Moonshots Over Tehran
Who benefits from staging battles between Extremely Online Leftists and Iranians?
Over the summer I was walking down 7th Avenue in Park Slope when I got a Signal message from a younger friend about the recent X post by Donald Trump in which Trump laments that Iran didn’t accept his nuclear deal and warned that all residents of Tehran should evacuate immediately.
My friend said he was terrified and I replied something to the effect of “yeah, me too” because I had been floating in a suspended cloud of existential dread since I saw the post, spending a day or so waiting for a flurry of horrifying videos of carnage and explosions from missiles indiscriminately hitting a city of 10 million people. Turns out he was hoping to be reassured, like maybe I would say that Trump was bullshitting and hamming it up for the cameras.
Now we’re back again in a moment of terror while “reports” swirl in our feeds of impending American strikes on the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The last week or so has also seen the return of a couple rhetorical figures that often come alive in these moments, namely the American Leftist Extremely Online Guy (obvious why I’m interested in this character) and The Iranian or Iranians as his foil. In the narrative we see posted from some of the biggest accounts and most prestigious and well respected media outlets, these two characters are each other’s mortal enemy in the wild and the Very Online Leftists are violating the cardinal commandment to listen to Iranians.
Of course, there are some online confrontations between overzealous American leftists and Iranian people on the internet, what is important here is not whether or not this happens but rather the underlying set of assumptions animating the narrative that the Iranian is rhetorically besieged by the American Leftist Online Bros or “tankies” if you are really internet literate (of course the tankie is still more Online than the person who is Online enough to even know what that is).
In fact, this script has nothing to do with Iranians at all, as evidenced by the extremely vicious dismissal and personal attacks on an Iranian legal scholar who in discussing the current protests in Iran had the temerity to argue that the role of the police in Iran is different than the role of police in the United States, a dramatically different society. The Iranian scholar, Dr. Helyeh Doutaghi, is a postdoc at the University of Tehran after having been suspended by Yale with zero due process over spurious AI-generated accusations of being affiliated with terrorists.
Whether or not Dr. Doutaghi is correct it seems obvious that she is at the very least qualified to make some kind of assessment of events on the ground in Iran, but some American leftists have gone as far as to attack Progressive International’s credibility for even platforming her article. So, American leftist men who post online for a living dismissing an Iranian scholar’s judgment of events in Iran seems to be something very different than the rhetorical device of the supposed eternal battle between American leftist online posters and Iranians. You will notice the ease and total lack of concern for how he comes off in Ganz’s response to Doutaghi, and how he is seemingly unaware that his government is quite credibly getting ready to bomb where she or her family lives.
This also happens with Syrians, Russians, Ukrainians, Venezuelans, Cubans, and even the Irish. People used to occasionally try this with Palestinians too but it turns out to be pretty hard when you get pushback for even treating Palestine like a real place.
But first, who is this guy?
The American Extremely Online Bro Leftist (usually a guy because he is mansplaining on his podcast, which nobody wants to hear obviously) commits a series of unpardonable sins.
He is simultaneously overeducated (sitting Online all day reading about Iran in this case) and undereducated (lacks credentials or doesn’t write for magazines or give lectures).
He simultaneously has no life and doesn’t participate in any meaningful political action (as evidenced by his sitting in Discord all day with his loser friends) or has no life and therefore constantly attends protests and DSA meetings which means he is out of touch with “normal people” who aren’t “online all day”.
He is presumably single and maybe lives with his parents or 5 roommates but is also privileged to have time and energy to engage with leftist politics 24/7 instead of doing something “normal” like raising a family.
Most importantly, he has no reason to give a shit about anything going on in any country other than the United States and the only social issues he has any reason to care about he demonstrably doesn’t because he didn’t vote for Kamala Harris. He cares way too much about Palestine and way too little about the things that really matter. Ultimately, he exists entirely outside of history and his engagement with politics is a manifestation of his own personal dysfunction and his unwillingness to simply “get a life”.
The Iranian as rhetorical figure, on the other hand, is a person with some direct connection to the country of Iran, a very complex society with a history going back thousands of years and a wide array of ethnic and religious groups and languages. They may be Persian, Shia Muslim, Kurdish, Jewish, Mazanderani, Baloch, Christian, etc. The circumstances of their migration (the Iranian as a rhetorical figure always lives in the West) may relate to any period of Iran’s history and many aspects of their historical experience are difficult to immediately comprehend without some amount of background knowledge of Iranian politics and history.
The most important thing is that while the Online Bro Leftist is marked by the ways in which he fails to fit into American society and “be normal”, the “Iranian” is permanently marked by the decades long confrontation between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States. It is assumed that regardless of their own personal views they exist in some kind of half space between belonging in a multicultural American democracy and a permanent tie to a government that is a sworn enemy of the United States (and Israel) and has been under sanctions and various forms of attempts at regime change by both countries for decades.
In reality, a person living through this experience would probably have a nuanced set of views on Iran and the United States that don’t immediately fit into the grammar of an existential war between America and Iran. I know this to be the case because I’ve had the pleasure of discussing these issues with Iranian people of varying political persuasions, learned a great deal, and generally found an agreement that whatever the solution to the complex set of internal challenges facing Iranian society may be, it isn’t a United States invasion or bombing campaign.
The problem is that in the official narrative (reproduced in magazines) any nuance or rejection of the basic framework of war between the United States and Iran is fundamentally forbidden. There is either 100% loyalty to the United States (and acceptance of Trump’s possible attacks on Iran) or fanatical devotion (notice the latent racism here) to the ayatollahs and the Islamic Republic.
Thus the rhetorical figure of the Iranian performs an erasure of actually existing Iranian human beings and demands that they either conform to a Western liberal narrative of the Iranian as a inchoate liberal subject awaiting their liberation by United States intervention or accept their status as internal/eternal enemy. This is assimilation under threat of social death. Thus, in John Ganz’s gesture, Helyeh Doutaghi is socially dead and he can speak of her writing as he pleases.
This is why, in the official script, the Leftist Bro or the Campus Radical must necessarily be written as the natural enemy of the Iranian, and both sides are expected to consent to this script and play their roles. The idea that the Bros and Radicals might have a real material stake in whether or not their government attacks other countries, to say nothing of a human concern for the well being of others and the horror of war, must be dismissed out of hand. As for the Iranians, their voices are useful insofar as they justify American belligerence and totally erased otherwise.
Sitting in the eerie calm before an imagined barrage of missiles, we ought to ask ourselves whether this script makes any sense at all.