The Anti-Woke Diaspora: Surviving the Red-Green Alliance

Today’s Long View is a background file on the people I think are the best antidote the West has to the alliance of the far left and the Islamists: the young Iranian diaspora. It opens with the history they carry, the 1979 revolution in which Iran’s Marxists helped Khomeini to power and were executed for their trouble, then turns to the intimidation campaign against them, the values they defend, and twenty names, each checked against the public record. It closes where the Forum’s work does, with the Iranians inside the country who will have to finish this. The opening and the 1979 section are open to every reader. The rest is for premium members, and every Forum donor reads it with the Forum’s compliments.

The Anti-Woke Diaspora: Surviving the Red-Green Alliance

Young Iranians in exile watched the left deliver power to the theocrats once. Twenty of them are now the West’s clearest voices against doing it again, and the fight they are pointing at is inside Iran.

The most effective antidote the West has to the Marxist-Islamist alliance now working through its universities, its city halls, and its street protests is the young Iranian diaspora. While masked activists occupy American campus lawns for Hamas, young Iranians in Los Angeles, Toronto, London, and Washington carry the pre-1979 Lion and Sun flag, march beside Israeli flags, and demand the destruction of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps by name. On the night the United States and Israel struck Tehran, February 28, Iranian exiles filled the streets outside the White House, in Los Angeles, and in New York with Lion and Sun and American flags to celebrate.

This is not a coincidence of temperament. This demographic has seen the red-green movie before, and it knows exactly how the script ends. Their parents watched the alliance form in 1978, watched it win in 1979, and watched the Islamists execute their partners on the left within four years.

The West is now repeating the sequence. Progressives who would not survive a week under Hamas anchor the coalitions that defend it. The Iranian diaspora is the one constituency in Western politics that reads that scene with the correct historical dread, and it has paid for the reading in harassment, lawsuits, kidnap plots, and knife attacks.

The spectacle of secular progressives allying with Islamists is not an American invention. It is a replay of the Iranian revolution. In 1978 and 1979, Iran’s communists in the Tudeh Party, its Marxist guerrillas in the Fedai, and the Islamist-Marxist Mojahedin joined Ayatollah Khomeini’s movement against the Shah. For the Tudeh, the alliance was not tactical hedging. It was doctrine. Jeremy Friedman’s study of the East German archives found that the party backed Khomeini as the ideal “anti-imperialist” leader at the urging of its Soviet and East German patrons, confident that a theocracy could not last a year, and that in doing so it “facilitated the consolidation of theocracy in Iran” (Friedman 2018).

The shared hatred of the Shah and of American “imperialism” blinded the left to what it was installing. The Islamists did not return the courtesy. Once in power they purged the universities in 1980, turned on the Mojahedin and the independent left from June 1981, and finished with the Tudeh itself. By 1982 Amnesty International had recorded well over 4,000 executions since the revolution. In February 1983 the regime arrested the Tudeh leadership, banned the party, and put its general secretary on television to confess to treason.

The rest came in the summer of 1988. On a secret fatwa from Khomeini, “death commissions” in 32 cities sent at least 5,000 political prisoners to the gallows in a matter of weeks, most of them Mojahedin, hundreds of them leftists, many already serving sentences for offenses as small as distributing leaflets. The commissions asked prisoners whether they were Muslim or Marxist and whether they prayed. The wrong answer was a death sentence.

One of the dead was Bijan Bazargan, a London student who went home in 1979 to help build the new Iran, joined a leftist group, was arrested at 23 for selling its newspaper, drew ten years, and was executed at Gohardasht in September 1988 as an “apostate” who, the guards told his father, did not deserve a grave. His sister Lawdan is one of the twenty names below.

That is the lesson the diaspora carries, and it was written in blood. When progressives ally with theocrats to overthrow an establishment, the theocrats execute the progressives first. Today’s young Iranian exiles, the children of the people who fled that purge, watch Western students chant “globalize the intifada” with the specific dread of people who have read the last chapter. As this newsletter wrote when the horseshoe closed in Congress in July, the beneficiary of the convergence sits in Tehran. The diaspora does not need that argument explained. It needs the West to listen to it.

“When progressives ally with theocrats to overthrow an establishment, the theocrats execute the progressives first. The Iranian diaspora learned that in 1979, and it is the reason they are immune to the alliance now.”

The Long View continues below for premium members: the intimidation campaign, the vanguard, twenty verified names, and the Iranians inside the country. Every donor to the Middle East Forum receives premium membership with the Forum’s compliments; if your invitation has not arrived, write [email protected].