This article was written in response to a conversation Bernie Sanders had with three experts about the tense and troubled history of relations between Iran and the United States. The discussion rightly highlights the legacy of the 1953 coup, the destructive impact of sanctions and military interventions, the warmongering of the Trump administration, Israel’s role in escalating the regional crisis, and the human cost of war for ordinary people in Iran.

These are important and necessary points, especially at a time when many dominant narratives are normalising civilian suffering, the destruction of infrastructure, and disregard for international law. And yet, the problem begins exactly where, even within this seemingly critical and anti-war narrative, Iranian society is once again pushed to the margins.

It is as if Iran is nothing more than a stage for confrontation between states, sanctions, armies, and geopolitical actors, rather than a living society made up of workers, protesting women, students, teachers, pensioners, political prisoners, and civil networks that have been struggling for change under repression for years. The future in a dark room, under the shadow of war in Iran What is most exhausting Disagreement is political.

It can be argued with. It can be answered.

What is exhausting is the repetition of a frame that has already decided, in advance, who counts as a political subject and who does not. Many people like me do not claim that everything we say is flawless.

I am not pretending to stand above contradiction or error. But I am trying, consciously and stubbornly, to speak from a different angle than the one that dominates so much of the conversation about Iran.

I am not speaking as an “Iranian-American”, and I am not speaking from the settled comfort of a European citizenship that has turned Iran into a distant theme, a source of commentary, a moral theatre. I am speaking from a position that still treats Iranian society as a living force rather than an abstraction.

That difference matters. Because much of what passes for informed commentary on Iran does not actually begin with Iranian society itself at all.

It begins with a map of states, security doctrines, regional alignments, and elite factions. Everything else is fitted into that map afterwards, if it is allowed to appear at all.

This is why so many journalists and commentators, including those who present themselves as critical or progressive, keep reproducing the same suffocating binary: Iran is either the state or it is the right-wing alternative waiting in the wings.

Either the Islamic Republic or a manufactured opposition blessed from above. Either official power or another form of power already legible to the West.

And in this script, society disappears. Workers disappear.

Protesting women disappear. Students disappear. Teachers disappear. Pensioners disappear.

Political prisoners disappear. The networks of care, thought, resistance, and survival that exist under censorship and repression disappear.

A whole society is reduced to a duel between rulers and replacements. It is a cheap script, but it is incredibly durable.

That durability is not an accident. It is ideological at its core.

This is the real face of colonialism in contemporary liberal language. It does not always arrive with open racism or explicit calls for conquest.

It often arrives in polished sentences, in strategic analysis, in the calm voice of expertise. But the core gesture is the same: it decides who counts as Iranian and who does not.

It decides which forces are “realistic,” which voices are “serious,” which aspirations are “mature,” and which forms of social life are too inconvenient to recognise. It decides what Iran is before Iranians are allowed to speak.

That is why I have stopped being impressed by people who are called progressive simply because they are not as grotesque as the American far-right. Compared to Trumpism, many things can sound civilised.

Compared to open reaction, even the narrowest liberalism can appear humane. But that does not mean it escapes imperial habits of thought.

For those of us on the receiving end of these narratives, the problem is not just what they say about war or diplomacy. The problem is how they see the world.

Iran only through the lens of statecraft They still privilege power over society. They still return, again and again, to intervention, security, containment, stability, and great power rivalry.

Even when they oppose war, many of them cannot imagine Iran except as a problem to be managed from above. And so, whenever civil and political movements inside Iran threaten to complicate the story, those movements are pushed aside.

The reality of social struggle becomes an inconvenience. This is also why I find many discussions of the Iranian diaspora deeply dishonest.

Take the recurring claim that parts of the diaspora “want to be seen as white and Western,” that they are trying to erase their Arab or Muslim ties, that they suffer from some pathology of assimilation. The first question should be obvious: who exactly is being described here?

What is this “diaspora” that commentators speak of with such confidence? Millions of people with different class positions, migration histories, political trajectories, and relationships to religion are compressed into one moral caricature.

The second question is even more revealing. Why are the racial realities of migration in the West so often erased from this discussion?

Why is it so difficult to admit that migrants are shaped by humiliation, exclusion, suspicion, and hierarchy in the societies they enter? Why is the rightward drift of some migrants discussed as though it were a cultural defect floating in mid-air, rather than something produced in part through racism, social sorting, and the demand to survive inside hostile environments?

You cannot spend decades racialising people, humiliating them, making them prove they belong, and then act surprised when some of them seek distorted and reactionary forms of belonging. None of this justifies that rightward drift.

But it does expose the laziness of the commentary. And there is another layer to this nonsense.

Why are Iranians so persistently treated as if they must remain frozen inside a religious identity assigned to them from outside? Why this constant insistence on imagining them first and foremost as Muslim Shia subjects?

Why the refusal to grasp that large parts of Iranian society, through bitter historical experience, have moved beyond religion in profound ways? Why is secularisation, disillusionment, and active social distance from religion so hard for these commentators to recognise?

It is as if the Iranian is permitted to be either the faithful subject of tradition or the useful native in a geopolitical parable, but never a modern, contradictory, transforming political being. Who were they?

Memory, labour, and the politics of erasure in Iran Our own agency This refusal is not a small analytical mistake. It is a worldview.

It is a way of managing reality so that Iran remains intelligible only through categories that flatter Western expertise. The “Middle Eastern Muslim,” the Shia subject, the authoritarian state, the security threat, the intervention case, the right-wing exile, the assimilated migrant: these are all figures in a familiar theatre.

What is missing is the actual social process by which people in Iran have fought, changed, broken with old forms, created new languages of struggle, and tried to imagine another future under brutal conditions. I am tired of being told this absence is accidental.

It is not. Many of us have tried, repeatedly, to speak to journalists and commentators about labour strikes, student organising, feminist resistance, prison conditions, intellectual work under censorship, and the everyday forms of political and social endurance that never make it into their frameworks.

The problem is not that the information does not exist. The problem is that they are not interested in a picture of Iran that would force them to abandon their favourite narratives.

That is why this cannot be reduced to ignorance. It is not merely a knowledge gap.

It is a hierarchy of vision. These people do not want to see Iran as a society full of political subjects.

They want Iran as an object of interpretation. Something to decode, classify, warn about, manage, fear, or instrumentalise.

The liberal version of this is softer in tone than the openly reactionary version, but it often lands in the same place: the erasure of collective agency. So no, I do not accept that this is progressivism.

At best, it is anti-conservatism within the United States. It is a domestic positioning that, when exported outwards, continues to look at places like Iran through the old imperial grammar.

And for those of us whose lives are entangled with that reality, whose friends are imprisoned, whose society is constantly reduced and misnamed, that grammar is not neutral. It is domination in better clothes.

What is needed is not another expert performance about Iran. What is needed is a break with the entire gaze that makes Iranian society disappear.

Until that happens, the same people will continue to speak of freedom while helping erase the very forces that have been fighting for it. (Image: frame via YouTube)