Above: Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei visiting the DPRK, 1989.
In these last several years, since Russia launched its operation to rescue the Donbass in February 2022, the antiwar movement has been majorly tested. We’ve seen unprecedented efforts by the global anti-imperialist forces to resist the hegemon, with Russia’s action having helped inspire Africa’s recent revolutions and Gaza’s Al Aqsa Flood Operation. We’ve seen Yemen come to the defense of the Palestinians amid Zionism’s accelerated genocidal campaign, and now Iran has shown a new amount of will to retaliate against the enemy. For the U.S. antiwar movement to do its part in advancing this global struggle, it will need to avoid the errors it’s made during the last several defining moments of our third world war. Its participants must transcend the “antiwar” brand, and build a real, labor-based united front with those who are resisting the empire’s aggressions.
In a speech from 2023, Scott Ritter articulated why we have to orient ourselves around this idea of resistance, which is the only way we can end the imperial system that’s perpetuating war and genocide:
This is supposed to be about antiwar, an antiwar movement. I am not antiwar. I just want to make that point as loud and clear as I can. I’m not pro-war, I don’t support war. I’m against war, but if you want to wage war, there ain’t nobody better at it than me. I know how to wage war. That’s why I hate war. I despise war. But if you want to fight, let’s fight. And the reason why I bring this up is we are confronted with some problems today. For instance, let’s take Russia and Ukraine. It’s a war I think we can all agree we want to end. No! We don’t want it to end. Because if it ends today, right now, there is no justice. There is no justice for the children of Donbass. There’s no justice for the Russians who have been oppressed by the fascist regime in Kiev. No, there needs to be war, this thing has to be settled. Once you cross the threshold, once you cross the line of departure, then you must close with and destroy the enemy through firepower maneuver. Now, that’s difficult for an antiwar movement to understand, but Russia didn’t start this war.
In the two years since Palestine’s resistance carried out its own great act of defiance, and Zionism has responded by expanding its extermination effort, many more have come to share this mentality. The bulk of Gen Z’s politically engaged members support Gaza’s armed coalition, recognizing the utter dishonesty of Zionism’s narrative that Hamas was the aggressor. This has translated into support for Yemen’s Ansarallah, and now for the Islamic Republic in its retributive effort.
As Khaled Barakat of the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Movement says: “The United States and ‘Israel’ are responsible for launching an aggressive war against Iran that will become a long, protracted war, with serious consequences for the aggressor. The Zionists must prepare themselves for the kind of war that they have never experienced before. They must give up the idea that they can commit genocide and attack countries throughout the region while living in their comfort zone, and that Palestinians, Lebanese and Yemenis will be subjected to massacres while they enjoy the shores of Palestine with no consequences. That era is over.”
That voices from the Palestinian struggle itself have concluded there’s been a serious strategic shift against Zionism’s favor shows we do have good reasons for optimism, despite the necessity of caution in our optimism. A mistake that the antiwar movement has made is listening to the types of alt media which only tell us what we want to hear, leading to hubris among our ranks. This hubris has done damage that we’ll need to work towards repairing; for example, it’s caused far too many to expect that Trump will bring “peace,” with this narrative only now truly losing its grip. With Trump’s White House fully exposing its neocon nature, we have an opportunity to propagate a productive kind of hope; a hope that comes not from looking towards top-down forces to do the work for us, but from connecting our movement with the global popular struggle.
Through their collective efforts to aid the Palestinian cause, and to fortify Iran’s national resilience against imperial pressure, the Iranian masses have gained a massive amount of leverage. They’ve had great success in sidelining the liberal pro-appeasement elements, making these elements go along with Khamenei’s agenda of serious self-defense. This means that if the U.S./Zionist menace hits Iran again during the present tensions, Iran can be expected to continue on its positive trajectory.
The Trump White House’s aggressive posture has fortified the Axis of Resistance, causing the revolutionaries to gain new advantages against the appeasers; this is why anti-imperialists who’ve doubted Khamenei are now admitting he was never part of the problem. As the world war’s West Asian front turns in favor of the revolutionary forces, we in the empire’s core must strengthen our movement alongside the Axis of Resistance. We must leave behind the antiwar movement’s old habits, where our groups tailed behind either the Democrats or the Trump wing, and orient ourselves around true internationalism. Which means advancing the interests of both our own country’s masses, and all the peoples worldwide who are resisting the hegemon.
The USA’s people are already compatible with such a project for global revolutionary unity. They are not accepting the idea of a war with Iran, and the hostility towards this war drive is actually bigger than the initial skepticism towards the Ukraine war had been. Americans have been fatigued about war for quite a long time now; the only reason why our ruling class could at first sell the operations against Russia and Palestine was because in those cases, there were mass prejudices that the propagandists could seize on. Liberal Americans were already hostile towards Russia, and pro-Zionist sentiments had been carefully engineered in the United States for decades. But as the Ukraine and Gaza campaigns went on, enthusiasm disappeared quite fast, with that enthusiasm turning to horror in the case of Gaza.
These developments have ruined the imperial state’s ability to craft a persuasive narrative on Iran. The state might do a false flag, but a very large part of the masses are ready to reject a trick like that, because they’ve spent the last generation looking into 9/11. The ruling class cannot manage the destabilized kind of mass consciousness that’s emerged, where probably most of the people who would have supported Bush twenty years ago have caught on to the neocon lies.
Add this antiwar MAGA demographic to Gen Z, which largely supports the Palestinian resistance, and we have opposition towards empire from the majority of the people. Our task is to build a movement for these masses that’s not simply “antiwar” from a pro-capitalist, American exceptionalist perspective; but that’s specifically dedicated to ending imperialism. Such a movement must by definition be based around class struggle, because imperialism is just another word for today’s capitalism.
This is why the more the masses involve themselves in the struggle against this war drive, the more they’ll be pulled into advancing the goals which communists have. The more apparent it will become that we have to build the workers movement, build a party for the workers, and build a united front with those fighting against the empire abroad. The events of these last few years have provided us with innumerable lessons. Now we have to apply these lessons, and navigate the struggle’s next phase in a way that actually wins power for the forces of popular revolution.
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