situation at play in the whole “people are inevitably going to turn to the far right” thing: it's the admission that as soon as people in the groups that hold the majority of the power and privilege feel that things are going pretty shit for them and they don't see much hope on the horizon, a whole chunk of them will immediately embrace racism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, antisemitism, ableism, transphobia etc. “If things aren't going well for us, we will utilise our social power and majority status to crush you under our boot.”

And make no mistake: this is a choice. This isn't just some “inevitability”. This isn't “just what's obviously going to happen when liberal/centrist parties perpetuate a shitty status quo that doesn't work for ordinary people”. This isn't “people in general” turning to the far right. It is people in majority groups choosing to respond to failing economic systems by flexing their might against minorities, because they are in a social position that gives them might to flex. There are other choices available. Of course there are. But these people are making this choice. This choice is available to them in a way that it functionally isn't to people in minority groups - despite all of us, and especially minority groups, suffering under that failing system - and they're deciding to make it.

To say that this “is just inevitable” is essentially to argue that this situation - effectively one of people in majority groups holding guns to the heads of everyone in minority groups and going “give me what I want or I blow their heads off” - is fine and normal and to be expected. “If these people don't feel listened to by their government, of course they're going to hold minority groups at gunpoint!” (And for a fair few of them, let's be honest, the very thing they want is to pull that metaphorical trigger. That's precisely the appeal.)

Stop letting people get away with this whole “when xyz is the case then people are inevitably going to get behind the far right” or “xyz makes people feel they have no choice but to vote for fascists” line. Ask: which people? Is it Black women who suddenly feel they “have no choice” but to vote for some far-right populist? Is it disabled trans people who give their support to fascists because “they've been let down by the mainstream”? Somehow I don't think so.

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And that’s that on that.

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“never let them convince you broken glass or property damage is violence”

the pogrom that kickstarted the Holocaust is literally named after the broken glass from the destruction of Jewish businesses, synagogues, and homes

even outside of literal pogroms, smashing windows & defacing people’s property during a protest or riot comes with an implicit threat of violence in the same way that someone punching a hole in the wall or smashing a chair in the middle of an argument does.

it may be less violent than if they physically hit your body, but it is still threatening, and is often a precursor to more extreme actions that do cause physical harm.