Morality, Iran and the U.S.

Maybe people talked to you with excitement this week — seeing everywhere those photos of women in the streets of Iran, standing on top of cars, burning cars, protesting the death of a woman in custody after her arrest by the “morality police.”

Maybe you were furious after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling struck down the national right to abortion access and thought: What if there was that kind of mass protest here, anger after Roe v. Wade pouring people into the streets, police stations burning and —

Oh. Wait.

There’s already been that level of protest and more in the U.S. Since 2015 millions of people have marched against cop killings, led by Black Lives Matter. A police station was burned in Minneapolis, and cop cars burned in Seattle and Philadelphia.

And U.S. cops have kept killing people. Sandra Bland. Breonna Taylor. George Floyd. Elijah McClain. Michael Brown. Tony McDade. More than 5,000 people have been fatally shot by on-duty police in the last seven years, the victims disproportionately Black. 

The killing system is still in place in the U.S.

We are working for the millions to come out against the U.S. “morality police” — the patriarchal, white-supremacist, Christian-nation folks, who are now the majority on SCOTUS and in the legislatures of many states.

They are using laws instead of guns to condemn people to death — physical, intellectual and emotional death. To punish any women, gender-nonconforming people, and children pregnant through rape, to attack trans people who need medical treatment to stay strong against bigotry and physical attack, to deny school children factual information about history and health.

The “morality police” are stalking through every state in the U.S. — so why is the corporate media whipping up so much high-toned indignation and scorn toward the “theocratic government” of Iran?

How hypocritical for U.S. opinion-makers to “take the side of women” in Iran — now that 20 years of U.S. war against Afghanistan’s Taliban, ostensibly to “liberate women,” has left that country broken, its women and families in direst poverty.

So now you might say: “But how can you defend Iran’s government?”

We say: We are Marxist-Leninist communists, and our enemy is our own ruling class. The U.S. government aims to destroy Iran, which it considers an enemy, by exploiting any legitimate grievances of the women living there. Washington tries to sow chaos and weaken Iran’s government, preferring the relations it has with the Saudi monarchy, despite that regime’s intransigent repression of women’s rights.

The U.S. has placed Iran under sanctions and is trying to defang it economically and militarily, just as the U.S. tries to subvert or crush any nation maintaining independence from the U.S./NATO gang within global capital.

As independent communists, we don’t “pile on” a nation at the bidding of U.S. rulers.

And we extend solidarity to working and oppressed peoples within those nations to organize to govern their own destinies — independent of U.S. subversion — as was true of the 1978 communist-led revolution in Afghanistan that made great advances for women, before CIA-backed reactionary forces undermined that attempt at human liberation. Washington armed the forces that murdered women teachers during the Afghan civil war. 

We refuse to march in lockstep with U.S. capital and its machinations. We know that no intervention by U.S. imperialism can liberate women or other oppressed sectors of another nation. Guarding its profits, capitalist imperialism will always sacrifice women while claiming it will “save” them. 

The U.S capitalist class seeks to dominate working and oppressed people — including all women — with white-supremacist, patriarchal, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-disability laws and prejudice. 

We are dedicated to overturning this deadly U.S. ruling class.