The Other War on Iran (With Roya Rastegar)

Most of us who are against the war in Iran have been loudly calling it out. What we've seen less of, however, is the callouts of the regime before the war. And, more importantly, the uplifting of Iranian voices.

As opposition to the war grows, Iranian voices that don't fit the anti-war frame are getting stifled even more. This hurts solidarity. It cuts us off from the people we should be learning from.

Roya Rastegar is a scholar and filmmaker who runs the Iranian Diaspora Collective. She's in direct contact with people inside Iran right now, in the middle of a 53-day regime-imposed internet blackout.  And while we don't agree on the war, I believe Roya's voice (and many others) is essential to listen to. She brings the voices of people on the ground into a conversation that's mostly happening without them, people who feel caught between a 47-year war their own government has waged on them, and the one we just watched unfold.

When I asked Roya how she felt about the ceasefire (we recorded before it occurred), I was struck by her response. She felt no war had ended. It was just one more phase in that war on Iranian people.

This doesn't mean Roya speaks for every Iranian: there are many who are strongly against the war, both in Iran itself and in the diaspora. But it is important to hear this one in order to contend with why Iranians have often been left out of discussions, not to mention simply learning and hearing their experiences.

What Roya talks about:

- The internet blackout and what the IRGC is doing to its people right now
- The January massacres and what they changed
- Why some Iranians are saying "I would rather die by bombs than by the regime"
- Why "pro-war" and "anti-war" is the wrong binary
- What Kurdish feminist thought, and "Woman Life Freedom" in its original meaning, has to teach us
- What she thinks the diaspora gets wrong, and what she thinks we need next

Follow Roya:

Iranian Diaspora Collective on Instagram: @iraniandiasporacollective
Substack: Global Freedoms
Her Vox piece on what Iranians are living through: https://www.vox.com/politics/482389/voices-from-iran-war-dispatches

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Here We Come is a podcast about democratic movements and nonviolent transformation, hosted by Elad Nehorai.

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00:00 Cold open
03:00 Meet Roya Rastegar
03:30 What Iranians are living through right now
06:30 Putting Iranians at the center
08:00 The false binary: pro-war vs anti-war
11:00 How social media distorts the diaspora
14:30 Taking cues from people inside Iran
19:00 The 47-year war: how we got here
25:30 The January massacres
28:00 "I would rather die by bombs than by the regime"
30:30 Rethinking the civilian cost of war
35:30 Responsibility to protect
39:00 What the diaspora needs to do now
40:00 Kurdish feminist thought and Woman Life Freedom
41:30 Where to find Roya's work

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi. I'm Aladna Harai and welcome to Here We Come. Today's episode's a heavy one. My guest is Roy Rostiger. She's a scholar, a filmmaker, and she runs the Iranian Diaspora Collective. She and I did not and do not agree about the war in Iran. I was an am against it. I didn't think it was going to bring what its supporters hoped it would bring. And Roya saw it very differently and sees it very differently. And you're going to hear her make that case. She makes it seriously and effectively. Here's why that matters. For decades, Iranians have been living under a regime that is at war with its own people. They have protested, they have been jailed. They have been killed. And in the meantime, they've been begging the rest of us to pay attention. And most of us, including most progressives, including me sometimes, have not really listened. Not the way they've needed us to. The discussion we're having right now in America about this war is mostly a discussion about ourselves, about our politics, our coalitions, who we're willing to be seen agreeing with. The Iranian people are barely in it. And when Iranians who are asking for outside help do show up in the discussion, they often get treated like they don't count. Or like maybe they're confused. I don't think we get to do that. I don't think you can be against this war honestly without first sitting with what Iranians are actually living through, including the Iranians whose conclusions you find hard to hear. And one more note. This conversation was recorded before the ceasefire between the United States, Israel, and Iran was announced. I'm still releasing it, and actually Roya's own framing is part of why. When I called her to ask how the ceasefire changed things, she said two things that stayed with me. The first was that Iranian people were not at the table when the ceasefire was negotiated, which is the same erasure this whole episode is about, just in a different form. The second was that from her perspective, this isn't really a ceasefire. The regime has been at war with its own people for 47 years. And a pause in the bombing between three states does not end that war. The blackout, the surveillance, the executions, the persecutions, none of that stops because a bunch of countries shook hands. And I want to say one more thing. Roya is one voice. She is a thoughtful, deeply informed voice, and she is in real contact with real people inside Iran. But she's not all Iranians, and she's not all the diaspora. There are Iranians and Iranian Americans who are passionately against this war, who also have family in the country, who also have standing to speak, and whose analysis is very different from ours. I'm not putting Roy on the show because I think she speaks for everyone. I'm putting her on because I think a strand of Iranian thinking she represents is one a lot of progressives, including me, have not really sat with. And we need to. So that's what this episode is. It's not a debate about the war, it's a conversation with one person who has spent her life on this, who is in contact with people inside Iran right now, and who's going to tell you what she's hearing. I ask questions, I sit with what she says, I don't always know what to do with it. I'm still where I was when I started. But I'm in a different relationship to my own position than I was before we talked. And I think you might be too. Here's my conversation with Roya Rastager. Welcome to Here We Come. I'm excited to welcome Roya Rastager, a scholar specializing in political philosophy and history, as well as a filmmaker. Welcome, Roya.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Yeah, I'm excited to speak to you. We uh we need your voice.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

And we need yours.

SPEAKER_00 3:48

Thank you. You had a Vox piece that I thought was incredible and really important, which was what are Iranians going through? It was framed in a very thoughtful way, but just the fact that you put Iranians to the foreground in a discussion about the Iran War, where I don't think we actually center Iranians so much, as far as I could tell. And I'm curious, number one, I would love to hear a little bit about your original framing, but I would also love an update. I think it's been a few weeks since you wrote that. And I think it's so important that, like, before we even jump in, I want us to start with what are Iranians going through right now and feeling?

SPEAKER_01 4:30

So the absence of Iranians from this dialogue is very much by design. Iranians right now are in the middle of a 31-day regime-imposed internet blackout. Uh, this is the longest the Iranian regime has ever kept the Iranian people in the complete dark. So for the majority of Iranians, the great majority of people inside of the country, they're not able to contact their friends or their family. They're not either inside of the country or outside the country. Um, they're not able to get alerts that are being sent by Israel around strikes because the Islamic Republic is not sending Iranian people alerts. They're getting them from Israel. And so I don't really have many updates about how they're doing because I think some people were able to have access earlier, the people that I was speaking to, a friend of a friend who has a Starlink, that kind of thing. But as martial law has descended upon the country, the regime is really lashing out against its own people. And so people have everything has gotten tighter. People are more afraid to talk, people are are very aware that they're being surveyed on the phone, people are are afraid to go out. And so I haven't, I don't have that much of an update. I have some things that I'm hearing from people. And I mean, I think people are very right now, people are having a very hard time. I mean, I think the bombings are intensifying. There's a lot of debates that are happening amongst Iranian people about whether or not this is ever going to come to something, like the collapse of the regime. They're very worried that if the regime does not collapse, it's going to turn into an even greater monstrosity. It's like that mythical snake where you cut off the head of one and then it just grows two heads. They're worried that this is going to become like a huge monster, the regime. And so right now I think people are also struggling economically because without the internet, they're not able to do any kind of even the small bits of like business that they maybe could have done before, they can't do anything like that. Not able to access their money. Think about like all the ways in which we rely on the internet and being connected, right? So they're completely cut off from their own economy and their own networks and also from the outside.

SPEAKER_02 6:54

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 6:55

So the the Vox piece that I wrote was my idea originally for that was just to be able to hear put together a compilation of voices from people inside of Iran and present a kind of a portrait of all the different voices and the different perspectives. Uh, because you're right, the what Iranian people think and feel and what the civilians are wanting is being lost from the picture. And so I thought that that was important to kind of bring up and also to really think through the moral complexity of it. Uh, because I think in the diaspora, we're having a lot of debates around is intervention good? Is intervention bad? Is war good? Is war bad? But from the ground, when you live there and you're advocating for bombs to fall on the place where you're living, I think it's really important to understand what are the circumstances that lead you to even conceptually think that that would be a good idea.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

I think one of the hardest things that I've found as a progressive and talking to other progressives, and I'll say as someone who's had uh a bit of access into the Iranian diaspora rhetoric around this, is I'm kind of finding myself between two things. One is that there's a lot of progressives that aren't aware of, I think, at the very least, what many Iranians are going through, were going through before the war, andor not necessarily even acknowledging it within the conflict that we're experiencing now, partly just because I think to an extent they just want the war to stop. Um, but I think the unfortunate consequence of that is that those people end up cutting out Iranian voices just by default when they do that. On the other hand, I think that there's also a lot of the pro-war Iranian diaspora voices who are so angry at progressives that it's creating a false split. Like they're so angry at the progressives that they've pushed them away. And I think what what has resulted has been this split that seems like it's conservative versus progressive, but in many ways they share the same values of wanting human rights for the Iranian people, for the world. And I'm trying to figure out how we how we bridge that. You know, at the very least, like that was part of why I hope to have you here, because it's like I just don't even know. You know, I try to speak out about it, but I find myself not wanting to step on Iranian voices, but at the same time, I don't want to by default then seem like I'm supporting the war. So I'm not sure how to balance that. I'd love your thinking on that.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

I think it's really hard. And I think like the thing that we should be doing as the diaspora and people who are non-Iranians in the diaspora is we should be modeling what democratic culture actually looks like and being able to hold a diversity of perspectives. It seems to be like the people who are against intervention are also very much touting the fact that the Islamic Republic of Iran is an anti-imperialist state, which it's not. And I can get into that later. And so I'm really invested in a way of thinking about our society and our culture where we're not throwing people away because of the things that they say. And that means holding space for the fact that people can change, and also holding space for the fact that you and I can disagree. And that doesn't mean that you're an evil person and deserve to die. And that doesn't mean that I am always correct and am morally superior to you.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

That might be true, like relatively speaking.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

I might always be correct too. But I think that that is a really I think being able to hone space for the fact that different people's lived experiences give them different perspectives is really important. And I think a lot of the this kind of polarization that you're talking about is because of social media, is because of what drives algorithms. And I think that's really upsetting. And it's honestly why I don't have a social media presence. I really know that ethically I actually should speak on social media because this is our mode of communicating with each other. And I feel like I have a lot of things to be able to say and I can contribute something to the conversation. But I really have an ethical issue with social media because of the way that it polarizes and divides people and creates kind of false division that we then believe. So, and I also start to repeat it. So, for example, we start to say, oh, the Iranian diaspora is so fractured, so fractured, we start to repeat it. Then we start to see it online because we're seeing it in the comments. But how do we know if those are real people, if those are bots, if they're regime agitators?

SPEAKER_00 11:42

And also by definition, comments are almost always polarized. Like if you're commenting to an extent, it could be just because you're upset, and the people that agree are often very quiet.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

So I think that the um this polarization that's happening, there's something underneath it, right? I think there are misogynistic elements to many different cultures. I think Iranian culture also has a misogynistic underlying to it. But I also think that so does Marxist thinkers and analysts. And I feminists have critiqued Marxist thinkers for this. There's also a very racialized way of thinking about Iran, but there's also racialized way of thinking about other elements of different societies too, in terms of what's happening in Israel as well, or what's happening in America with violence against black people and people of color and ICE.

SPEAKER_00 12:37

Aaron Ross Powell If you had like a progressive who was against the war and you had someone who was very for the war because they were anti-the regime and wanting democracy, how do you imagine we could have that discussion where that gets bridged?

SPEAKER_01 12:53

In some ways, I I know that there are people who are very against intervention and anti-war who have family in Iran. I'm not gonna say that all the anti-war people have no family in Iran. I'm not gonna say that at all because it's really hard to speak in these generalizations. But I know a lot of people who have a lot of their family, like the majority of their family inside of Iran. And they maybe came over 10 years ago, 13 years ago. I am a little bit taking my cue and my advocacy from those people and from the people I'm speaking to inside of Iran. I've been directing a film about underground dancers in Iran for the last few years. So I've been in communication with Gen Z, literally like they're between 20 and 28. Yeah, in inside of Iran. And they're not political. When we started talking to them a couple of years ago, they were really like, we don't want to be political. They were a little traumatized by woman life freedom. They were in the streets around that, but after seeing what the police did and seeing their friends get hurt and having people get arrested, some of those people are still in prison. They were really like, we don't want to participate in a political film. We don't want to talk about politics. What we're doing is not political, don't put a political frame on it. And so I agreed to all of those conditions when we started working with them. But I've seen them become more politicized over the last six months, especially since the January massacres.

SPEAKER_00 14:18

And so I can we give some background. Like I would love to maybe give some background actually, I'll let you finish that. No, sure.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

So like uh talking about what are the things that they said. So I'm taking a lot of my cues from those people, but listen, like there might be other Iranian diaspora people in the diaspora who are saying bombs will never bring liberation. And I I I've heard people say that. I somewhat agree with that, but we can also get into that. And I don't disagree with those people necessarily, because they're also saying it based on something, some part of their lived experience. I think the problem comes when people start to speak for everyone. They say all Iranians are saying this or all Iranians are saying that. And I, if I had those kinds of different people in a room, I would start by asking them about their lived experience, who they have inside of Iran, what their stakes are. I think what people's stakes are is really important because I think we have to prioritize those stakes. So the people who have the most invested in terms of friends, family inside of Iran, I think those people get more weight to their words. So I get very upset when I hear influencers who are very much advocating against intervention or even saying things like Iran has a right to defend itself, which I don't think it does, which we can also get into that. Who then also make fun of Iranians who are calling for intervention by saying, Oh, thank you, President Trump. That's making fun of someone's accent. But there's something actually really interesting about that. When you make fun of somebody's accent for call when they're calling for war, that person has an accent because they're closer to that country than you, who have maybe assimilated a little bit more here.

SPEAKER_02 16:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

Yeah, and I I just think we can have discussion. Like I I honestly think we can have like discussion debate. And I also think we have to constantly we have to also remember what are some core principles that we share. Do we believe that it's people before governments? Yes or no? Are we going to prioritize states and their sovereignty, or will we prioritize the sovereignty of people and civilian populations? Because civilian and people have their own sovereignty too too, right? So which one? So let's agree on that first. The second thing that I would say is we cannot make suggestions without that are poetic and beautiful, but that are not concrete. It is not an option to leave Iranian people in the situation in which they are in. That should not be on the table. So people can say, I am against the regime and I'm also against military intervention. I respect that. Tell me what you're for. Tell me what the solution is. Because Iranian people have protested, they have striked or struck, they have gone on strikes, um, they have protested, they have been arrested, they have been maimed, they have gone into the streets, they have been murdered en masse, they have stayed in the country and tried to fight, they have built underground civil society organizations. But if Israel and the US cannot overthrow this regime, and we have to remember that the Islam the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, is designed to prevent a coup d'etat and it's designed to prevent civilian uprising, to overthrow it. It is not an army or a military that is designed to protect the people of Iran. It is an army that is designed to protect the ideology of Islamism, which is not the same thing as like being Muslim or Islam, but it's like a particular thing. So if these two nations, which have some of the most like sophisticated military technology, surveillance technology, information, if they can't figure out how to do this, how did we expect this uh Iranian civil society to do it? So we have to acknowledge that the people inside of Iran cannot continue this way. So I would, if I had those different people inside of a room, we would have to start with some core agreements. And I think those would be the two core agreements that I would put forth.

SPEAKER_00 18:46

The values of like sovereignty?

SPEAKER_01 18:49

The values of people's sovereignty over the sovereignty of states, right? And the second one would be we can't abandon we can't abandon the Iranian people. Yeah. So it's okay to say we're against the regime and we're against bombs. Yeah. But then what are you for? What's the solution? Because what the Iranian people are basically saying is we can't do this anymore. When they came out en masse and then were murdered en masse January 8th and 9th, that was the red line for Iranian people inside of Iran.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

I feel like people in general just like need to at the very least get an insight into what Iranians have been dealing with. We talk sometimes with the assumption that people know, but I really don't think they do.

SPEAKER_01 19:35

Yeah, I don't know if people know either. When the Islamic Republic was founded 47 years ago, they changed the constitution and set up the constitution to be an Islamic Republic. And the idea around that was to protect and try and build a unified world order of Islam. So the entire mission of the Islamic Republic is that it's not to protect Iran, it's not to protect Iranian culture or heritage or anything like that. And so all of the decisions of the governing body of Iran for the last 47 years has been to basically support the expansion of an Islamist ideology and at the detriment of the Iranian people. That means that any religious minorities, Baha'i minorities, uh Jewish minorities, Zoroastrians, they are actively persecuted. Baha'is are not even allowed to go to school, they're not allowed to participate in any kind of organizations, they're routinely arrested and imprisoned and executed. There was an execution of a number of Baha'i girls in the 80s. That was just, it's like still haunts me. There's also a diminishment of different ethnic groups. So Kurdish people are also, their language is criminalized, their culture is criminalized. There's many different ethnic groups in Iran, and they get the brunt force of the Islamic Republic of Iran's like anger, and the policing is really focused on them. I see a lot of parallels when we think about the racialization of policing in the US to the way that that's also happening in the Islamic Republic of Iran. It it is a police state. The police run it. That is how they maintain control through violence, through coercion. And then, of course, the subjugation of women is like also a core tenant of it that women are just not as as much as as worth much as men. Women are not allowed to wear what they want. The marital age was dropped to like I think nine or thirteen or something crazy like that. Women cannot do many things, like the family laws were repealed, all these laws that the former Shah of Iran had kind of put into place to protect women's rights, that kind of thing were all taken away. Iranians have been asking for a referendum on whether or not they want an Islamic Republic as a form of governance. And the Islamic Republic has not allowed them to have a vote on this. And so when I say that I don't think Iran has a right to defend itself, it's because I don't think Iran is a legitimate state. Because its people have been resisting its governance, and that has grown over the years.

SPEAKER_00 22:42

And how has the government responded to people who are speaking out? We touched a bit on the culmination of the massacre, but over the years.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

There's no freedom of expression. Yeah. Um, there's women cannot dance publicly. You can't show your hair, you can't wear what you want. Every aspect of life in Iran is policed. Iran is like a surveillance capitalist state. And whatever it pretends to be otherwise, right, by during the Islamic revolution, Western leftists like Noam Chomsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, they I don't know, romanticized, orientalized the idea of these like pious men in robes. But these are not pious men. These are bad people. And I, if you know me, you know that it's very hard for me to say that because I really don't believe in like evil. I don't, I think there's gray, I don't think everything is black and white. But this is really like a it's a gender apartheid state. Systematically, women are abused and discriminated against, but it's also a Persian supremacist state. People who are not Persian are criminalized in all different kinds of ways, depending on who you are. Afghan people can't aren't even allowed to exist. They just deported millions of Afghan people.

SPEAKER_02 24:15

Millions.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

And think about millions and millions. I I don't know the exact number. I wish I had it on hand, but they deported millions. And this was just earlier, I think that was earlier in 2025. And where are they deporting them to? Back to Afghanistan, where women are not allowed to sing, they are not allowed to be seen, they are not allowed to talk, they're now not allowed to get health care. Like it's like we have to look at the abuses of the Islamic Republic on a population of 95 million people. And so I think this kind of I think the thing to know when you start to really first think about Iran is that we didn't just enter a war with Iran. Yes, maybe America entered the chat, but the Islamic Republic of Iran has been at war with its own civilian population for 47 years. Because anything that is not a perfect representation of what they consider to be Islam is to be eradicated. And it's terrifying. And it's it's a violent state.

SPEAKER_00 25:26

And the dissent has been like really crushed in many ways.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

Yeah. There's no freedom of speech. They're like journalists, artists.

SPEAKER_00 25:35

People are being massacred or were massacred recently.

SPEAKER_01 25:38

Right. So when people went to the streets, uh it began as an economic protest in the end of December. There began as an economic protest. The um shopkeepers and the bazaar ended up going on strike because they were like, look, the economy is just collapsing, inflation is too intense. And this is also because of corruption in the regime. Uh, this is it because it's a petrostate, right? It's a it's uh also called crony capitalism. Like this is uh a very corrupt state that uses all the Iran's resources to basically fund itself, um, but doesn't fund the people itself. And so the people have been economically devastated, and that has happened consistently over the years, and it reached a fever pitch at the end of December. The shopkeepers went on strike, and then in the beginning of January, Trump made an announcement saying, you know, it if people go to the streets en masse, we have your back. And so people went out into the streets even more than they already had been. They were in the middle of protests before Trump said that. But then millions more came to the streets. And the regime cut off internet on that day that they went out to the streets, and then they were massacred in cold blood, and the stories are just horrifying. And I've heard first at her, I've heard firsthand accounts of people who were there. People who were there with their grandmothers. I've heard that it was a peaceful, I heard that it was very peaceful protests. I know that there's these claims that Mossad or the CIA basically orchestrated these protests. I don't know how you get millions of people to go into a into the streets who are not already very, very, very upset and dissatisfied and don't see any other future for themselves. And yeah, the regime killed the estimates are 30,000. That's from human rights organizations on the ground that are vetted and verified. And when I was talking to one of my dancers in the film that I'm directing, uh, we when we reconnected after the internet came back on after the massacres, this was a couple weeks after, she said, We are really needing help. What more can we as Iranian citizens do? We have spoken out, we have written, we have created music, our workers have gone on strike, we've protested. What else can we do to show the world that we don't want this regime? We got killed for it. And she said she was really pushing at that time for military intervention. This is before it actually happened. And she was like, you know, I'm not afraid of dying. I remember her saying, I'm not afraid of dying. What I'm afraid of is how I'm going to die. I've given up the idea that I'm gonna get old. She said, the stories that I've heard from my friends, my classmates, family of my friends, of how they kill girls, the videos that they saw once the internet did come back on of how they massacred people. There's one video of these plainclothes police officers pulling a woman by her hair and then stomping on her face and then basically hacking her with a machete. The videos that these young people saw, they were like, I would rather die by bomb than to be hacked to death or raped before I'm killed or arrested and tortured, had have my body withheld from my family. I would rather die by bomb than die by the hands of the regime. For them, that's the choice, not intervention or no intervention, war or no war. For them, their act, their thought process is how do I want to die? And when the terms are that life and it's not even life and death, it's death and death. I think it's really egregious when people inside of the diaspora don't hold space for that perspective because they believe fundamentally in anti-violence, and they fundamentally, from an ideological perspective, are anti-war.

SPEAKER_00 30:15

I think I've heard a bit of that from listening to diaspora, but like told in such a stark way. It's interesting because like I think it helps to me, it helps like as you're talking, helps explain what you were saying before about people with stakes. Because only someone with stakes is gonna say what you just said.

SPEAKER_01 30:39

There's a question right now that's going around, which is at what point do you think the cost will be too high to continue this war? We have to first think what has been the cost of the regime being in power for 47 years? What has been the civilian cost of that? And what is the cost of the regime continuing to be in power if it does not get taken out? Because if we only think about the civilian cost of war in this acute moment, then we're essentially saying that the cost of the regime having stayed in power for 47 years, all of that civilian death is a sunk cost. And I refuse to say that those people are a sunk cost. We can't just wipe the slate and cleat and be like, all right, from here forward, let's talk about civilian death. They executed more than 2,000 people just last year. The civilian death toll so far is 1,200 people. And I'm not saying that's okay. And I'm I mourn every single death. I mean, those girls that were killed in Minab, I really cried about them for days because I have an eight-year-old. They were eight, nine, they were kids. They didn't deserve it. I don't care if they were the kids of regime people. I don't, I mean, kids are like off the table for me. I don't care whose kids they are. I don't care if they're Palestinian kids or Israeli kids or Iranian kids or police's kids or Trump's kids, like kids are off the table for me. Every civilian death is a death that we have to recognize and we have to mourn. But I think at this point, there is a cost. Is the civilian cost of war higher or is the civilian cost of the regime staying in power higher? So if you think about it from the perspective of people who are inside of Iran, who have grown up with this regime and who had nothing to do with putting this regime in power, like these are 25-year-olds. They literally just want to do TikTok dances. They want to be able to be silly, they want to do be like wear their clothes, they want to make mistakes, they want to like have bad relationships and then have good relationships. They want to be able to pursue careers. They want like girlfriends, like they don't want to be political. They just want to do their thing. So if you're thinking about it from their perspective, that question of the civilian cost of the war becomes very different. So if we consistently remember the people, it reframes all of our kind of questions. This kind of question, for example, of liberation has never come from bombs. The same people who are saying that are the people who said that Palestinians via Hamas had a right to do what they did on October 7th. The people inside of Iran do not have bombs. They do not have weapons. They cannot go and actually fight the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. So I think there's something to be said for what happens when you put politics and states over people, like the interests of states over people, and thinking about people as just collateral damage. I think that's really problematic. I think we have to think about things from the perspective of people. I think if we think about things from the perspective of what's going to make Israeli people safer, what's going to make Palestinian people safer? What's going to make Jewish people safer around the world?

SPEAKER_00 34:06

I just think in so many discussions, we like don't talk about actual people. Yeah. Especially they become constructs. To me, you know, part of the reason I'm against war is because I think it'll make things worse overall. And I also feel like I don't think I and other people wrestle enough with the actual experience on the ground. But I do also acknowledge this point that you're making that Iranians have tried everything.

SPEAKER_01 34:36

My issue, my the thing that really is my pet peeve is moral inconsistency. Democrats were totally fine sending weapons to Israel to murder children and to flatten Gaza. And now they are saying they are against war. Listen, I've always been anti-war. I opposed the war on Gaza, because I don't even think it was a war in Gaza. I think it was a war on Gaza. I opposed that genocide. I oppose this. I oppose that. I'm like, okay, at least that's morally consistent and I get it. But that also has to be consistent when there's resistance, right? When Hamas also attacked on October 7th. I did not consider that resistance. And I got a lot of flack for that. But I was like, this is not what resistance looks like. In a way, I think I was also morally inconsistent on that one, right? Because I was saying there is no space for violence here. But now I'm saying I understand why there needs to be violence in Iran. The regime won't go without it. One of the things that I was advocating for in the organization that I run, the Iranian Diaspora Collective, one of the things that we were advocating for early was right to protect. Right to protect is invoked in the cases where governments are not protecting their populations. In the case of Bosnia, in the case of Rwanda, there are many situations in which right to protect should have been invoked because it would have curtailed the amount of civilian death. And of course, Iranians are not naive. America has its interests. Israel has its interests. Foreign interests. Iran is a very rich place. Very, very full of resources and rich. There is a lot to strip out. The regime has been doing it for 47 years for the benefit of themselves, Russia and China. Foreign interests have already been at play in the maintenance of this regime. And so foreign interests will also be at play as it's collapsing and as it's being taken down. So see, the binary of like foreign interests or not foreign interests doesn't make sense. Because it's already been happening. The binary of war anti-war doesn't happen because, for example, when you're saying even offensive-defensive, what about from the position of an Iranian person on the ground who's had so much loss because this regime keeps attacking them and their family and their friends? It's a defensive position then. It's not an offensive position. If I was not Iranian and I didn't know what the regime had been doing to Iran, I would probably be anti-war. I'd be like, we have no place in doing that. But as an Iranian who has people inside of Iran, who is listening to people inside of Iran, who are saying, listen, if they want to help, we don't know what else to do here. What Iranians understand is that they have been in active warfare. Their own government has been murdering them, torturing them, maiming them. To give you an example, January 8th and 9th, when they shot protesters, some of the protesters had to go to hospitals. Police forces came into the hospitals and shot them. This regime has no right to exist. It's exceedingly narcissistic to put an ideological judgment on their call for help. Now listen, there are some cuckoo banana crazy people. For sure. I think there is a real problem with a lot of monarchist groups, but I think there's also extremists in every single group. And social media amplifies those people. But for this entire call for intervention and for Iranian people needing help, for all of that to be boiled down to this is just a bunch of crazy monarchists calling for it just in the diaspora, I think that's very unfair.

SPEAKER_00 38:34

I don't feel like the vast majority of progressives don't want Iranians to be free. A lot of times what I'm hearing, perception-wise, for example, like people supporting the regime. I don't think the vast majority of progressives actually support it. And I feel like it's another example to me of what happens with online rhetoric. We're seeing comments become the representative sample, especially from Iranian diaspora, for example, like being upset about the left. I don't think that's the left. I guess I just wish the discussion at large was giving more credit to people in general for wanting a solution. I hear everything you're saying. It just feels to me like the terms of the discussion are messy.

SPEAKER_01 39:22

Circling back to the beginning part of you're like, I'm trying to figure out what to do in this world, like how can we contribute? I really feel like this is that's why it's actually so important to be writing and educating in this moment. And I don't even know if it's like historical education that's needed, which I do think that that is needed. But I think it's like just I think there's like a level of moral education that's needed that recognizes people and live lived experience in a different kind of a way. I really, really believe that we all need to really look at Kurdish thinkers and activists, and even the term woman life freedom, which is Jinjian Azadis in Kurdish, that comes from a long-standing political ideology that is from Kurdish feminists. But they're thinking about a model of living that is not dependent upon a state and defending a state's sovereignty. I think there is a real lack of political education. And I think that political education needs to start with people who have been the most disenfranchised and the most vulnerable. I think Kurdish women's work and Kurdish work is really important to read right now. I think black feminist work is really important work to read. I think Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault didn't listen to Iranian women. These guys are they're talking about an Islamic revolution, but it's really, this is not really like a anti-West, it's not just anti-Western, it's not just anti-imperialist, it's like there's something much more awful here. This is a masculinist revolution, like this is a sexist thing that they're doing. They didn't listen to them. Because even though their analysis might be very sharp on in when it comes to post-colonial theory and theories of the oppressed and all the rest, it doesn't hold in its analysis. Women are always left aside. And you write no one listens to Iranian women. And people are still not listening to Iranian women on the ground. If we don't have an intersectional analysis, we're screwed. And I think that intersectional analysis always comes out of necessity. And I think people inside of Iran, men and women, implicitly have it. This the younger generation has it because they understand their liberation is connected.

SPEAKER_00 41:39

I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your view and being so personal and powerful. Thank you for coming.

SPEAKER_01 41:49

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 41:49

Of course. Um, before we go, how can people find you and read more and learn more from you?

SPEAKER_01 41:56

So I run an account on Instagram called the Iranian Diaspora Collective. So it's at Iranian Diaspora Collective. And then we also have a substack, which is Global Freedoms, which is the name of the organization. So it's a substack called Global Freedoms. And then also, I think if people Google me, I'm my website comes up which has all my writings.

SPEAKER_00 42:18

We definitely recommend your Vox piece to people. Thanks.

SPEAKER_01 42:20

Yeah. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 42:22

All right. Well, thank you again.

SPEAKER_01 42:23

I appreciate it. Thanks. Pleasure for engaging, opening the space.