One must appreciate the choreography. For weeks, Western media has been airlifting hysterical casualty figures from exile groups and Toronto-based NGOs with official-sounding names like the ‘Human Rights Activists News Agency’, manufacturing a consensus of outrage. The protests, which began in December over devastating economic hardship caused by decades of Western sanctions were swiftly rebranded. No longer are they a complex domestic reaction to inflation and state mismanagement, they are now simply a ‘human rights crisis’, requiring the righteous intervention of Washington and Brussels. Never mind the clear evidence these demonstrations were hijacked by foreign-backed rioters aiming to incite violence. Never mind the mosques burned, the medical infrastructure attacked, the Israeli media and ex CIA bosses openly boasting about providing weapons and coordination to protesters. The narrative, like all imperial narratives, must be simple: a brutal regime versus a valiant people. The truth is that a nation can simultaneously have legitimate public grievances and be the target of a coordinated foreign destabilisation campaign but this is an inconvenient truth that the Empire cannot afford. So the IRGC must be branded terrorists. Not because the EU has suddenly developed a principled stance on state violence, but because the label is the necessary legal and rhetorical groundwork. It is the bureaucratic paperwork required for the next phase: justification for something far worse.

Crossposted from https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10534861