Iran does not need saving, you bloodthirsty ghouls.
the home of Shia Islam doesn't need Western values—it needs sovereignty from the Empire that so desperately wants to destroy it.
Good day, spectators,
And firstly, the title of this newsletter is obviously not directed at you.
But recently, the headlines from Western media are saturated with breathless reports of a ‘revolution’ in Iran. Pundits and politicians, from Donald Trump to former CIA directors are offering cryptic encouragement and threats of intervention. Exiled monarchists have flooded social media, and the emoji for Iran’s flag was manually changed to a pre-revolutionary symbol by an Israel-friendly product manager at X.
It’s a formidable propaganda campaign, probably the most powerful I have ever seen from the Empire. It’s one so aggressive that it has managed to temporarily co-opt voices from across the political spectrum into creating consent for regime change. Even Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn, a man who has spent his entire political life opposing Western imperialism, posted messages that sounded like every other politician mindlessly regurgitating the State Department line.
That’s how potent this propaganda campaign has been, it’s gotten to people who should know better.
But when we take a step outside of this manufactured digital reality, a different and more complex truth emerges. And it’s one they hope you’ll ignore.
Let me be explicitly clear: The people of Iran do not need ‘saving’. Least of all by the United States and Israel, two regimes currently engaged in genocide and posturing for a war that could shatter the whole region. This, of course, coming from the ‘no war president’ Trump. This is the oldest imperial playbook, updated for the digital age and amplified by bot networks. Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, name your war: same shit, different decade.
what actually happened: genuine protests hijacked by the Empire.
We need to be clear about the scale and the reality. Since late December 2025, Iran has seen significant protests across all 31 provinces. These have been sparked by a devastating economic crisis where the national currency collapsed and food inflation soared above 70%. These grievances are real, painful, and largely manufactured by decades of suffocating US-led sanctions designed to cripple the country and induce exactly this kind of suffering.
The protests were genuine. People are pissed off. The bazaaris who are the merchant class that’s historically been a pillar of support for the Islamic Republic, were hit hard by the economic collapse and took to the streets. That’s a legitimate expression of economic desperation.
But here’s what Western media won’t tell you: those genuine protests were systematically hijacked by external forces and the evidence isn’t hidden, they boast about it openly.
Read that again. A former head of American intelligence publicly celebrating foreign agents embedded in protests.
Israeli Channel 14 reported confirmation that ‘foreign agents’ were behind the arming of protesters and that we should ‘guess who’.
The Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said shamelessly, ‘I can assure you that we have some of our people operating there right now’.
So they’re not even hiding it. The smoking gun is being waved in your face whilst Western media asks you to ignore it.
And the results of this interference? Mosques burned. Ambulances set ablaze. Destruction that even protesters on the ground questioned. Sara, a 39-year-old protester in Tehran, told Middle East Eye: ‘When you see the videos... you feel this cannot be the work of ordinary people. It looks like they just want destruction’.
Watch: Footage shows a trained group of individuals preparing an attack in Iran last Thursday the 8th of January. People can be seen loading weapons, concealing firearms under clothing, and using satellite communications believed to be linked to foreign intelligence agencies.
This is the signature of hybrid warfare: take genuine economic grievances, inject external agitation and resources, provoke maximum chaos, and then use the resulting violence to justify intervention.
As of now, the demonstrations-turned-Israeli-backed-riots have been subdued. It’s once again tentatively peaceful in Tehran. But we need to document what actually happened here before the revisionist history sets in. These were genuine demonstrations that were hijacked by Israel and the United States. The evidence is copious, undeniable, and being openly admitted by the perpetrators themselves.
the voices that don’t represent Iran.
Now let’s talk about who’s actually cheering for this ‘revolution’ online.
The minority of bazaaris hit by inflation have legitimate economic complaints. But the voices dominating your social media feeds? They’re diaspora Iranians who left decades ago, monarchists dreaming of reinstalling a US-backed Shah, and bot networks run by intelligence agencies with a vested interest in regime change.
Let’s take one of the most famous faces of this ‘revolution’ — you know the cigarette girl? The one who lives in Canada?
Yeah. It didn’t surprise me she was pro-Israel either.
These people do not represent Iran. They do not speak for Iran. And crucially, they do not live in Iran.
99.9% of the people who actually live in Iran are not on your social media platforms because they don’t use your social media platforms. You’re not seeing their voices. What you’re seeing is a curated selection of exiles, bots, and intelligence cutouts creating a false image of what Iranians want.
People leave countries all the time for various reasons. Usually because they don’t like the government. But does that mean they should advocate for someone to intervene militarily, to destroy their former country’s sovereignty, to impose a puppet regime?
The diaspora flooding comment sections might not like conservative Shia governance. Fine. That’s why they left. But it doesn’t give them, or you, or me, the right to attack Iran and call for the destruction of the country for the people who still live there.
the fundamental failure of Western imagination.
At the heart of this fury is a fundamental failure of the Western liberal imagination: the inability to conceive that not everyone on earth wants to live like them.
Iran is a conservative, majority-Shia Muslim nation where faith and culture are deeply intertwined with centuries of history. It’s the home of Shia Islam. For many, and I understand not for all, the social conservatism of the state, however it’s enforced, isn’t an alien imposition but a reflection of societal values they hold.
Watch: Street interviews with Iranians from the massive pro-Iran demonstration on Monday.
This is quite simply so difficult for the average Westerner to understand. Not everybody in Iran wants to live like you. Not everybody in Iran wants your culture. It’s just that we live in more liberal societies and they simply don’t, and it’s not on us to impose our values on them.
To assume every Iranian woman dreams of Western-style liberalism instead of, say, economic security within their own cultural framework and national sovereignty, isn’t progressive, it’s just bloody racist and patronising. It’s the same colonial mindset that’s justified every intervention for the past two centuries: we know better, we’ll civilise them, we’ll liberate them from themselves.
Watch: Real Iranians burning photos of their real evil oppressors at a demonstration days ago.
Of course, this doesn’t absolve the theocracy. The Islamic Republic is repressive and as a socialist, I don’t advocate for its model. I think theocracy is always oppressive and I’d never support it as a system of government. But that’s for the Iranian people to change, on their own terms and their own timeline. That’s their problem to solve, not ours to bomb into submission.
The alternative being groomed by the West with a return to the US-backed, SAVAK run monarchy or a pliable client state. And that isn’t liberation. It’s subjugation. It’s the final looting of a nation that had the audacity to be independent.
the hypocrisy that gives the game away.
I went over this point in my last newsletter but I need to hammer it in. This manufactured outrage exists within a vacuum of moral consistency so blatant it reveals the true motive: and it’s not ‘freedom’, it’s dominion.
Where the West cheers ‘protest’:
Iran: Theocratic government opposed to US/Israeli hegemony and a major supporter of Palestine and counterweight to Israel
Where the West supports the regime:
Saudi Arabia and the UAE: Absolute monarchies bombing Yemen into famine for years
Egypt: Military dictatorship, one of the world’s top jailers of journalists
Bahrain: Monarchy that crushed its Arab Spring with Saudi tanks, hosts the US Fifth Fleet
Of course this list could go on…
So the rule is simple: if you host our bases, sell us oil, or isolate our enemies, your internal brutality is ‘stability’ but if you defy us, your economic protests are a ‘revolution’ and that’s just the way it is.
And here’s the question that exposes the entire farce: where are the leaders of the West’s calls for intervention in the United States itself, where fascist ICE forces are kidnapping, beating, and killing citizens in the streets? Where are the demands for regime change in America, where protesters are being shot and disappeared?
Watch: US authorities shoot and permanently blind a peaceful protester protesting heavy handed ICE tactics.
They’re absent. Because this was never about human rights. The United States is far more connected to the West than Iran, so that should be our primary concern if we actually cared about oppression. But we don’t see that, do we? Where’s the moral consistency?
The answer is simple: these people don’t actually care about Iranians. They just hate Muslims. They hate independence and they hate any nation that refuses to bow to Western hegemony.
what they’re really after (and why Iran must be left alone).
The people of Iran have a right to self-determination, free from the ‘invisible hand’ of Mossad and the cruise missiles of Donald Trump. They have the right to resolve the tension between their conservative social fabric and their desire for political and economic reform without foreign powers turning that tension into a bloodbath for geopolitical gain.
This is a country with sovereignty. A people with self-determination. They will choose their own path.
Watch: Hundreds of thousands of Iranians from all walks of life took to the streets earlier this week to denounce foreign-backed riots.
Not the diaspora monarchists who haven’t lived there for decades. Not the bots in the comment sections. Not the intelligence agencies coordinating regime change operations from Tel Aviv and Langley. The Iranian people. The actual people who live there and have to endure the Western sanctions, who have to navigate the contradictions of their system. These are the only ones with the right to decide Iran’s future.
Nobody needs liberating right now (apart from the Yanks, maybe, no offense to my American readers but you know it’s true). And the Palestinians. And the Yemenis being bombed by Saudi Arabia with American weapons. The list of people actually being slaughtered by Western allies is long, but Iran suddenly needs urgent intervention? The propaganda is pathetic. The hypocrisy is obscene. And the agenda is plain for all to see.
Lift the sanctions. Stop the interference. End the war propaganda. Let the Iranian people breathe, and let them decide their own destiny.
The Empire isn’t offering salvation. It’s offering a cage, painted in the colours of a flag it burned by the people decades ago. It’s offering the return of the Shah, whose secret police tortured dissidents with American training. It’s offering client-state status, where Iran’s oil flows to Western corporations and its foreign policy is dictated from Washington.
As the United States and Israel gear up for yet another war, we need to be absolutely clear about what’s happening. This is about breaking the last major independent power in the Middle East that actively supports Palestine. Iran doesn’t need saving. It needs to be left alone to work through its own contradictions, make its own mistakes, and chart its own course. Just like every other nation that claims to value sovereignty and self-determination.
The next time you see a hashtag trending for a country’s liberation you need to be asking yourself: Who stands to profit from this war? And more importantly, who stands to lose the most, lives and homes? Because it won’t be the diaspora monarchists and liberals tweeting from Los Angeles. It’ll be ordinary Iranians. That’s the ones whose voices you’re not hearing because they’re not on your social media timeline.
And on that thought, I’ll let you go for today,
(And as always, thanks for reading, make sure to subscribe and do please give this post a ❤️ and restack below too.)
I need your support this month!
Please consider leaving a small tip below to support the magazine. If even just 10% of people reading this post tipped just *one* time a month, I could dedicate myself to this work full time and expand to bring you even more unfiltered, independent stories, every single day.
Alternatively, commit to supporting the spectacle as we reach 10,000 subscribers by becoming a paid subscriber to to receive articles one day earlier and get full access to the archives and ‘microscope’ long reads section.
Every contribution counts and is deeply appreciated. Thank you for being part of this community.
Read more from the magazine:
Excellent piece. Even within the Iranian diaspora there is broad support for the Shia regime - including from people who strongly oppose the Shia ideology - because of their shared hatred of imperialism.
The Zionist monarchists are a marginal group, but an exceptionally loud and media-visible one. The level of propaganda and Islamophobia in the West is so intense that many socialist Iranians living here no longer see any point in making their voices heard because of the fear being labeled extremist. They know there is no free speech here.
Hi Deaglan
The Iranian people decided their own destiny when they overthrew the murderous western-backed Shah. I’m plenty old enough to recall it.
THANK YOU RUSSIA 🇷🇺 for providing Iran the technology to shut down Starlink and foil the IsraHelli terrorists!
Anyone desiring to get the real story on Iran, please listen to Professor Marandi, located in Tehran.