Iran is passing through a phase of exceptional violence and intensity. In the wake of the genocide in Palestine and the large-scale destruction inflicted on Lebanon, the United States and Israel are also participating in the devastation of lives, bodies, territories, and vital infrastructures in Iran.There they have been targeting not only refineries and fuel depots, but also health facilities, water resources, energy systems, oil installations, schools, and other civilian spaces. In Minab, a girls’ school was obliterated and more than 168 were killed, among them Baloch children. This war has disrupted the very conditions of social reproduction, further deepened the vulnerability of the working classes. It has undermined the material basis of social autonomy, pushing struggles from below several steps backward, and reinforcing forms of state or social-driven ethno-nationalism. The rapid shift, within the space of a month, from Trump’s promise to “make Iran great again” to the threat of reducing the country to the “stone age” dispelled any remaining ambiguity about the imperial logic at work—a formula that unmistakably recalls the language of the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq.
This imperialist “external” violence, however, cannot be understood apart from the internal crisis through which the Islamic Republic has been attempting to reconstitute its authority. Since the 2022 uprising, following the police murder of the young Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini, the Islamic Republic has continuously sought, in every war and geopolitical crisis, ways to restore some of the authority and respectability it has lost.
The paradox of imperialist assault and regime legitimacy
The war waged by the genocidal Israeli colonial power against the Palestinians after October 7, 2023, followed by the first Israeli-U.S. attack on Iran in June 2025, offered the Islamic Republic an initial framework for rehabilitation. However, the January 2026 massacre, during which thousands of Iranian demonstrators were killed in just two days by the forces of the theocratic state, simply for protesting against the economic crisis and political dictatorship, reopened an acute crisis of legitimacy, domestically and internationally, for Tehran.
When Iranians were still in mourning, and while many families had not even been able to recover the bodies of their loved ones killed in January, the United States and Israel launched a new imperialist invasion on February 28, 2026, one even more violent than previous assaults. Paradoxically, the attacks have so far helped the Islamic Republic regain some of the credibility it had lost through the bloody repression of the previous month.
These two events, massacre and war, do not constitute either separate sequences or two opposing forms of violence—one repressive and the other supposedly liberatory—but rather successive, even asymmetric, moments of an interconnected counter-revolutionary process. The “external” war prolongs and deepens the internal counter-revolution, enabling the Iranian state to tighten internal cohesion and, once again, stifle popular dissent.
Recognizing this in no way minimizes the fact that Iran has been, and remains, the target of imperialist and colonial aggression carried out with impunity. On the contrary, it requires us to read this assault in terms of its deeper political function: first, as a murderous enterprise of destruction targeting civilian lives, bodies, infrastructure, and territories, carried out under false pretexts and extending the genocidal enterprise pursued in Gaza, as well as in the West bank and Lebanon; and, second, as the provision of new resources to the Islamic Republic for its own reconstitution.
What is campism?
Israeli-U.S. aggression is reinforcing Iran’s militarization, repression, and the crushing of uprisings from below. It is also intensifying a deadly political polarization. On one side, part of the opposition, especially monarchists, welcomed the imperialist bombings in the name of their hostility to the theocratic state. On the other side, other political forces have fallen back into the orbit of the Islamic Republic in the name of anti-imperialism and opposition to war. While the reactionary nature of the first current—pro-Israel, pro-U.S., and pro-genocide—has been readily opposed based on a relative consensus among the progressive and leftist forces, the second current has unfortunately captured parts of the Left and is every bit as significant.
It is within this impasse that the question of campism re-emerges with particular urgency. By campism I mean a range of positions and tendencies that support any force or state based on its opposition to Western imperialism regardless of its reactionary or progressive nature.
A legacy of the Cold War, campism, as articulated by self-proclaimed anti-imperialists and supporters of the so-called resistance camp, often reduces the world based on a binary logic of two “camps”: imperialism (the United States, NATO, Israel, and their allies) versus “the resistance” (Iran, Russia, China, Assad’s Syria, and so on). The democratic and subversive uprisings against the latter states, such as Rojava, are thereby dismissed as inherently suspect or as a”” Trojan Horse” of the enemy. Any criticism of dictators is immediately disqualified as “complicity with imperialism”.
Popular mobilizations are reduced to mere “Western relays”, or else instrumentalized whenever they can serve one camp. The logic of “the enemy of my enemy” becomes an alibi: it becomes an excuse for overlooking internal repression and the protests that follow, as nothing more than parts of a larger geopolitical conflict.
The result is that internationalist, mutual solidarity based on the shared experiences and destinities of the oppressed classes becomes paralyzed, incapable of holding anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism together. Under the pretext of preventing any “imperialist exploitation” of revolutions, campists tend to privilege a structurally marginalized, “prudent” Left, at times condemned to perpetual defeat.
This “identity-based anti-imperialism” privileges loyalty to “anti-Western” states over an analysis of global capitalism. In so doing, it justifies repression, patriarchy, homophobia, and internal colonialism in the name of “resistance.” Absolute priority is given to the struggle against Western imperialism, and victims of these “anti-imperialist” states become “collateral damage.” .
The Irish essayist Fred Halliday described this type of thinking as “the anti-imperialism of fools.” In the name of hostility to the United States, this posture violently reinforces, in practice, a theocratic state that represses the Left, national minorities, feminists, and popular councils. The concept was later taken up by the Syrian activist Leila Al-Shami in her book Burning Country to designate supporters of Bashar al-Assad during the Arab revolution of the 2010s. From the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising in Budapest in 1956 to the present, this anti-imperialism of fools has masked state violence and the crushing of revolts.
Such a tendency can be observed within certain segments of the white Western left, but also within decolonial modes of thinking. It belongs to what one might call “anti-imperialism-washing,” the strategic use of anti-imperialist rhetoric to conceal, justify, or minimize forms of authoritarianism and fascistic violence exercised within national borders, especially when these states are presented as adversaries of Western hegemonic power. While these figures denounce the colonialism of Western powers, they remain largely blind, and even complicit, when it comes to “internal colonialism,” that is, the way minoritized peoples, such as the Kurds and Baluchs, describe their relationship to Iranian state power.
This practice is also often accompanied by a form of racial gaslighting. “Gaslighting” originally referred to the manipulation of women by systematically casting doubt on their word and mental state. Having become a key term in psychology and later a critical tool of feminism, it now encompasses a form of deceitful, violent, even denialist political language more broadly. Communities that have historically been subjected both to imperial domination and to internal repression are “taught,” from positions of relative privilege, the “correct” interpretation of imperialism and resistance. This condescending posture does not merely reinscribe colonial hierarchies of knowledge; it delegitimizes the ideas and lived experiences—the very agency— of those subjected to entangled systems of violence.
The consequences are all too tangible. The Islamic Republic of Iran instrumentalizes this decolonial discourse to label demonstrators as “terrorists” and harden its coercive apparatus. This logic also helps justify the discriminatory policies directed against Afghan migrants in Iran: by portraying them as an internal threat, the state shifts onto them responsibility for difficulties that in fact stem from its own political, social, and economic regime.
The counterrevolutionary logic of campism
After the genocide in Gaza and the war waged by Israel and the United States against Iran in June 2025, campism has once again come to dominate part of the global radical Left in the West, as well as in Latin America, Africa, and the Arab world. It reduces Iranian politics to a duel between “Iran” and the “U.S.-Israeli axis.” Popular uprisings, repressed in blood since 2017, are either passed over in silence or recast through the state’s official discourse: “Mossad infiltration,” “color revolution,” “Western plot,” and so on. This framework turns social movements into a security threat and legitimizes repression—from street violence to executions—under the pretext of a “state of emergency” or an “untimely moment”. By treating insurgent people as the principal enemy, it is, in fact, profoundly counterrevolutionary.
Under the expanding regime of permanent war, people in struggle are repeatedly told to stand down, to defer themselves for the sake of a higher urgency. Even those who recognize the repressive nature of these forces often set aside emancipatory struggles in the name of strategy. This is what Morteza Samanpour and Amir Kianpour have called “strategic campism.” Feminist struggles have long been trapped in precisely this logic: they are always asked to wait, first for class, now for anti-imperialism. But feminist politics has named the truth of this postponement with clarity: later too often means never. No struggle should be consigned to the “waiting-room of history” in the name of a linear conception of liberation, or sacrificed to a hierarchy of supposedly more urgent causes.
Recent geopolitical developments have given campists even greater room for maneuver. During Israel’s war against Iran in June 2025, often referred to as the “Twelve-Day War,” the concrete experience of destruction strengthened anti-war tendencies inside Iran. However, after the bloody massacre perpetrated by the state in January 2026, part of society, exhausted and confronted with a dead end, came to falsely view foreign intervention as a means of overthrowing the government, other internal avenues having been tried unsuccessfully and with the state not yielding to pressure. A prominent doctor reported that “at least a thousand” patients (protesters) with severe eye injuries had presented at a single hospital in Tehran following the January protests, all requiring urgent treatment in an attempt to save their eyesight.
It is precisely here that campism collapses. To condemn external war while remaining silent about internal state violence is not a principled anti-war position, but a form of relativism that effaces crucial differences between regimes and modalities of violence. This is not a claim of Iranian exceptionalism invoked to legitimize military attack, as some Trumpist and monarchist currents have done. It is, rather, the insistence that a theocratic dictatorship, in which an unelected leader exercises extralegal power over ninety million people through social terror, executions, torture, political imprisonment, digital isolation, misogynistic religious rule, and racist-colonial policies toward national minorities and Afghan migrants, cannot be treated as equivalent to states where civil and legal freedoms, however limited, still exist, and where violence operates at a structurally different scale and form. .
To condemn the external war or imperialist intervention without explicitly denouncing this internal violences, the massacre of its own population, as campists do, is both a complete political misreading of dynamics in Iran, and means siding with the state against the people it is killing. States rule by dividing people and crushing uprisings. Campists do not resist this logic; they follow it. By taking states and their geopolitical alignments as their primary point of reference, they reproduce and legitimize the divisions imposed from above, substituting allegiance to state camps for solidarities forged from below among people in struggle.
A betrayal of the memories of the Global South
Since the Islamic counterrevolution against the genuine 1979 revolution, part of the national and international left has subordinated class and gender analysis to its one-sided interpretation of anti-imperialism. Women’s protests against compulsory veiling, for example, were marginalized, inadvertently contributing to the consolidation of the religious and patriarchal order, and came to be presented as a guarantee of “cultural authenticity,” a sign of distinction from the West, and a marker of national independence. A dominant narrative thus took shape, one that views the Iranian Revolution exclusively through the prism of anti-Westernism and, in so doing, erases secular, feminist, queer, Kurdish, socialist, and other progressist forces. This ideology is structurally incapable of recognizing the legitimacy of internal struggles within anti-Western states. Non-Western peoples are recognized only as objects of Western imperialism, the lived experiences, collective memories, and political subjectivities of subaltern groups—women/queer communities, ethnic minorities, and the popular classes—are systematically dismissed as insignificant distractions or as being inventions of the West.
After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, this orientation persisted in the form of statist Third Worldism: the loyalty of populations was transferred to “anti-American” states, and the rights of women, queer people, and minorities were subordinated to “anti-imperialist unity.” This approach, at once Eurocentric and Orientalist, ignores the subjectivity of non-Western peoples. It treats violence as serious only when it emanates from the U.S. camp and refuses to acknowledge that populations of the Global South may genuinely struggle for democratic rights and freedoms.
“Anti-colonial unity” is thus transformed into nationalist authoritarianism. And it accepts the logic of a seemingly permanent “state of emergency”: priority is given to state power, security, and geopolitical leverage (for example: “We fight in Syria so that we do not have to fight in Tehran”).
Campism turns anti-colonial memory into an instrument for legitimizing authoritarian postcolonial states. It makes the state the agent of resistance and strips peoples of both their legitimacy and their political subjectivity. In doing so, it betrays subaltern memories that were often constituted against the state itself. Paradoxically, states such as Iran are presented as “independent from global capitalism,” even as they remain machines of internal exploitation and militarism, concerned precisely with integrating themselves into and competing with other states on the stage of global capitalism.
It is precisely in its relation to Iran’s colonized margins that this logic most clearly reveals its violence. Campism does not only erase the plurality of Iranian opposition forces. Rooted in a quasi-colonial and securitized conception of sovereignty and borders, it also reproduces internal hierarchies by relegating Kurdish and other non-Persian ethnic struggles to the background, or even disqualifying them. In this respect, from the 1980 jihad against Kurdistan to 100+ recent attacks on exiled Iranian Kurdish parties in Iraqi Kurdistan during the war, campists have often shown themselves even more hostile to the Kurds than the Iranian government, minimizing or marginalizing the legitimacy of their resistance.
These violences form part of a longer history, aggravated by the active support—or the silence—of some actors in the Arab world and of certain segments of the Left. The Al-Anfal genocide carried out by Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, costing the lives of around 180,000 Kurds simply because of their identity, illustrates this dynamic. The trauma of the murderous repression was compounded by the support of part of the Arab world and the denial of the genocide on the part of intellectuals.
More recently, in 2018, the occupation of Afrin in Rojava by the Turkish army brought systematic violence, displacement, and destruction. In response, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, stated, “ victory in Afrin is a symbol of Turkey[’s] will. If God wills, we will submit great epics to help our people,” before praising the leadership of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his party, the Justice and Development Party, which has been in power for more than twenty years.
These events have unfortunately produced a lasting rupture in the ties between Kurdish struggles and those of the Arab or Persian worlds, as well as with certain parts of the self-proclaimed anti-imperialist left, which have too often failed to recognize and support the Kurdish struggle.
State instrumentalization of Western sanctions
The recent war against Iran did not emerge suddenly; it was long in the making through a sanctions regime that operates as an imperial technology for producing social vulnerability, as Iraq had already shown. Sanctions have not merely impoverished the population, fueled inflation, eroded healthcare and employment, and weakened collective capacities for resistance; they have also helped generate the very conditions for military escalation. By locking the country into a protracted siege economy, they have normalized the state of exception, consolidated the state’s rentier and security apparatuses, and displaced the costs of the crisis onto the popular classes. In doing so, they have prepared both the material and ideological terrain of war: a society exhausted, fragmented, and reduced to the struggle for survival becomes more exposed to external projects of militarization. Sanctions thus appear for what they are: not an alternative to war, but one of its preparatory forms.
Yet while sanctions are real and devastating, they do not alone account for the conditions of undignified life in a resource-rich country like Iran. Against campist readings that reduce all forms of social inequality in Iran to Western sanctions, analysis must also confront Iran’s own political economy: a capitalist order marked by harsh privatization, widespread labor precarity—with more than 90 percent of contracts reportedly temporary—and an internally organized regime of domination and deprivation, sustained in part through the extreme exploitation and expropriation of racialised and undocumented workers, especially Afghanis and Baluches. For campists, popular protests in Iran are interpreted as economic discontent, caused entirely by sanctions, thereby obscuring the central role of the state’s own policies. One implication of this campist logic is that, by minimizing the actual dynamics of the domestic opposition to Islamic Republic, it draws a false equivalence based on the mistaken notion that such “economic discontent” is consonant with the reactionary Pahlavist project of regime change from above. Contrary to the campist claims, opposing imperialist regime change does not require dismissing or delegitimizing domestic revolt against the Islamic Republic.
Widespread poverty in Iran is not attributable to sanctions alone; it is also rooted in a rentier political economy and in the monopolization of imports, both of which the Islamic Republic has instrumentalized. Its security and regional policies are not simply reactions to outside pressure. Rather, these policies are integral to the state’s logic of survival, channeling resources toward coercive institutions and ideological-military projects, while the population is left exhausted and impoverished. As Kayhan Valadbaigi argues, sanctions help intensify the concentration of wealth within the oligarchy while consolidating structures of power. They shift the costs onto the most vulnerable, justify repression, and further enrich the oligarchy. Economic shock policies—fluctuations in the dollar, the removal of the preferential exchange rate—appear as calculated measures of “survival” in a context of vulnerability.
In addition, campists erase the Islamic Republic’s violence against the people. Murders, torture, executions, the shooting of wounded people in hospitals, and attacks on mourning ceremonies are ignored or denied, and thus legitimized. This support for an authoritarian and anti-imperialist theocracy empties the language of emancipation of any real content.
Stop judging a cause by the way it is coopted
The spread of authoritarian campism takes place largely through social media. There, the legitimization of authoritarian states intertwines with a reductive anti-Westernism and, in some cases, with antisemitism and conspiratorial patterns of thought.
Despite the objective asymmetries between Israel (backed by the West) and the Islamic Republic (under Western sanctions), similar political and symbolic mechanisms are at work: U.S. and Israeli flags at certain “pro-Iran” rallies; Iranian state flags (or the Islamic Republic flags) and portraits of Ali Khamenei at certain pro-Palestinian mobilizations. These are all gestures liable to turn legitimate struggles into justifications for violence, while at the same time discrediting both the Iranian and Palestinian resistance. The same logic applies to the now-famous slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” (Jin, Jiyan, Azadî). Appropriated by the Western far right, the Iranian far right in the diaspora, and pro-genocide currents, it has been instrumentalized in support of militarized violence.
This logic is not specific to Iran. As David Brophy has argued in relation to Xinjiang, parts of the international Left have treated the repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples less as a question of national rights and state violence than as a problem of Western propaganda, funding, or geopolitical manipulation; in the case of Vijay Prashad and Tings Chak, this apologetic posture has even relied on fabricated, apparently AI-generated sources. But the cynical instrumentalization of human rights by Western states does not make the suffering to which that language refers any less real.
We know all too well how progressive and radical movements from the Global South often end up being appropriated by the right once they are relayed in the West. But this process cannot lead us to abandon the duty of solidarity. The case of the queer movement illustrates this well: pinkwashing by states such as Israel cancels neither the emancipatory force of queerness nor the necessity of solidarity with queers who face repression in any context. The legitimacy of a resistance depends only on its emancipatory content and on its rootedness among the oppressed, never on its appropriation.
Campism contributes in very concrete ways to the perpetuation of historical and contemporary injustices. It creates a political vacuum through dispersal and fragmentation, a vacuum gradually filled by the right and the far right, both in the region and across the world. The Iranian far right in the diaspora occupies this vacuum by simplifying the revolution and demonizing “anti-imperialism.” It can thereby present itself as the only force for change. By artificially homogenizing entire populations (“All Ukrainians resisting Russia are Nazis.” “All Syrian revolutionaries are jihadists.” “All Iranians in revolt support Israel or the monarchists.”), campism becomes an accomplice in the rise of imperialist and reactionary forces.
The far right is the far right everywhere
In Europe, no consistent Left would accept rallying under the flags of the far right on the grounds that an enemy power was attacking the country. Yet when it comes to Iran, some consider it acceptable to demand that Iranians efface themselves and rally behind reactionary, nationalist, fanatical, even fascistic forces. Such an asymmetry implies, in effect, that the peoples of the Global South should be satisfied with a choice between imperial domination and internal barbarism. And yet the Islamic Republic is precisely a state that must be named for what it is: a fascistic formation, a non-Western far right, especially when it comes to ethnic-national minorities and Afghan immigrants.
The recent “anti-war” statement on Iran exposes the political impasse of campism: an anti-war discourse that enables certain segments of the Left to converge with fascist, antisemitic, neo-Nazi, and conspiracist milieus. The statement brought together signatories from seemingly opposed political milieus: on the one hand, decolonial-campist anti-war figures such as Vijay Prashad, Sandew Hira, Ramón Grosfoguel, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Munyaradzi Mushonga, Ajamu Baraka, Nordine Saïdi and Paulina Aroch Fugellie; and, on the other, a range of figures—including Dieudonné, Alain de Benoist, Thomas Werlet, Jean-Michel Vernochet, Christian Bouchet, Marion Sigaut, Jacob Cohen, Pierre-Antoine Plaquevent, and Arnaud Develay—as well as organisations such as the RN, Égalité & Réconciliation, L’Œuvre française, and the Mouvement France Résistance, all associated with conservative , far-right, nationalist, or fascist currents. This juxtaposition illustrates how a purely geopolitical form of anti-imperialism can become compatible with far-right politics. Within this framework, the Iranian regime and its criminal Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, are recast as “a voice against arrogance and terrorism” while a deeply troubling tolerance toward the violence of post-colonial states against their own populations is being normalized under the banner of anti-war politics.
Political consistency requires refusing, for Iranians as for any other people, any injunction to accommodate fascism in the name of a geopolitical “lesser evil.” We should not ask Iranians to accept politically any reality that the Left would refuse to accept for themselves elsewhere. We neither march with fascists nor under their banners: we fight them, including when they appropriate the lexicon of freedom in order to invert its meaning.
Much like Stalinism, which did so much to discredit socialism, campism in Iran weakens the Left and strengthens the far right. At the same time, it deepens the North-South divide and legitimizes the repression of anti-tyrannical movements in the South. The result is the isolation of emancipatory forces, the distrust of exiles toward the Left in the North (including decolonial currents), and the collapse of international solidarity.
While Kurdish feminist prisoners sentenced to death in Evin prison are capable of expressing their solidarity with the Palestinian resistance—even at the risk of losing part of their support in Iran—authoritarian and identity-based anti-imperialists, speaking from the comfort of the West or elsewhere, prove incapable of showing comparable solidarity with popular struggles in Iran. At times, and even more gravely, the full extent of those sufferings is denied or called into question.
It is urgent to move beyond campism. Otherwise, will not succeed in rebuilding a genuinely emancipatory left or in revitalizing a truly popular internationalism that networks such as “Peoples Want” attempt to do. Anti-imperialism is authentic only if it fights all forms of domination, everywhere and for everyone.
Parts of this text was originally published in French -Eds.
Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: C.Suthorn; modified by Tempest.
