When “The Enemy of My Enemy” Builds Your Gallows
How 'Anti-Imperialism' Became Whatever Moscow Needed That Week
Tehran, March 8, 1979. The revolution is five weeks old and already eating its children.
Over 100,000 women flood the streets. nurses, students, professionals, all bareheaded and furious. “In the dawn of freedom,” they chant, “we have no freedom.” The day before, Ayatollah Khomeini decreed women must wear hijab in government offices or stop showing up “naked.”
For six days the numbers grow. Pro-Khomeini forces attack with knives and stones. The women are branded traitors, counter-revolutionaries, bourgeois imperialist stooges. The full Stalinist bingo card.
But they weren’t attacked just by Islamists. They were condemned by the communists. The Marxists. The garden-variety Left. Virtually all the leftist factions of the rebellion seemed to be Team Khomeini at that point. The Tudeh Party (Iran’s official communist party before Khomeini had it banned and its members hanged) called the protests “reactionary.” They went out of their way to condemn these protests as “vassals for imperialism”. Leftist intellectual Homa Nategh recalls trying to dissuade these women from protesting with this logic: “If Hijab is the only means to get free of Imperialism, if it’s the price, then we’ll pay.” The revolutionary subject as a credit card rewards program.
Years later, Nategh admits: “It was me who finished the women’s protests. They were moving their veils on top of their heads hoping somebody would help them. Nobody came.”
It’s a common misconception that in the Iranian revolution of ‘79, the leftists were outmaneuvered. Outnumbered. Outplayed by a more powerful Islamist force that had the masses on their side. Poor leftists, they fought so hard but just couldn’t compete with religious populism.
But the truth is actually quite shocking.
In the late 1970s, leftist organizations in Iran vastly outnumbered Islamist groups.
You had the Tudeh Party (Communist Party), tens of thousands of members, and an established organizational infrastructure dating back to the 1940s. You had armed guerrillas like the Fedai’an-e Khalq, Iran’s largest Marxist organization. They’d been doing the dangerous work for years: assassinations, bank robberies, underground organizing. These are people who knew which end of the Kalashnikov the bullets come out of. They had the guns, the experience, the revolutionary credentials. You had trade union networks reaching hundreds of thousands of workers. You had numerous smaller Maoist, Trotskyist, and other leftist factions.
The leftists were the vanguard. They organized the oil strikes that crippled the regime. They built the underground networks. They survived SAVAK torture chambers and came back for more. They had actual organizational infrastructure while the Islamists mostly had… mosques. And vibes.
The left had the numbers. The weapons. The working-class base. The theoretical frameworks. Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, the whole gang. Everything they needed to seize power.
Instead, they subordinated the entire movement to the Islamic fundamentalists. They literally theorized themselves into subordination.
Fast-forward to August 1988. Evin Prison, Tehran. Khomeini by this point had killed most of the leftists in opposition. Those who survived the initial purges - and by “survived” I mean “were in prison and somehow haven’t been executed yet” - are being called out of their cells. They’re told to answer some questions about their religious beliefs. Just administrative stuff, they’re assured. Totally routine. Nothing to worry about.
The questions are designed to identify apostates. Anyone who fails the vibe check gets hanged. That’s not metaphorical. Literally hanged.
By the time the killing stops, somewhere around 10,000 political prisoners are dead. Mass graves so shallow that stray dogs tear apart the bodies. Nine years. That’s the timeline. Nine years from “we’re the revolutionary vanguard” to “shallow graves and feral dogs.”
As Iran convulses in revolution once again, it’s worth reflecting on the first revolution, and the lessons we learnt (or didn’t learn). Why did avowed communists abandon all their progressive principals, and throw their hat behind an extreme right wing medieval religious cleric? Why would they subvert the progressive project in revolutionary Iran and cheerlead the state’s conversion into a theocracy? Were they sleeping at the wheel?
How was their revolution stolen from them? Or was it even stolen? Did they give it up willingly?or unwittingly?
The answer is startling and also has little to do with Iran.
