The war on Iran marks a historic moment: either politics remains bound by ethical limits, or violence becomes the norm. Very little is still known about the crisis facing people in Iran. On the very first day of the war, the government severely restricted the Iranian population’s access to the internet. Thus, in the West, so-called ‘exiled Iranians’ were, to a certain extent, regarded as representatives of public opinion. 1
The US’s interest in profiting from Iranian oil and gas, as well as Israel’s aim to create a ‘New Middle East’, were sold as ‘help on its way’ for the Iranian people. Images of what amounted to a veritable carnival of joy and expressions of gratitude to Trump and Netanyahu for the attack on Iran spread rapidly and were presented as the opinion of the Iranians. At the same time, as far as I observed in Germany, where I live, the leading media outlets reproduced a narrative that was summed up in the headline of an article in the FAZ: ‘They are happy about this war’ (Sie sind glücklich über diesen Krieg). A TV presenter on ZDF stated: ‘The Iranians may be afraid of the bombs, but they are even more afraid that the bombing will stop.’
Yet this narrative was nothing more than a cover-up for the unspeakable suffering taking place in Iran. Contrasting with this portrayal are the voices of civil society activists who have fought for freedom in recent years and have even been imprisoned for it. These voices are not being taken seriously.
The myth of state–society divide
An American friend from my student days wrote to tell me that this war seems ‘complicated’ to his people because they believe they are helping the Iranian people. From an arrogant Western perspective, the matter may seem complicated, yet the free and critical minds I have encountered in Iran unequivocally reject war. For them, the anti-war stance is not the result of a cost-benefit analysis, nor is it a mere political decision or a matter of geopolitical interest: Iran is home to millions of people, and being against the war is an ‘ethical pact’ with the victims. From the perspective that ‘not a single person more must die’, no political goal is so valuable that it should be allowed to cost human lives – especially when the warmongers in Western countries profit from this ‘unequal distribution of the costs of war’. The philosopher Maryam Nasr writes: ‘The smoke rises from the ashes of our dreams and the days of our lives and those of our children – and you call that “losses”.’ 2
The attack by the US and Israel on Iran quickly turned into the gradual destruction of urban areas and economic infrastructure. In addition to the killing of innocent people and the destruction of residential areas, people in Iran now fear the collapse of vital networks and the destruction of the country’s productive capacities. The actions of Israel and its Western allies in Gaza show that no external or moral principle can set a clear limit to the devastation caused by this war. People ask themselves, in disbelief: Will it really come to this? Nobody knows. Trump’s announcement that he intends to target power plants and bridges in Iran is a threat to everyday life, a threat to hospitals, communications, and supply chains for water, food and medicines. Ultimately, there is a risk of the abrupt collapse of the economic and social order.
The issue of critical infrastructure highlights the deep interdependence between the state and society. The illusion that one can precisely separate ‘the state’ from ‘the country’ and strike at ‘the system’ without harming ‘society’ has been swiftly disproved. This artificial dichotomy is not a political stance, but a ‘moral evasion’ of responsibility for the deaths of many people and the destruction of the most beautiful cities in West Asia – or, as the economist Mohammad Maljoo puts it, ‘disguising death with the word “liberation”’. 3
The Western dream of a ‘rapid regime change’ in Iran, propagated by the Israeli government, has now been revealed to be a naïve illusion that has resulted in nothing but human suffering, destroyed infrastructure and a devastated cultural heritage. Yet the social actions of civil society actors in Iran have been unable to compete with the large-scale campaigns of the warmongers in effectively criticising and rejecting this illusion. Amidst the clamour of collective hysteria whipped up by warmongers and authoritarians, possibilities for action are gradually being eroded. The war is devouring the social foundations of society, alongside the destruction of the material infrastructure.
Freedom needs life.
Opposition to war in Iran, however, has never meant defending those in power. On the contrary: opposition to war and opposition to authoritarianism stem from the same principle – the protection of ‘society’s right’ to realise its own will, ‘neither behind prison walls nor beneath the roar of fighter jets’, as Maljoo puts it.
It is therefore not surprising that neither the warmongers nor the authoritarians take the self-determined social developments in Iran seriously. From the Green Movement of 2009 to the Mahsa/Jina Movement of 2022, they regard these not as moments of collective consciousness, but as unnecessary, unpatriotic and unsuccessful deviations. Yet, the civil society has transformed in the course of these movements, continuously subjected itself to radical internal criticism and fought for its rights and freedoms – without getting caught up in the bloody and fruitless projects of a military regime change. This is precisely what the warmongers fail to understand.
War and authoritarianism both employ a form of violence that make effective participation virtually impossible. In the shadow of death and destruction, any discussion of freedom becomes meaningless. The writer Elham Rahmati puts it this way: ‘Before I can demand freedom and democracy, I must be alive; there must still be a country whose right to self-determination I can claim. I do not want to surrender. I do not want to live in an Iran that has been defeated without a fight.’
Who knows if war-torn cities will be able to withstand the pressure and fulfil their potential? Should we trust in the human dimension of politics and the pursuit of the common good and the alleviation of suffering, or hope in love for one’s homeland and concern for its preservation as a ‘shared world’? 4 People from Iran like me, who are searching for a moral conception of politics beyond Iran’s geographical borders, are confronted with this question first and foremost. But it also speaks to the conscience of all those around the world who view the wars in the Middle East with concern, and whose unease extends beyond rising petrol prices or travel destinations that have become unsafe. Is it possible to develop an understanding of ‘home’ that is not tied to national affiliation – an understanding that forges new connections between the suppressed hopes and the suffering of people in Palestine, Iran, Cuba, and beyond? War forces us to make a decision.
Saman Mahdevar is an author and doctoral researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt, specializing in messianism and philosophy of history in Abrahamic religions.