Róisín McAleer
The liberal-left’s default alignment with imperialist narratives is no longer surprising anymore. It’s becoming more predictable, and more transparent.
Traitors and opportunists, both inside and outside target nations like Iran for example, are essential cogs in the machinery that legitimises foreign domination. Selective amplification of certain voices, packaged as “progressive” or “human rights advocacy,” is a tactic designed to manufacture consent for imperialist powers. You do not have to share the ideology of the Ayatollah to stand firmly with Iran and defend its sovereignty. Internal contradictions, debates, and struggles are for Iranians to resolve. External interference only makes class struggle harder. Genuine solidarity is anti-imperialist first, and foremost.
Consider the recent Mossad-backed, Washington-sanctioned regime-change riots in Iran. Groups like the Centre for Human Rights in Iran operating from New York, in the very heartland of the imperial core that has imposed crushing sanctions and waged decades of economic warfare against Iran, translate Iranian suffering into narratives palatable for Western policymakers, media, and NGOs.
Their reports never disrupt imperial consensus, they only reinforce it. They catalogue abuses meticulously while treating the structural violence of sanctions, financial strangulation, and geopolitical siege as irrelevant background noise. When millions are pushed into poverty by US policy, CHRI’s silence says it all.
Of course CHRI does not call for bombs or boots on the ground, in the sense that some people might think of imperialism. But their work feeds the same system that does. Their selective outrage is a moral conveyor belt. Iran is the perpetual violator, Washington and Tel Aviv are untouchable. Human suffering is weaponised as evidence against the targeted state, while the architects of genocide in Palestine walk free. This is not human rights. It is imperialism dressed up as human rights.
CHRI exemplifies how imperialism can operate without firing a shot, via a human rights NGO façade. Condemnations, reports, and selective outrage circulate through Western institutions already primed to punish. The politics of moral superiority absolves imperial powers while deepening the suffering of the people they claim to defend. Human rights without anti-imperialism is a weapon; compassion divorced from liberation makes zero sense.
So when we see photos, slogans and placards copied and pasted from CHRI on our streets here in Ireland, it becomes abundantly clear not how confused these groups are, but how used their base is in propagating imperialist narratives. Tools, in every sense of the word.
If you cheerlead Washington and Tel Aviv’s destabilisation operations while claiming anti-Pahlavi or leftist credentials, you are not leftist. You are a tool of imperialism. Anti-imperialism is the strongest pillar of any leftist stance. Without it, all else is decoration.
