The Narcissism of the 'Anti-Imperialist' Left: How Seeing the CIA Under Every Bed Erases the Iranian People

Reclaiming Iranian agency from the Western academics who view Middle-Eastern revolution as a CIA plot.

A note on personae: To protect the chronically online and avoid the inevitable LinkedIn ‘HR-friendly’ retaliation, we have renamed our subjects. We shall call our academic theorist ‘Professor Deep-State-Hickory’ and his devoted commentator ‘The Human Leadership Synergy-Bot’. Any resemblance to real individuals with blue checks is entirely intentional.

Onwards!

In the streets of Tehran, Karaj, and Zahedan, the pavement is slick with blood. Reports, smuggled out through Elon Musk’s Starlink-provided internet coverage during near-total digital blackout, suggest thousands have been slaughtered by the IRGC and Basij militias in the most brutal crackdown in the Islamic Republic’s history. A young generation, suffocating under a theocratic kleptocracy, is throwing itself against a wall of live ammunition.

Yet, if you log onto LinkedIn—that digital salon of the professional managerial class—you will find a very different reality being curated. You will find highly educated Western academics and commentators, like Professor Deep-State-Hickory and his ideological chorus, calmly explaining that what you are seeing is not a desperate fight for freedom, but a psyop.

Hickory’s post, and the viral approval it received from the usual flag-waving segments of the online Left, is a masterclass in a specific modern pathology: West-centric geopolitical narcissism.

Faced with a populace risking machine-gun fire to overthrow their oppressors, the first instinct of this comfortable vanguard isn’t solidarity. It isn’t horror. It is a frantic, desperate search for the hidden hand of the CIA.

The Erasure of Agency

Hickory frames the current carnage not as an internal Iranian rupture, but as a move by ‘the US and Israel’ to install a ‘puppet’ regime. Human Leadership Synergy-Bot, in the comments, doubles down on this grotesque simplification, reducing 88 million complex, modern Iranians to mere historical re-enactors of the 1953 coup against Mossadegh.

This worldview, disguised as sophisticated ‘anti-imperialism’, is in fact deeply patronising. It operates on a racist premise: that non-Western people are incapable of authentic political agency. In this framework, Iranians are not protagonists in their own history; they are NPCs in a grand American video game. (A far too real GTA, perhaps?) They are either helpless victims or brainwashed dupes of Western intelligence. They cannot possibly just hate their own government enough to die fighting it.

Only the West has agency. Only the West can act. Everyone else is just reacting to the omnipotent puppet masters in Washington.

The Zombie Politics of 1953

Synergy-Bot’s response is archetypal of this intellectual laziness. ‘It’s history repeating’, she cries, invoking the 1953 coup as an all-purpose trump card to invalidate present reality.

Let us be clear: The 1953 coup was a crime that devastated Iranian democracy. Western imperialism is real, historical, and bloody. But weaponising that history to delegitimise the agency of a 20-year-old woman taking off her hijab in front of an armed militia in 2026 is morally bankrupt.

It is an intellectual sleight of hand that says: ‘Because America and Britain did bad things then, the Mullahs can’t really be the problem now.’ It is a zombie politics that prefers the comfortable clarity of seventy-year-old grievances over the messy, lethal reality of today. It is the same fascistic tendency we see in our own domestic politics, where any dissent that doesn’t fit the approved narrative is immediately labelled ‘misinformation’ or ‘foreign interference’ to justify its suppression.

The Double-Edged Hypocrisy

Perhaps the most delicious and devastating irony is that these self-described ‘human leadership activists’ are using the very freedoms they claim are a sham to protect a regime that is currently hanging people for exercising them.

The Synergy-Bot laments that our ‘privileged comfort’ is a lie, yet she enjoys the ultimate luxury: the right to be a contrarian without consequence. She can sit in a London or New York coffee shop and post dangerous takes that align perfectly with the propaganda of a theocracy. She will face no internal war for her dissent; she won’t have her internet cut off; she won’t have her family threatened; she won’t be ‘disappeared’ into Evin prison for her LinkedIn activity.

There is a staggering lack of self-awareness in using a platform protected by liberal democratic norms to argue that those same norms are merely weaponised tools of the empire when others die to attain them. It’s a form of intellectual stolen valour. They wrap themselves in the aesthetic of the ‘rebel’ while acting as the digital janitors for a regime that is scrubbing the blood of real rebels off the streets.

But the hypocrisy of their safe-space dissent is only half the story; the real tragedy is how their ‘enlightened’ scepticism serves as the perfect camouflage for state-sponsored murder. In their desperate attempt to avoid being ‘brainwashed’ by Western media narratives, they have turned themselves into apologists for one of the most repressive regimes on earth.

When the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gets on state television and screams that the protesters are Zionist agents, American stooges, and terrorists, Hickory and Synergy-Bot nod along from their ergonomic office chairs and say, ‘Well, actually, his geopolitical analysis is sound.’

They are so obsessed with denying the West a win that they are willing to throw millions of suffering Iranians under the bus of their ideological purity. They see the potential return of a flawed Pahlavi monarchy as a fate worse than the current reality of mass executions, gender apartheid, and economic ruin. It’s easy to hold that opinion when you aren’t the one being led to the gallows.

A Callous Abstraction

This is not solidarity. It is callous abstraction. It treats real human beings bleeding out on concrete as mere pawns on a geopolitical chessboard where the only moves that matter are our own.

True internationalism doesn’t require you to love Western foreign policy. But it does demand that you stop centring yourself and your own historical hang-ups when other people are dying. When people rise up against tyranny, the decent human response is to listen to them, not to lecture them about how they are actually unwitting tools of the Pentagon.

It’s time for the flag-waving Left to wake up: Not everything in the world is about us. Sometimes, a revolution is just a revolution.