The Binary of the Blind: Beyond the Moral Colour Code
As Tehran burns and Western activists remain silent, we must look deeper than the surface.
Elica Le Bon recently gave us the Moral Colour Code, but the roots of this paralysis go back centuries. We have traded the messy, human heart for a Manichaean checklist of good versus evil, and, today, the Iranian people are the ones paying the price.
The silence is not just deafening; it is a confession.
As we sit here in January 2026, the streets of Iran are once again thick with the smoke of a genuine revolution. The Iranian people are not asking for tweaks to a dress code; they are fighting to dismantle a clerical theocracy that has held them hostage for 47 years. Security forces are opening fire on protesters, internet blackouts are total, and the body count is mounting.
And yet, I look out across the Western ‘progressive’ world, and I see... nothing.
No road blockages. No student encampments on the lawns of the Russell Group. No Freedom Flotillas Coalition (a ridiculous, vainglorious display of Western activist arrogance, if ever I saw one). No celebrities dedicating their award acceptance speeches to the brave women of Tehran. Where are the humanitarians? Where are AOC, Bernie Sanders, and Greta Thunberg?
As we watch the Iranian people sacrifice everything for a shred of the dignity we, in the West, take for granted, attorney and ‘Daughter of Iran’ Elica Le Bon has identified the psychological wall blocking our empathy. She calls it the Moral Colour Code. It is the binary that tells a generation of activists to stand down when the oppressor isn’t white.
The Laws of the Moral Colour Code
As Le Bon argues, the modern activist doesn’t operate on universal principles. They operate on a binary that divides society into good and evil based on a racialised hierarchy.
The Code: Everything designated ‘white’ is considered evil. Everything designated ‘non-white’ is considered good.
The Training: Our youth are trained like Pavlovian dogs to attack the moment they hear the buzzword ‘white oppressor’ and to stand down the second they see the ‘brown oppressor’.
The Anti-West Alibi
Enter the moral dilemma: Iran.
Our ‘progressive’ students will march for hours to protest a conservative speaker on campus, yet they remain chillingly silent about an Islamic regime that enforces the ultimate depravity. They are supporting, through their silence, a system that won’t allow a fifty-year-old man to drink a nine-year-old wine, but will happily allow him to marry a nine-year-old girl.
Why is this ignored? Because the regime is anti-West. In the warped logic of the Red-Green alliance, any atrocity, no matter how barbaric, is excused as long as the perpetrator is throwing stones at Washington or London. They have traded their humanity for a geopolitical grudge.
The New Manichaeism: Externalising Evil
But if we are to truly understand the depth of this rot, we must look past the colour palette and into the philosophical machinery that created it. We aren’t just looking at a misunderstanding of race; we are looking at the resurrection of an ancient, dangerous heresy.
For thousands of years, the great thinkers of human history agreed on one thing: the battle between good and evil is an internal struggle.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, lying on the rotting straw of the Gulag, famously realised that ‘the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties—but right through every human heart.’
The modern activist has rejected this wisdom. They have externalised evil. They have moved the line from the heart to the skin. In their world, evil is no longer a personal capacity for malice; it is a structural property of a specific group. This is the Psychology of Totalitarianism in its purest form—it removes the need for self-reflection. If evil is ‘white’ and you are ‘non-white’, you are liberated from the burden of being a good person. You are good by default.
This is why they cannot process Iran. The Iranian regime is an Islamic theocracy—a ‘Brown Oppressor’ in Le Bon’s lexicon. Because the regime doesn’t fit the externalised ‘White’ profile of evil, the activist’s brain simply short-circuits. They cannot find the ‘evil’ button to press, so they do nothing.
This leads to a form of moral insanity that is almost too dark to contemplate.
The Hegelian Trap of the ‘Oppressor’
Our universities have spent decades teaching a debased form of the Hegelian Dialectic. In this flattened worldview, every human interaction is reduced to a struggle between Master and Slave, Oppressor and Oppressed.
But there is a catch: the roles are fixed. In the modern Western academy, the ‘Master’ is always the West, and the ‘Slave’ is always the Global South. This creates a terrifying blind spot. When a regime in the Middle East—like the Islamic Republic of Iran—acts as the Master, beating and killing its own people, the Western Red-Green activist doesn’t see an oppressor. They see a ‘victim of Western imperialism’ who is simply having a bad day.
By making the Oppressor a racialised category rather than a behavioral one, we have given the world’s most brutal dictators a free pass. We have traded Universalism, the idea that all humans deserve freedom regardless of who is taking it, for Tribalism. This pass is often issued under the guise of a noble caution.
One might argue that the Western activist’s silence is not a lack of empathy, but a strategic caution—a fear that by condemning the Islamic Republic, they might inadvertently provide a pretext for Western regime change or imperialist intervention.
They claim that to speak out is to punch down against a Global South state already under the thumb of Western sanctions. But this is a hollow alibi that prioritises a geopolitical grudge over human life. By refusing to stand with the Iranian people out of fear of how Washington might react, the progressive world has effectively decided that the survival of a Brown Oppressor is more important than the liberation of the people living under its boot.
This logic suggests that an Iranian woman’s right to life is secondary to the West’s need to maintain a clean anti-imperialist record. When we treat the Mullahs as anti-imperialist heroes rather than common tyrants, we don’t prevent war; we simply give a brutal regime the green light to wage war on its own citizens with total impunity.
The Totalitarianism of the Binary
This is what makes our current cultural moment so frightening. We think we are more inclusive than ever, but we have actually become more totalitarian.
As Theodor Adorno warned in his study of the Authoritarian Personality, the hallmark of the fascist mind is the ‘stark contrast between in-group and out-group’. We have recreated this exact psychological structure. We have built a world where:
Israel is designated ‘White/Evil’, so 100,000 people march.
Iran is designated ‘Non-White/Good (or neutral)’, so 100 people march.
This isn’t humanitarianism. This is a moral software update designed to ensure that you never have to think for yourself again.
Living in the Shadow
Le Bon is right: the Moral Colour Code is killing the Iranian people. It is a psychological barrier that prevents the Western Left from seeing the Mullahs for what they are—not anti-imperialist heroes, but common, garden-variety tyrants.
We must reject the binary. We must stop asking ‘what colour is the oppressor?’ and start asking ‘what is the oppressor doing?’ Until we move the line back to where Solzhenitsyn found it—inside our own hearts—we will continue to be the useful idiots of every regime that knows how to manipulate our modern racial anxieties.
The revolution in Iran is the ultimate test of the Western conscience. So far, we are failing.