A People(s)-Centered Human Rights framework rejects the liberal abstraction that makes a false symmetry between Iranian authoritarianism and U.S. imperialism, which obscures the fact that one is a sovereign state under siege and the other is the world's most powerful empire waging war.
Several commentators have addressed the problem with the metaphor of the “two blades of a scissors,” which is the central element of the anti-Iranian propaganda letter (AIPL) released a few days ago in the Guardian newspaper. We are not going to repeat the critiques here but will offer a People(s)-Centered Human Rights/anti-imperialist perspective that takes the critique beyond the specifics of Iran. We argue that the false symmetry reflected in the Guardian letter represents one of the most significant theoretical problems that Western-centric leftists have introduced repeatedly when confronting major episodes of U.S. aggression.
Western-oriented leftists have engaged in a consistent pattern of confused anti-imperialism and ideological mystification that has resulted in many of them being objectively aligned with U.S. imperialism precisely at the moment when the U.S. has launched one of its horrific hybrid attacks on a Global South nation.
The AIPL is just the latest in these misguided collaborations. And always that collaboration is characterized in terms demonstrating an annoying but culturally resonating moral superiority that supposedly separates them from the raw interests of U.S. imperialism.
It is a bogus argument that attempts to legitimize a form of left humanitarian imperialism.
A People(s)-Centered Human Rights / anti-imperialist perspective offers a more precise critique.
But first, what elements inform what we refer to as a “People(s)-Centered Human Rights” (PCHR) frame?
People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHR) are those non-oppressive rights that reflect the highest commitment to universal human dignity and social justice that individuals and collectives define and secure for themselves and Collective Humanity through social struggle.
This definition is a description of a process and an ethical framework as opposed to a pre-figured list of items defined as representing human rights. This is one of the key differences between the liberal framework and PCHR. PCHR’s approach asserts that human rights must be created from the bottom-up, emanating from mass struggles that reflect a commitment to both individual and collective rights. The core ethical principles of PCHR include the right to self-determination, authentic democracy, social justice and the right to collective self-defense.
The PCHR frame does not reject in its entirety the normative standards reflected in state-centric international human rights treaties, covenants or declarations. The PCHR approach recognizes the importance of these texts and the ethical principles implied in them, however PCHR asserts that what can be defined as human rights goes beyond national legal regimes or Western liberal individualistic normative standards reflected in international human rights treaties, covenants or declarations.
It asserts that the ultimate meaning and scope of human rights and modalities for rights implementation are rooted in the international struggles against national oppressions, capitalist exploitation and imperialist violence. PCHR are, therefore, not neutral, they reflect the demands and successes of an evolving radical process of global societal transformation whose final determination is dependent on popular political struggles and national and global dispensations of popular power.
The AIPL identifies two contradictory internal and external forms of violence but constructs a political equivalence between the two forms that obscures the asymmetry of power between imperialism and the Iranian state. Consequently, it reproduces the liberal-human-rights framework in which the internal conduct of a Global South state becomes the principal object of international mobilization while the structures of imperial power remain secondary.
A People(s)-Centered Human Rights framework refuses that abstraction.
The Iranian people are not simply trapped between an asserted “Iranian authoritarianism” and American/Israeli imperialism.
They are a people with a history, political subjectivity, and a right to determine their own future. And it appears that millions have opted to resist U.S. imperialism and have determined that, whatever internal contradictions exist, the imperative to resist the external aggressor takes precedence at this historical moment.
This is a political reality the signatories seem either unable or unwilling to recognize. More importantly, they have made a political choice: they have decided that the voices and political agency of those millions are less important than the unnamed people they refer to as political prisoners they have chosen to foreground.
This individualist, ahistorical, and ultimately arrogant position captures the limitations and biases of the liberal human-rights framework adopted by the letter.
The letter depoliticizes while purporting to represent a higher understanding of human rights.
That is where PCHR moves beyond the liberal human-rights framework:
The Iranian state exercises coercive authority over a population within its territorial jurisdiction. The United States and Israel are external powers exercising military, economic, and geopolitical power over another sovereign society.
These relationships of power are fundamentally different.
Recognizing that difference is necessary because, without it, anti-imperialism becomes reduced to a moral balancing exercise:
Iran commits abuses.
Israel commits abuses.
The United States commits abuses.
Therefore, all three are essentially manifestations of the same thing.
This is petit-bourgeois mystification, not a materialist and historical analysis of Iran or the global reality of imperialism. Ideologically, it provides a justification for a left humanitarianism that buttresses imperialist intervention framed as the “responsibility to protect.”
The AIPL states:
“We reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism.”
This conjures up the non-existent position that anti-imperialists are blind to internal contradictions and abuses committed by governments targeted by U.S. imperialist intervention.
But the formulation also advances the theoretically and morally specious position that the central political task is to oppose two supposedly equivalent forms of authoritarianism simultaneously, rather than understanding their relationship within the structure of global power.
The PCHR framework insists:
Imperialism is not simply another form of authoritarianism.
It is a system of international domination.
The United States possesses a military and economic apparatus with global reach. It maintains hundreds of military installations abroad, possesses the world's dominant reserve currency, exercises enormous influence over international financial institutions, deploys unilateral sanctions, and has repeatedly used military force or covert action to overthrow or destabilize governments.
Iran does not possess remotely comparable power.
PCHR would introduce another category:
The rights of people’s
That changes the question.
Instead of asking: Are you for Iran or against Iran? Or are you for the United States or against the United States? We ask:
What position advances the sovereignty, self-determination, dignity, and material well-being of the Iranian people while undermining the global power of U.S. imperialism?
The AIPL calls for:
“Unconditional support and solidarity to all incarcerated kin fighting for our collective liberation.” To the naïve, this can be emotionally powerful. But solidarity with whom, on whose terms, and toward what political end?
A People(s)-Centered Human Rights approach distinguishes between:
solidarity with a people and state in the crosshairs of imperialist assault, and abstract and weaponized doctrines of human rights that themselves are contested.
The Iranian people do not need to be “saved” by Western governments, Western NGOs, diaspora political organizations, foreign-funded opposition movements, or petit-bourgeois, Westernized anti-imperialists.
The political principle we adhere to is that the Iranian people must determine the political future of Iran.
That means defending their right to struggle for their future within the context of their own historical and material realities.
The AIPL takes an even worse dive into left opportunism and cynical manipulation with its references to state repression directed at Black radicalism. The letter references the history of U.S. state repression against Black radicalism as an example of state repression and, by implication, as a basis for solidarity with Iranian political prisoners.
“We see it in the history of the US targeting freedom fighters, particularly Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican and other anticolonial organizers…”
This is correct and important.
Yes, our movement was attacked, resulting in multiple deaths, imprisonment, exile, and the longest-held political prisoners on the planet.
But the letter does not explain why those movements were targeted.
Black liberation movements were not targeted simply because the United States is a white-supremacist settler colony—it is.
African and Black radicals were targeted because we were deemed national-security threats.
Why?
Because our movement connected: white supremacy to capitalism; to colonialism; imperialism and militarism.
That is precisely why the state interpreted radical Black internationalism, then and today, as subversive and, recently, as domestic terrorist organizations.
Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Black Panther Party, the African People's Socialist Party and Uhuru 3 case, and the Black Alliance for Peace represent a continuity of targeted state subversion.
The deeper lesson is that the U.S. national-security state has historically understood the connections between racism, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and Black internationalism—and has therefore treated movements making those connections as threats to national security.
The AIPL says: “We stand with you.”
Okay.
But PCHR asks: Who is the “we”?
And more importantly: Who decides what liberation looks like?
If liberation ultimately requires Washington, Tel Aviv, European governments, international NGOs, or Western political institutions to determine which Iranian political forces should govern Iran, then the Iranian people remain objects rather than subjects of liberation.
The revolutionary principle that PCHR advances is:
No one can liberate another people. People liberate themselves.
Others can provide solidarity, material assistance, expose repression, demand the release of prisoners, and oppose imperial aggression.
But they cannot substitute themselves for the political agency of the people whose liberation they claim to support.
The Political Conjuncture: These Are Not Normal Times
A radical actor can sincerely oppose U.S. imperialism while producing a discourse that, under particular historical circumstances, can be incorporated into the ideological apparatus legitimating imperial policy.
This is the error reflected in the letter and represents the essential question for the critics of so-called campism, knee-jerk anti-imperialism, and all the other cute phrases the anti-anti-imperialist, Eurocentric left comes up with, but:
What happens when a radical politics of internal oppression becomes detached from an analysis of the international structure of power?
The answer?
It can provide left cover and legitimacy for imperialist intervention, no matter how vociferously those radicals also criticize the United States. What is heard and acted upon is the corroborating evidence that the targeted regime deserves the violence and subversion being meted out to it by U.S. and/or Western imperialism.
This is not an argument about the intentions of the signatories.
It is an argument about political effect.
This is an essential issue in the letter because of the open and accelerating movement toward fascism and the confusion on the left about how to counter fascism at this historical moment.
The danger is that fascist and authoritarian political projects do not always have to defeat radical ideas directly. They can benefit when the left becomes divided over which members are sufficiently orthodox, sufficiently anti-authoritarian, or sufficiently critical of a targeted foreign government to remain within the boundaries of legitimate political solidarity.
This is where political responsibility becomes indispensable.
We are not living in ordinary political circumstances.
The U.S. state is simultaneously waging war abroad and expanding a domestic security framework in which anti-imperialist and radical political activity can increasingly be interpreted through the language of extremism and terrorism.
Under these circumstances, radical political discourse does not exist outside politics.
Our words can be appropriated, selectively quoted, and incorporated into state narratives. They can be used to construct the ideological case for policies that we ourselves oppose.
This does not mean that we should remain silent about repression by governments targeted by U.S. imperialism.
It means that we have a responsibility to understand the political conjuncture in which our criticisms are being made and the political uses to which those criticisms can be put.
To those comrades whose names appear on this statement, many of whom have spent decades fighting racism, colonialism, political imprisonment, imperialism, and state violence, and to all the individuals who sincerely believe in the correctness of their positions even when they find themselves consistently on the same side with imperialism, I insist that you consider the political conjuncture in which we are now operating.
This is not an appeal to silence. It is an appeal to historical consciousness.
We cannot afford to forget that the state has always attempted to transform legitimate radical dissent into evidence of extremism and to isolate those who refuse to accept the political boundaries established by the ruling order. Today, that process is becoming increasingly explicit.
The U.S. government is constructing a national-security narrative around a purported “far-left terrorism” threat while simultaneously waging war and economic warfare against a country whose government it has spent decades demonizing.
In such a conjuncture, our words do not exist outside politics.
They can be appropriated, selectively quoted, and incorporated into a state narrative whose ultimate purpose is not the liberation of Iranian prisoners or anyone else but the consolidation of imperial power and the destruction of political opposition in the U.S.
We must distinguish criticism of a government from participation—consciously or unconsciously—in the political construction of an enemy state.
And we must distinguish the right of the Iranian people to transform their society from the right of Washington to determine that transformation for them.
These are not normal times.
The consolidation of a neofascism within the United States – that is, a fascism that expands beyond the racial enclaves, reservations and barrios of the U.S. settler-colonial project into the broader U.S. society - requires more, not less, political clarity. It requires us to resist the temptation to make the left prove its moral credentials by joining campaigns of demonization directed against governments targeted by U.S. imperialism.
That is not ultra-leftism.
It is the minimum political discipline required of an anti-imperialist left confronting a state that is increasingly defining anti-imperialism itself as a security threat.
We are not asking for ideological conformity.
Instead, we conclude by posing a question that cannot be evaded by those of us who will never denounce Iran—or any other nation that finds itself in the crosshairs of U.S. state terrorism:
In a period when the state is explicitly constructing “the far left” as a national-security enemy, can the left afford to reproduce political divisions that make anti-imperialist dissenters easier to isolate and marginalize?
The answer does not have to be:
“Everyone must agree on Iran or anything else.”
It can be:
We must disagree without allowing the state to turn our disagreements into political isolation of dissidents or into a weapon that further confuses the broad masses and leads them to support U.S. criminality.
That is the political responsibility of a left operating in the imperialist core, whether or not it understands the implications of anti-imperialism or not. Under fascism, there is no such thing as a respectable left - all are enemies of the fascist state!
Ajamu Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is the Director of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights and serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC).
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