I have sadly come to realize that there is no principled manner when it comes to what the American left chooses to protest (U.S. power) or stand up for (whoever they deem to be the victim of the day). I often don't understand Yascha how and why you still seem to believe in the left, but I always appreciate your perspective. As a former lifelong democrat (with all of the same personal values I have always held) I keep listening to you and reading to maintain balance of thought and to not allow my disgust at the left to color everything going on these days.
I mean the fact is people on all sides of politics have always had massive blind spots and hypocrisies that have clouded their judgement and made them sound like the preposterous people they are, and while it might be worse now in some cases than in the past (though I’d be curious/skeptical as to whether that’s even true more broadly, given the new composition of the Democratic Party), it’s simply the case that humans are flawed creatures and all we can do is try our best and not let the assholes get us down. Foreign policy has *always* been a major locus of left-wing hypocrisy and confusion; this is not a new phenomenon, distressing though it is to see it on display yet again. But in American politics there’s one grouping that cares about things like a social safety net (or even cares much about public policy generally, outside of cutting taxes and social programs and the like), and it’s the center to center-left, basically (I think the “leftist” left is too interested in their own internecine bullshit to do much about actual politics or policy). Probably some center-right people in there too. But if you care about, for instance, providing public transportation, you only have one party to vote for 99 times out of 100. Or, if you want to stay focused just on this Iran issue, I frankly don’t know if I believe there are many Republicans out there who are invested in the success of Iranian democratic forces either, I’m sorry to say. So while the Corbyns of the world will always be there as an embarrassment to the left, the important thing is to fight them and discredit them and put their moral bankruptcy on display for all to see, as Yascha has done here.
So when group X is dedicated to issue Y they also need to care more about issue Z. This is a fallacy, not a hypocrisy. We see that hypocrisy argument raised over and over again, esp. when it comes to critics of Israel, why don't you care about sudan etc etc etc. It is a lame fallacy. In terms of Iran there is now mass slaughter and the US President could take limited action that would imply regime change. So the left could point out the deadly inaction of the orange perils.
Any movement by the US or Israel to militarily support the Iranian revolution will be met by an explosion of anti-West histrionics by the progressive left who hates the West far more than it loves freedom and democracy for oppressed people. All those expressions of compassion for the vulnerable and the oppressed is being exposed as a shameful lie and pretension by the facts of the Iranian revolution.
The progressive mainstream Iranians will love an intervention. This regime does represent repression, not popular support. Trump did a strike against Suleimani in his first presidency, probably the best risk has taken. It will be easy to decapitate the regime run by a 86 year old and his fellow thugs.
Well as you can see today, the regime has doubled down on repression, and it will not be so easy to remove. I surely do not want to be Trump's shoes today. Destroying industrial infrastructure, even though will largely hurt the Iranian people, may be the only possibility open. But of course that will cause a new regime that starts to be strongly anti-American.
People do not own Industrial infrateucture, they will be fine. The Regime will be gut really hard and the US will know what they so. The time of their regime is running out.
Priorities are not fallacies. If you spend all your energy and resources defending pronouns to the death, you have little left to fight for minimal access to food for the poor.
I meant the accusation of hypocrisy against activitsts is a fallacy. And you give a perfect reason why, someone spents his or her time budget on one item, so he or she has nothing left for other issues.
Well said. It can seem arbitrary, but I sense there is some method to the madness. Perhaps it's cryptically rides along with the whole "world without (moral) borders" agenda? I could never understand why the Obama and Biden administrations capitulated to the Iranian Theocrats. Why would they do that?? I just don't get it. What WERE they trying to achieve??? The European left, and to a lesser extent the American left, certainly favors the Islamic Republic over Israel, and in that sense they have indirectly taken sides against the Iranian People. I wonder if there is a connection to the way the the left ignored the suffering of Venezuelans for the last twenty years.
Yes, there is a strong connection. There are good material reasons why western leftist activists have stopped supporting the oppressed demanding freedom and democracy. For one thing freedom and democracy in its very essence is capitalistic - i.e. it always comes with the legitimization of private property and free markets.
That's an incredibly good take, and I think you are absolutely right. I'm actually kind of embarrassed that I failed to see this angle. Thanks.
They really did stop supporting this. Expanding on this point, even the once-vaunted Nordic 'social democracy' model respects achievement and property, and it recoils from outright confiscation. Even my forebears, the primitive Vikings, had a better innate grasp of freedom than the new left.
I am a venezuelan and I am greatly grateful for your words. I feel the plight of Iranian women as my own. I feel we are sisters. Although we don't have to wear a veil we face the same totalitarian regimes, torture, repression, families separated and so so much pain. And the left shuns us. Doesn't understand us. Explains our countries and our plights to us. And worst, from a supposed moral superiority. Thank you for being our voice .
Explains our countries and our plights to us. And worst, from a supposed moral superiority.
This perfectly states my personal experience of the left, and im just a middle aged white guy living in the middle of the u.s. The left lost the ability to listen long ago.
Sorry, don't agree. They lost the ability to listen to the less-righteous and less-pure. They still listen to themselves a LOT, and ONLY to themselves, probably because they're the only ones that can begin to understand the gibberish they're talking.
I am an American and I apologize on behalf of Democrats and all other western liberals who completely ignored your plight for the obvious reason that it reflected poorly on their pro-socialist anti-western narrative. I have been following your story closely for decades and I have been shocked and disillusioned by the lack of reporting and attention around what has happened to your wonderful freedom loving people. The persistent decades long dismissive attitude towards your plight, by the liberals of America and their mainstream media, is an utter disgrace and a permanent stain on the institution formerly known as the free press.
All the American liberals who ignored your country and people, and yet are suddenly interested in Venezuela, and are howling in opposition to Trumps actions there--they need to take a good long look at themselves and their so called values.
For the last two days, Iran has been the top news story on there. The problem I've found is that the article is very light on information - it sits there but is rarely updated. Of course, that's due to the lack of information coming out of the country.
Normally these sites like to lead you to live blogs, but the guardian hasn't been doing that - it's had the Iran story positioned above the constant updates around ICE/US politics.
This article feels like a story in search of a reality. Slate and the New Republic are hardly "news" sites; this kind of breaking news with limited information is just not their thing.
And as for the Iranian ministerial op-ed; that was in December - it's a bit misleading to cite it in this article as if it were being posted alongside the violent crackdown.
I've been a professional media analyst, doing work for major corporations, governments, and NGOs, but understanding why the media does what it does isn't the kind of analysis in which I have any experience or deep knowledge. However, I do know about what tends to get covered in the news, and the kinds of coverage it usually gets, and YM is correct that this issue has gotten very little coverage on parts of the left. And, the coverage it has gotten hasn't been very in-depth, and has often omitted relevant information that would make the Iranian regime look bad. For example, these protests are most similar to the big ones in 2022, so it would be relevant to say that the regime killed 500 civilians in those protests, detained 22,000 people, and to note that some of the detainees were raped and/or tortured, but the Guardian left that out.
That was a very long way to have to dig in order to find something that might support Yascha's rather broad and sweeping point. The guardian has previously reported on atrocities in 2022 protests, and in this one was quite freely reporting "they are going for the eyes". I don't understand the cult of defence set up here to defend Yascha's weak argument. Just accept that this one is pretty clumsily constructed and that there's really nothing to see here at all. The bigger question is why he has gone out of his way to contort himself like this? Who on earth would go Slate magazine for their leftist reporting of Iranian uprising?!
I didn't have to "dig in" because the omission was glaring, and not the only one, simply the first one that came to mind. I'm not defending his position out of any sense of deference to his opinion. I'm merely stating that what I've seen reported is inconsistent with reporting on previous civil conflicts in countries with oppressive regimes, and that news outlets haven't covered this in a way that paints nearly as complete a picture as they could with a few more sentences, if they cared to do so. Yes, the outlets may have mentioned some of what the regime has done in the past (I'll take your word for it), but it's pretty standard to restate stuff like that because the average reader isn't going to remember years later if they don't pay close attention to Middle East politics.
(When I said, "The Guardian left that out," I meant in the recent coverage, not the coverage years ago in 2022.)
I think it's important to gauge the reporting last week against the size and importance of the story itself. Given that Iran has been waging a multi front war against Israel for decades, it would be fair to expect that the level of reporting would be similar to that which the Israel-Gaza story received. Right?
Thirty years ago all the major news outlets would have their international reporters on this story and they would have constantly interrupted regular programming to keep us up to date. And that would have been exactly appropriate. I think Yascha nails it.
It is much easier to report on the Gaza war than on Iran - that is a more important factor than the size of the story. The fact is that the Guardian promoted a story with sparse information and infrequent updates to the top of their homepage, when they could have promoted the various US political live blogs above it. This hardly amounts of "the left's silence" or "the revolution will not be reported".
As for the claim about "thirty years ago". No, they wouldn't. They would have had even less information than they have now, and hence no need to constantly interrupt regular programming.
There is no way in which "Yascha nails it", except in picking his narrative ahead of the facts, making a clickbaity headline, and ignoring the guardian frontpage to instead delve into their archives for a regime op-ed. There is plenty to grumble about at the guardian (they are an open goal at times), but this isn't one of them.
If I were--without prejudice-- to grant you complete agreement with regard to the Guardian, how would you explain the performance of the major legacy media outlets?
I wouldn't and couldn't. I didn't look at any over the weekend. I was working and just looked at one news site. Outside of that, I rarely go to the BBC because I find their reporting to be very thin in general, and just have never got into the habit of using US news sites. I am defending the guardian because I happened to be visiting it, and what I saw did not match what YM was claiming. There's plenty of other areas in which I would not defend the guardian....
Exactly. Mounk is trolling. The Guardian is at this point THE left wing site. No one on the left reads Slate and TNR is focused on domestic events, which is its prerogative. On BlueSky, which the right likes to characterize as lefty, I see tons of coverage of Iran, all anti Mullah and pro-protester. Honestly, anyone who is still calling the BBC leftwing at this point is out of touch.
It's a bit more complicated than that. The default setting of most legacy media outlets is Blairite centre-leftism. Centre-right on economics, Left on culture, which is the only concession to the progressive Left they will allow. It's the reverse of what most citizens actually want on these two axes. Most people in the UK and the US want a reset on culture to where gay marriage is legal but kids aren't transed, and racial equality is essentially anti-discriminatory, but not jury-rigged to produce 'equity (and inherently discriminatory), but are willing to see some bold moves in specific areas in economics, particularly when it comes to funding healthcare.
The corporate Centre-Left has been censoring both conservatives and progressives for years. Sometimes it's just algorithmic and a matter of shadow-banning, but in other instances it's been outright bans.
The BBC has a narrower Overton Window than the UK. It ranges from David Cameron to Blairite Labour politicians but no further. Those who point to the overrepresentation of Reform in broadcasts should note two thing- first, they are the most popular with the electorate at the moment, and gaining ground with women, who now acknowledge in polls they feel less safe in public due to migration (other than Green party members), and second although the BBC routinely hosts Reform representatives, they are almost always attacking their positions.
But here's the thing- they did exactly the same thing to Jeremy Corbyn!
The BBC is not a Left or Right outlet, it's an establishment status quo outlet. The only genuinely Left politician the BBC seems to like is Zack Polanski, to whom they've been genuinely sympathetic. But then their coverage on climate change has been shown to be biased. The science predicts climate change is neither an existential threat or a civilisation ender, although it will likely cause major economic and social problems in future.
The most realistic projections of temperature change by 2100 (including all warming to date) predict around a 3°C in temperature, or slightly higher. That's bad, but not existential. Once one accounts for heat resistant GMO and shifts in crops planted the worst impact will likely be a 20-30% reduction in yields in the tropical zone in C4 crops. Climate change to date has only slowed the rate at which yields increase in the tropical zone. It hasn't reduced yields. Plus, a recent climate science paper by mainstream climate scientists, with no ties to scepticism, emphatically stated that while permafrost melt and methane hydrate release was an important feedback, critical to climate change processes, it didn't represent a feasible scenario for a runaway climate effect. In other words, permafrost melt is not the potential Black Swan so popular in science fiction novels.
I’ve been reading the Guardian closely, and the difference in standards compared to its Israel–Gaza reporting is hard to ignore. When the most severe reports and images emerge out of Iran, the coverage is buried beneath the headlines, careful, qualified, and framed with repeated caveats about what can and cannot be confirmed. This, of course, is laudable. But it would be nice if the Guardian had demonstrated the same level of journalistic rigor and integrity during the Israel-Hamas conflict.
For at least this reason, I find that your criticism of Yascha is misplaced. He’s not “trolling” — he’s pointing out an asymmetry that many readers can plainly see. If you believe the Guardian held its Israel–Gaza reporting to the same evidentiary standard it is applying now, I’m genuinely open to hearing that case.
And before you dismiss this as “hair-splitting,” I’d think twice — that critique cuts both ways, and you’re in no particularly strong position to deploy it here. To be clear, I don’t consider the Guardian the worst offender here — it’s often better than many of its peers — but the contrast still stands out.
The "Left" which is a bit of a fuzzy term seems to practice what I call disproportionate outrage depending on the victims of bad deeds. the Uighers? Silence Sudan? Silence. 8-90 million Iranians? Silence. the "Palestinians" or even Hamas? 100 decibels! Why? I do not get it. The interesting thing is that the Left in the US, UK, Ireland are more concerned about the Palestinians than anyone who actually lives in the Middle East. and while everyone is fervidly recognizing a Palestinian state, no one anywhere, especially in the ME will accept passports or identity documentation from the PA. Many of these people use Egyptian or Jordanian credentials.
You were not listening very hard if you think the left was silent about Uyghers and Sudan. Students at my very liberal university protested our own bowl game over the atrocities in Xinjiang. There are dozens of oppressed peoples around the world, and in most of these cases, the left contains the ONLY people in our politics who draw attention to their plight.
Palestine animates us especially because it is the United States funding and arming the violence against a powerless group. We have deontological streaks in our moral codes that make killing *done in our name* bother us especially much. There's no contradiction in a political community focusing on how to improve the behavior of its own violent, corrupt, and authoritarian government before they focus on how to fix other places.
Let’s make a deal. i will not attack your hearing and you will not attack mine?
I know nothing about you or your unnamed “very liberal” university. why not name? why bother characterize it as very liberal? who cares about the labels.
but i think you miss my point. I am glad that your people protested and were not silent about the Uyghers and the Sudanese etc. It sure did not make it on the newsfeed. My point is about proportionality and disproportionality. it is a numbers thing, a math thing. I assert that there is not a proportionate reaction to the mass tragedies of these other peoples. Take Syria as an example. Assad probably killed 1 million of his own people and drove millions to flee. He was a butcher. people disappeared, were tortured and killed. Did your very liberal university do anything about Syria and the Syrian people?
Assad wasn't killing *his* people, but competitor minorities.
The left doesn't actually care about the lives of people under authoritarian states, they are only used as "moral tools". That's why Palestinian suffering in Arab countries doesn't count for the left - only when Israel abuses them does the tool become useful.
by his people you mean the Alawites? An offshoot of Shia. Yes. Syria a partially European map drawing exercise had Alawites, Christian’s Druze and other groups. But Assad was Alawite. He killed a lot of people tortured a lot of people. There are stories of people that were looked up so long they lost their minds by the time they were liberated. A very cruel family currently shopping in Moscow
The Palestinians are in fact not embraced by much of the Arab world They are an inconvenience that is given lip service too by the more moderate countries and used as proxies by Iran and the MB
Assad killed a million people gradually, over the course of 13 years, and most of that time was before I was in the university. I don't remember a protest about it, but I do remember emotional, supportive groupchats with a Syrian student the day Assad fell.
I'll be the first to complain that people's moral and political priorities are not always proportional to the impact of the issue. This is true on both sides. But there are clear reasons for that, especially when it comes to foreign policy, related to people's political bandwidth and practical need to prioritize issues that *their vote and voice* can actually affect. Palestine was one of those, and most of these other places are not, and that explains the left's behavior better than any supposed hypocrisy.
I think this is just a natural consequence of the fact that the US doesn’t really have anything to do with those other atrocities, whereas our government very explicitly supports Israel’s violence against Palestinians. If Trump came out as strongly in support of the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces and started sending them guns and bombs to commit massacres with, there would probably be more protests about that too.
It’s skin colour. The oppressor must be light skinned and the oppressed must be dark skinned. Only Palestine currently fits the narrative. Ukraine: white on white. Iran: black on black.
I think racism is a part of it. If we are going into skin colour I wouldnt say Iran is Black on Black given my Iranian friends. I agree with your barbed comment about the Oppressor, But i think that it is more than racism.
I agree. But given the shortened attention span fostered by the internet, I thought it prudent to simplify arguments than to deliver into the nuances that characterise in all conflict. When I said Iran was black on black, I meant there was no meaningful difference in skin colour between oppressor and oppressed. Or am I wrong?
I went to Concordia University in Montreal, Canada around 2007-2008. It was (and prolly still is) known for being a very leftist, activist University. Yea, they were pro-Palestine, but people were also talking a lot aboot Sudan. I remember this thing: “I stand with Darfur” or something like that. Talking aboot the genocide in Darfur or something like that.
True, but it’s rarely noted that 10/7 also received more outrage than similarly bad terrorist atrocities committed in other places in the world. The Israel conflict is a global focal point and has been for 70 years.
I largely agree with your broader argument about moral asymmetry on parts of the left, and I think the underlying concern is real. That said, I was a bit surprised—and frankly disappointed—by how thin the methodological case is here. A snapshot homepage search at a single moment during an unusually crowded news cycle feels like too narrow a lens to support such a sweeping conclusion about “the left” as a whole. I don’t doubt there are real blind spots and selective silences, especially in activist and campus spaces, but that’s precisely why a more rigorous, time-based or comparative approach would have strengthened the argument rather than weakened it. The point is important enough to deserve sturdier evidence.
It’s pretty simple. Israel is at war with the Iranian regime and its proxies. The left absolutely hates Israel. The left has trouble acknowledging anything that conflicts with its narrative of Israel.
The point is made here that "For far too many progressives and leftists, their founding commitment is not to some principle or aspiration for the world. It is to believing that their own countries and societies are at the root of profound evil. For far too many progressives and leftists, their founding commitment is not to some principle or aspiration for the world. It is to believing that their own countries and societies are at the root of profound evil." -- Speaking as someone from the Leftist/Progressivist fold, I, too, have long been frustrated by the widespread refusal in our circle to criticize or act against many of the world's travesties that have not been committed by Westerners/Americans/Whites (or Israel). But it is not my experience that there is no Leftist/Progressive "attachment to principal or aspiration for the world". On the contrary, the widespread orientation in this circle is both to principle (in their own telling) AND to attacks against the West and company, considered the culprits in the story in question. The principles are often hawked when the West and company are guilty of travesties--but then disappear from concern when the culprits are someone else.
But that is only "step one" of a certain mental process and political orientation. There is a second step that occurs (possibly not consciously or planned) which was noted long ago, sarcastically, by philosopher Bertrand Russell in his essay "The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed". It is not enough to stand up for the oppressed and attack their oppressors (step one) but to assign to the oppressed of the moment a superior moral stance (step 2)--this when clearly that is rarely the case for whole societies outside the West/America/Whites/Israel and would be obvious to anyone who bothers to look. So why is that? Is that only the result of hatred of one's own society?
Here is an excerpt from Russell's essay:
One of the persistent delusions of mankind is thatsome sections of the human race are morally betteror worse than others...A rather curious form of this admiration forgroups to which the admirer does not belong is thebelief in the superior virtue of the oppressed: subjectnations, the poor, women, and children...Nationalism introduced, in the nineteenth century...the patriotof an oppressed nation. The Greeks until they hadachieved liberation from the Turks, the Hungariansuntil the Ausgleich of 1867, the Italians until 1870, andthe Poles until after the 1914-18 war were regardedromantically as gifted poetic races, too idealistic tosucceed in this wicked world. The Irish were regarded by the English as possessed of a specialcharm and mystical insight until 1921, when it wasfound that the expense of continuing to eppress them would be prohibitive. One by one these variousnations rose to independence, and were found to bejust like everybody else; but the experience of thosealready liberated did nothing to destroy thc illusionas regards those who were still struggling. Englishold ladies still sentimentalize about the "wisdoin ofthe East" and Amercan intellectuals about the"earth consciousness" of the negro.
From: The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed in Unpopular Essays by Bertrand Russell (first published in the 1920s) -- https://russell-j.com/cool/UE_1950.pdf -- (the link is to the whole book).
Being half-Hungarian (the oppressed) and half-British (the oppressing) I can sympathise or not, depending upon which foot I'm standing on.
Yascha's current comment is all very well, but he has probably not been in Tehran in late 1979, when he hears a loud commotion, getting louder. I was. I poked a head outside to find the wide road covered by a sea of chanting WOMEN, in full chadors, demonstrating FOR Khomeini and against the "devil Americans", and advancing down the street.
It's completely delusional that the Iranian Revolution didn't have massive majority support when it first took control. That this support has waned is also out of the question. The recent act of war by Trump/the US against Iran has probably pushed back the opposition to theocratic rule by a significant amount. I don't think that the Shah's son has ANY chance of gaining power: they know that family too well.
My friend, Stephen Zunes, spoke about the protests, and very positively. Otherwise, your point is spot on. The "useful idiots" of the left are especially misguided on Russia and Ukraine, as their hatred of the West makes them allies of a semi-fascist nationalist regime. But, heck, they support Hamas, etc. Regimes and movements which, if in power, would first of all execute all the leftists.
I am talking about the "anti-imperialist left": Chomsky, Stone, Benjamin and Davies in their monograph on the war, Vijay Prashad, etc are all apologists for Russia. The list can go on. More centrist left is absolutely against Russia, and you are correct in this respect.
For me, Chomsky, as a political commentator, is a fairly primitive propagandist with his ideas of little intellectual value. His answer to every political question is "blame US capitalism/imperialism." Crude agitprop. Otherwise, a significant linguist, for sure.
Intellectuals were always attracted to salons and power. Heck, Epstein had money, philathropists flocked to him, should we blame them? He was considered a "good guy" - his blackmail, espionage, abuse and sex traffic were hidden in the shadows, except for people who knew the truth. I imagine, intelligence apparatus and folks who were a part of his sex trade. And, Trump with his pageants and models was certainly a part of the network, plus, he is aware of the whole intelligence connection and this is what is being covered.
Well on paper yes - but that has hardly translated to anything concrete across the board. I have been shouting out Ukraine since the war began but it is barely mentioned by any of my progressive friends, especially after October 7th.
Some of this is the Chomskyist strain on the left where only the US and the West can be critiqued. The rest of the world are victims or merely acting in response to the power of the West.
It's also the Noble Omission in terms of not wanting to write anything that could be "weaponized" (perhaps literally in this case). Since the Tehran regime is terrible, better to say nothing rather than foment a war is probably the thought
Nicolás Maduro was a terrible COMMUNIST dictator. There are plenty of terrible dictators on the right, but Maduro seems to have some sympathy from American progressives because of his ideology. This makes no sense to the families of the people he tortured and killed or the millions of economic refugees who had to leave Argentina. The left, as always, has blinkers on, or is willfully blind.
Where's your "unscripted moderate" when we need him/her? Where's our "moral compass"? With NO help from the press, what hope for Iran and for our better selves? Liberals seem to have forgotten their raison d'être. WAKE UP!!
I have sadly come to realize that there is no principled manner when it comes to what the American left chooses to protest (U.S. power) or stand up for (whoever they deem to be the victim of the day). I often don't understand Yascha how and why you still seem to believe in the left, but I always appreciate your perspective. As a former lifelong democrat (with all of the same personal values I have always held) I keep listening to you and reading to maintain balance of thought and to not allow my disgust at the left to color everything going on these days.
I mean the fact is people on all sides of politics have always had massive blind spots and hypocrisies that have clouded their judgement and made them sound like the preposterous people they are, and while it might be worse now in some cases than in the past (though I’d be curious/skeptical as to whether that’s even true more broadly, given the new composition of the Democratic Party), it’s simply the case that humans are flawed creatures and all we can do is try our best and not let the assholes get us down. Foreign policy has *always* been a major locus of left-wing hypocrisy and confusion; this is not a new phenomenon, distressing though it is to see it on display yet again. But in American politics there’s one grouping that cares about things like a social safety net (or even cares much about public policy generally, outside of cutting taxes and social programs and the like), and it’s the center to center-left, basically (I think the “leftist” left is too interested in their own internecine bullshit to do much about actual politics or policy). Probably some center-right people in there too. But if you care about, for instance, providing public transportation, you only have one party to vote for 99 times out of 100. Or, if you want to stay focused just on this Iran issue, I frankly don’t know if I believe there are many Republicans out there who are invested in the success of Iranian democratic forces either, I’m sorry to say. So while the Corbyns of the world will always be there as an embarrassment to the left, the important thing is to fight them and discredit them and put their moral bankruptcy on display for all to see, as Yascha has done here.
So when group X is dedicated to issue Y they also need to care more about issue Z. This is a fallacy, not a hypocrisy. We see that hypocrisy argument raised over and over again, esp. when it comes to critics of Israel, why don't you care about sudan etc etc etc. It is a lame fallacy. In terms of Iran there is now mass slaughter and the US President could take limited action that would imply regime change. So the left could point out the deadly inaction of the orange perils.
Any movement by the US or Israel to militarily support the Iranian revolution will be met by an explosion of anti-West histrionics by the progressive left who hates the West far more than it loves freedom and democracy for oppressed people. All those expressions of compassion for the vulnerable and the oppressed is being exposed as a shameful lie and pretension by the facts of the Iranian revolution.
The progressive mainstream Iranians will love an intervention. This regime does represent repression, not popular support. Trump did a strike against Suleimani in his first presidency, probably the best risk has taken. It will be easy to decapitate the regime run by a 86 year old and his fellow thugs.
Well as you can see today, the regime has doubled down on repression, and it will not be so easy to remove. I surely do not want to be Trump's shoes today. Destroying industrial infrastructure, even though will largely hurt the Iranian people, may be the only possibility open. But of course that will cause a new regime that starts to be strongly anti-American.
People do not own Industrial infrateucture, they will be fine. The Regime will be gut really hard and the US will know what they so. The time of their regime is running out.
Priorities are not fallacies. If you spend all your energy and resources defending pronouns to the death, you have little left to fight for minimal access to food for the poor.
I meant the accusation of hypocrisy against activitsts is a fallacy. And you give a perfect reason why, someone spents his or her time budget on one item, so he or she has nothing left for other issues.
Well said. It can seem arbitrary, but I sense there is some method to the madness. Perhaps it's cryptically rides along with the whole "world without (moral) borders" agenda? I could never understand why the Obama and Biden administrations capitulated to the Iranian Theocrats. Why would they do that?? I just don't get it. What WERE they trying to achieve??? The European left, and to a lesser extent the American left, certainly favors the Islamic Republic over Israel, and in that sense they have indirectly taken sides against the Iranian People. I wonder if there is a connection to the way the the left ignored the suffering of Venezuelans for the last twenty years.
Yes, there is a strong connection. There are good material reasons why western leftist activists have stopped supporting the oppressed demanding freedom and democracy. For one thing freedom and democracy in its very essence is capitalistic - i.e. it always comes with the legitimization of private property and free markets.
That's an incredibly good take, and I think you are absolutely right. I'm actually kind of embarrassed that I failed to see this angle. Thanks.
They really did stop supporting this. Expanding on this point, even the once-vaunted Nordic 'social democracy' model respects achievement and property, and it recoils from outright confiscation. Even my forebears, the primitive Vikings, had a better innate grasp of freedom than the new left.
I feel exactly the same
You have described my sentiments exactly, which is why I quit the parties a decade ago and consider myself a bleeding-heart moderate.
Amen to that.
Don't be a moderate! Be a weirdo!
I am a venezuelan and I am greatly grateful for your words. I feel the plight of Iranian women as my own. I feel we are sisters. Although we don't have to wear a veil we face the same totalitarian regimes, torture, repression, families separated and so so much pain. And the left shuns us. Doesn't understand us. Explains our countries and our plights to us. And worst, from a supposed moral superiority. Thank you for being our voice .
Explains our countries and our plights to us. And worst, from a supposed moral superiority.
This perfectly states my personal experience of the left, and im just a middle aged white guy living in the middle of the u.s. The left lost the ability to listen long ago.
Sorry, don't agree. They lost the ability to listen to the less-righteous and less-pure. They still listen to themselves a LOT, and ONLY to themselves, probably because they're the only ones that can begin to understand the gibberish they're talking.
Echo chamber syndrome
I am an American and I apologize on behalf of Democrats and all other western liberals who completely ignored your plight for the obvious reason that it reflected poorly on their pro-socialist anti-western narrative. I have been following your story closely for decades and I have been shocked and disillusioned by the lack of reporting and attention around what has happened to your wonderful freedom loving people. The persistent decades long dismissive attitude towards your plight, by the liberals of America and their mainstream media, is an utter disgrace and a permanent stain on the institution formerly known as the free press.
All the American liberals who ignored your country and people, and yet are suddenly interested in Venezuela, and are howling in opposition to Trumps actions there--they need to take a good long look at themselves and their so called values.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPVo_QyS0Hw
I just don't think this article is very convincing. My default is https://www.theguardian.com/international
For the last two days, Iran has been the top news story on there. The problem I've found is that the article is very light on information - it sits there but is rarely updated. Of course, that's due to the lack of information coming out of the country.
Normally these sites like to lead you to live blogs, but the guardian hasn't been doing that - it's had the Iran story positioned above the constant updates around ICE/US politics.
This article feels like a story in search of a reality. Slate and the New Republic are hardly "news" sites; this kind of breaking news with limited information is just not their thing.
And as for the Iranian ministerial op-ed; that was in December - it's a bit misleading to cite it in this article as if it were being posted alongside the violent crackdown.
I've been a professional media analyst, doing work for major corporations, governments, and NGOs, but understanding why the media does what it does isn't the kind of analysis in which I have any experience or deep knowledge. However, I do know about what tends to get covered in the news, and the kinds of coverage it usually gets, and YM is correct that this issue has gotten very little coverage on parts of the left. And, the coverage it has gotten hasn't been very in-depth, and has often omitted relevant information that would make the Iranian regime look bad. For example, these protests are most similar to the big ones in 2022, so it would be relevant to say that the regime killed 500 civilians in those protests, detained 22,000 people, and to note that some of the detainees were raped and/or tortured, but the Guardian left that out.
That was a very long way to have to dig in order to find something that might support Yascha's rather broad and sweeping point. The guardian has previously reported on atrocities in 2022 protests, and in this one was quite freely reporting "they are going for the eyes". I don't understand the cult of defence set up here to defend Yascha's weak argument. Just accept that this one is pretty clumsily constructed and that there's really nothing to see here at all. The bigger question is why he has gone out of his way to contort himself like this? Who on earth would go Slate magazine for their leftist reporting of Iranian uprising?!
I didn't have to "dig in" because the omission was glaring, and not the only one, simply the first one that came to mind. I'm not defending his position out of any sense of deference to his opinion. I'm merely stating that what I've seen reported is inconsistent with reporting on previous civil conflicts in countries with oppressive regimes, and that news outlets haven't covered this in a way that paints nearly as complete a picture as they could with a few more sentences, if they cared to do so. Yes, the outlets may have mentioned some of what the regime has done in the past (I'll take your word for it), but it's pretty standard to restate stuff like that because the average reader isn't going to remember years later if they don't pay close attention to Middle East politics.
(When I said, "The Guardian left that out," I meant in the recent coverage, not the coverage years ago in 2022.)
I think it's important to gauge the reporting last week against the size and importance of the story itself. Given that Iran has been waging a multi front war against Israel for decades, it would be fair to expect that the level of reporting would be similar to that which the Israel-Gaza story received. Right?
Thirty years ago all the major news outlets would have their international reporters on this story and they would have constantly interrupted regular programming to keep us up to date. And that would have been exactly appropriate. I think Yascha nails it.
It is much easier to report on the Gaza war than on Iran - that is a more important factor than the size of the story. The fact is that the Guardian promoted a story with sparse information and infrequent updates to the top of their homepage, when they could have promoted the various US political live blogs above it. This hardly amounts of "the left's silence" or "the revolution will not be reported".
https://web.archive.org/web/20260110025736/https://www.theguardian.com/international
As for the claim about "thirty years ago". No, they wouldn't. They would have had even less information than they have now, and hence no need to constantly interrupt regular programming.
There is no way in which "Yascha nails it", except in picking his narrative ahead of the facts, making a clickbaity headline, and ignoring the guardian frontpage to instead delve into their archives for a regime op-ed. There is plenty to grumble about at the guardian (they are an open goal at times), but this isn't one of them.
If I were--without prejudice-- to grant you complete agreement with regard to the Guardian, how would you explain the performance of the major legacy media outlets?
I wouldn't and couldn't. I didn't look at any over the weekend. I was working and just looked at one news site. Outside of that, I rarely go to the BBC because I find their reporting to be very thin in general, and just have never got into the habit of using US news sites. I am defending the guardian because I happened to be visiting it, and what I saw did not match what YM was claiming. There's plenty of other areas in which I would not defend the guardian....
Exactly. Mounk is trolling. The Guardian is at this point THE left wing site. No one on the left reads Slate and TNR is focused on domestic events, which is its prerogative. On BlueSky, which the right likes to characterize as lefty, I see tons of coverage of Iran, all anti Mullah and pro-protester. Honestly, anyone who is still calling the BBC leftwing at this point is out of touch.
It's a bit more complicated than that. The default setting of most legacy media outlets is Blairite centre-leftism. Centre-right on economics, Left on culture, which is the only concession to the progressive Left they will allow. It's the reverse of what most citizens actually want on these two axes. Most people in the UK and the US want a reset on culture to where gay marriage is legal but kids aren't transed, and racial equality is essentially anti-discriminatory, but not jury-rigged to produce 'equity (and inherently discriminatory), but are willing to see some bold moves in specific areas in economics, particularly when it comes to funding healthcare.
The corporate Centre-Left has been censoring both conservatives and progressives for years. Sometimes it's just algorithmic and a matter of shadow-banning, but in other instances it's been outright bans.
The BBC has a narrower Overton Window than the UK. It ranges from David Cameron to Blairite Labour politicians but no further. Those who point to the overrepresentation of Reform in broadcasts should note two thing- first, they are the most popular with the electorate at the moment, and gaining ground with women, who now acknowledge in polls they feel less safe in public due to migration (other than Green party members), and second although the BBC routinely hosts Reform representatives, they are almost always attacking their positions.
But here's the thing- they did exactly the same thing to Jeremy Corbyn!
The BBC is not a Left or Right outlet, it's an establishment status quo outlet. The only genuinely Left politician the BBC seems to like is Zack Polanski, to whom they've been genuinely sympathetic. But then their coverage on climate change has been shown to be biased. The science predicts climate change is neither an existential threat or a civilisation ender, although it will likely cause major economic and social problems in future.
The most realistic projections of temperature change by 2100 (including all warming to date) predict around a 3°C in temperature, or slightly higher. That's bad, but not existential. Once one accounts for heat resistant GMO and shifts in crops planted the worst impact will likely be a 20-30% reduction in yields in the tropical zone in C4 crops. Climate change to date has only slowed the rate at which yields increase in the tropical zone. It hasn't reduced yields. Plus, a recent climate science paper by mainstream climate scientists, with no ties to scepticism, emphatically stated that while permafrost melt and methane hydrate release was an important feedback, critical to climate change processes, it didn't represent a feasible scenario for a runaway climate effect. In other words, permafrost melt is not the potential Black Swan so popular in science fiction novels.
I’ve been reading the Guardian closely, and the difference in standards compared to its Israel–Gaza reporting is hard to ignore. When the most severe reports and images emerge out of Iran, the coverage is buried beneath the headlines, careful, qualified, and framed with repeated caveats about what can and cannot be confirmed. This, of course, is laudable. But it would be nice if the Guardian had demonstrated the same level of journalistic rigor and integrity during the Israel-Hamas conflict.
For at least this reason, I find that your criticism of Yascha is misplaced. He’s not “trolling” — he’s pointing out an asymmetry that many readers can plainly see. If you believe the Guardian held its Israel–Gaza reporting to the same evidentiary standard it is applying now, I’m genuinely open to hearing that case.
And before you dismiss this as “hair-splitting,” I’d think twice — that critique cuts both ways, and you’re in no particularly strong position to deploy it here. To be clear, I don’t consider the Guardian the worst offender here — it’s often better than many of its peers — but the contrast still stands out.
The "Left" which is a bit of a fuzzy term seems to practice what I call disproportionate outrage depending on the victims of bad deeds. the Uighers? Silence Sudan? Silence. 8-90 million Iranians? Silence. the "Palestinians" or even Hamas? 100 decibels! Why? I do not get it. The interesting thing is that the Left in the US, UK, Ireland are more concerned about the Palestinians than anyone who actually lives in the Middle East. and while everyone is fervidly recognizing a Palestinian state, no one anywhere, especially in the ME will accept passports or identity documentation from the PA. Many of these people use Egyptian or Jordanian credentials.
You were not listening very hard if you think the left was silent about Uyghers and Sudan. Students at my very liberal university protested our own bowl game over the atrocities in Xinjiang. There are dozens of oppressed peoples around the world, and in most of these cases, the left contains the ONLY people in our politics who draw attention to their plight.
Palestine animates us especially because it is the United States funding and arming the violence against a powerless group. We have deontological streaks in our moral codes that make killing *done in our name* bother us especially much. There's no contradiction in a political community focusing on how to improve the behavior of its own violent, corrupt, and authoritarian government before they focus on how to fix other places.
Let’s make a deal. i will not attack your hearing and you will not attack mine?
I know nothing about you or your unnamed “very liberal” university. why not name? why bother characterize it as very liberal? who cares about the labels.
but i think you miss my point. I am glad that your people protested and were not silent about the Uyghers and the Sudanese etc. It sure did not make it on the newsfeed. My point is about proportionality and disproportionality. it is a numbers thing, a math thing. I assert that there is not a proportionate reaction to the mass tragedies of these other peoples. Take Syria as an example. Assad probably killed 1 million of his own people and drove millions to flee. He was a butcher. people disappeared, were tortured and killed. Did your very liberal university do anything about Syria and the Syrian people?
Assad wasn't killing *his* people, but competitor minorities.
The left doesn't actually care about the lives of people under authoritarian states, they are only used as "moral tools". That's why Palestinian suffering in Arab countries doesn't count for the left - only when Israel abuses them does the tool become useful.
by his people you mean the Alawites? An offshoot of Shia. Yes. Syria a partially European map drawing exercise had Alawites, Christian’s Druze and other groups. But Assad was Alawite. He killed a lot of people tortured a lot of people. There are stories of people that were looked up so long they lost their minds by the time they were liberated. A very cruel family currently shopping in Moscow
The Palestinians are in fact not embraced by much of the Arab world They are an inconvenience that is given lip service too by the more moderate countries and used as proxies by Iran and the MB
Assad killed a million people gradually, over the course of 13 years, and most of that time was before I was in the university. I don't remember a protest about it, but I do remember emotional, supportive groupchats with a Syrian student the day Assad fell.
I'll be the first to complain that people's moral and political priorities are not always proportional to the impact of the issue. This is true on both sides. But there are clear reasons for that, especially when it comes to foreign policy, related to people's political bandwidth and practical need to prioritize issues that *their vote and voice* can actually affect. Palestine was one of those, and most of these other places are not, and that explains the left's behavior better than any supposed hypocrisy.
I think this is just a natural consequence of the fact that the US doesn’t really have anything to do with those other atrocities, whereas our government very explicitly supports Israel’s violence against Palestinians. If Trump came out as strongly in support of the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces and started sending them guns and bombs to commit massacres with, there would probably be more protests about that too.
It’s skin colour. The oppressor must be light skinned and the oppressed must be dark skinned. Only Palestine currently fits the narrative. Ukraine: white on white. Iran: black on black.
I think racism is a part of it. If we are going into skin colour I wouldnt say Iran is Black on Black given my Iranian friends. I agree with your barbed comment about the Oppressor, But i think that it is more than racism.
I agree. But given the shortened attention span fostered by the internet, I thought it prudent to simplify arguments than to deliver into the nuances that characterise in all conflict. When I said Iran was black on black, I meant there was no meaningful difference in skin colour between oppressor and oppressed. Or am I wrong?
All good.
They focus on Palestine because white people can be blamed for it.
The others aren't so are "noble savages" fighting it out among themselves.
I went to Concordia University in Montreal, Canada around 2007-2008. It was (and prolly still is) known for being a very leftist, activist University. Yea, they were pro-Palestine, but people were also talking a lot aboot Sudan. I remember this thing: “I stand with Darfur” or something like that. Talking aboot the genocide in Darfur or something like that.
True, but it’s rarely noted that 10/7 also received more outrage than similarly bad terrorist atrocities committed in other places in the world. The Israel conflict is a global focal point and has been for 70 years.
PBS did a feature length discussion on the Iran protests last night
It’s almost like there was a giant incident in the US or something at the same and you’re just looking to confirm your priors
I suspect it is fear of appearing Islamophobic. I know this makes no sense whatsoever, but I suspect it is the true motivation.
I largely agree with your broader argument about moral asymmetry on parts of the left, and I think the underlying concern is real. That said, I was a bit surprised—and frankly disappointed—by how thin the methodological case is here. A snapshot homepage search at a single moment during an unusually crowded news cycle feels like too narrow a lens to support such a sweeping conclusion about “the left” as a whole. I don’t doubt there are real blind spots and selective silences, especially in activist and campus spaces, but that’s precisely why a more rigorous, time-based or comparative approach would have strengthened the argument rather than weakened it. The point is important enough to deserve sturdier evidence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEe96RBX2QM&t=26s
Thanks for the link. I have mixed feelings about the triggernometers, but they're providing a useful service in this case.
You can paint the campus Palestinian protests with the same brush - bigger in scale than the Vietnam war protests, but for Iran, nothing yet.
It’s pretty simple. Israel is at war with the Iranian regime and its proxies. The left absolutely hates Israel. The left has trouble acknowledging anything that conflicts with its narrative of Israel.
The point is made here that "For far too many progressives and leftists, their founding commitment is not to some principle or aspiration for the world. It is to believing that their own countries and societies are at the root of profound evil. For far too many progressives and leftists, their founding commitment is not to some principle or aspiration for the world. It is to believing that their own countries and societies are at the root of profound evil." -- Speaking as someone from the Leftist/Progressivist fold, I, too, have long been frustrated by the widespread refusal in our circle to criticize or act against many of the world's travesties that have not been committed by Westerners/Americans/Whites (or Israel). But it is not my experience that there is no Leftist/Progressive "attachment to principal or aspiration for the world". On the contrary, the widespread orientation in this circle is both to principle (in their own telling) AND to attacks against the West and company, considered the culprits in the story in question. The principles are often hawked when the West and company are guilty of travesties--but then disappear from concern when the culprits are someone else.
But that is only "step one" of a certain mental process and political orientation. There is a second step that occurs (possibly not consciously or planned) which was noted long ago, sarcastically, by philosopher Bertrand Russell in his essay "The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed". It is not enough to stand up for the oppressed and attack their oppressors (step one) but to assign to the oppressed of the moment a superior moral stance (step 2)--this when clearly that is rarely the case for whole societies outside the West/America/Whites/Israel and would be obvious to anyone who bothers to look. So why is that? Is that only the result of hatred of one's own society?
Here is an excerpt from Russell's essay:
One of the persistent delusions of mankind is thatsome sections of the human race are morally betteror worse than others...A rather curious form of this admiration forgroups to which the admirer does not belong is thebelief in the superior virtue of the oppressed: subjectnations, the poor, women, and children...Nationalism introduced, in the nineteenth century...the patriotof an oppressed nation. The Greeks until they hadachieved liberation from the Turks, the Hungariansuntil the Ausgleich of 1867, the Italians until 1870, andthe Poles until after the 1914-18 war were regardedromantically as gifted poetic races, too idealistic tosucceed in this wicked world. The Irish were regarded by the English as possessed of a specialcharm and mystical insight until 1921, when it wasfound that the expense of continuing to eppress them would be prohibitive. One by one these variousnations rose to independence, and were found to bejust like everybody else; but the experience of thosealready liberated did nothing to destroy thc illusionas regards those who were still struggling. Englishold ladies still sentimentalize about the "wisdoin ofthe East" and Amercan intellectuals about the"earth consciousness" of the negro.
From: The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed in Unpopular Essays by Bertrand Russell (first published in the 1920s) -- https://russell-j.com/cool/UE_1950.pdf -- (the link is to the whole book).
Russell had a ready wit!
Being half-Hungarian (the oppressed) and half-British (the oppressing) I can sympathise or not, depending upon which foot I'm standing on.
Yascha's current comment is all very well, but he has probably not been in Tehran in late 1979, when he hears a loud commotion, getting louder. I was. I poked a head outside to find the wide road covered by a sea of chanting WOMEN, in full chadors, demonstrating FOR Khomeini and against the "devil Americans", and advancing down the street.
It's completely delusional that the Iranian Revolution didn't have massive majority support when it first took control. That this support has waned is also out of the question. The recent act of war by Trump/the US against Iran has probably pushed back the opposition to theocratic rule by a significant amount. I don't think that the Shah's son has ANY chance of gaining power: they know that family too well.
My friend, Stephen Zunes, spoke about the protests, and very positively. Otherwise, your point is spot on. The "useful idiots" of the left are especially misguided on Russia and Ukraine, as their hatred of the West makes them allies of a semi-fascist nationalist regime. But, heck, they support Hamas, etc. Regimes and movements which, if in power, would first of all execute all the leftists.
You realize that the left is the side relatively more in support of Ukraine than the right, yes?
I am talking about the "anti-imperialist left": Chomsky, Stone, Benjamin and Davies in their monograph on the war, Vijay Prashad, etc are all apologists for Russia. The list can go on. More centrist left is absolutely against Russia, and you are correct in this respect.
Don't forget Chomsky was a good buddy of Epstein...
Right, but Epstein was everyone's friend back in the days. Epstein ran something of a intellectual salon, was lionized in the media, was considered a genius, etc. I think that everyone is forgetting about it. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/03/jeffrey-epstein-200303?srsltid=AfmBOorMvbEmjaOWpqrjzIFvXG4O2T_t-9Z8hDaR5_bP4-JLHoX8OGO6
The bigger takeaway from this is to show the elites are all on the same team, however noble Chomsky’s apparent values.
For me, Chomsky, as a political commentator, is a fairly primitive propagandist with his ideas of little intellectual value. His answer to every political question is "blame US capitalism/imperialism." Crude agitprop. Otherwise, a significant linguist, for sure.
Intellectuals were always attracted to salons and power. Heck, Epstein had money, philathropists flocked to him, should we blame them? He was considered a "good guy" - his blackmail, espionage, abuse and sex traffic were hidden in the shadows, except for people who knew the truth. I imagine, intelligence apparatus and folks who were a part of his sex trade. And, Trump with his pageants and models was certainly a part of the network, plus, he is aware of the whole intelligence connection and this is what is being covered.
Well on paper yes - but that has hardly translated to anything concrete across the board. I have been shouting out Ukraine since the war began but it is barely mentioned by any of my progressive friends, especially after October 7th.
Some of this is the Chomskyist strain on the left where only the US and the West can be critiqued. The rest of the world are victims or merely acting in response to the power of the West.
It's also the Noble Omission in terms of not wanting to write anything that could be "weaponized" (perhaps literally in this case). Since the Tehran regime is terrible, better to say nothing rather than foment a war is probably the thought
Chomsky, who got his marching orders from Jeffrey Epstein
Nicolás Maduro was a terrible COMMUNIST dictator. There are plenty of terrible dictators on the right, but Maduro seems to have some sympathy from American progressives because of his ideology. This makes no sense to the families of the people he tortured and killed or the millions of economic refugees who had to leave Argentina. The left, as always, has blinkers on, or is willfully blind.
Where's your "unscripted moderate" when we need him/her? Where's our "moral compass"? With NO help from the press, what hope for Iran and for our better selves? Liberals seem to have forgotten their raison d'être. WAKE UP!!