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    • Tag: resistance

    • “Don’t Woman Life Freedom Us, You Murderers!”

      “Women, Life, Freedom” against the War. A Statement against Genocidal Israel and the Repressive Islamic Republic, 23. Juni 2025, https://de.crimethinc.com/2025/06/23/women-life-freedom-against-the-war-a-statement-against-genocidal-israel-and-the-repressive-islamic-republic.

      It has already been six weeks: In the early hours of June 13, 2025, Israel launched an attack on Tehran in violation of international law. Iran struck back within hours, firing missiles at dozens of military installations in Israel. The Israeli government justified the war by claiming that Iran was on the verge of completing a nuclear bomb – an unsubstantiated claim that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been repeating since 1992. Nine days later, the US officially entered the war on Israel’s side. According to the US-based human rights organization Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRANA), nearly 1,000 people were killed and over 3,500 injured in the Israeli attacks. In Iran’s attacks on Israel, 29 Israelis were killed and 172 injured. After twelve days, the war was temporarily ended with a ceasefire initiated by the US.

      We share here a statement by the collective Roja, which was originally published in Farsi on June 16 and translated into English a week later by the decentralized network CrimethInc. It is now available in many other languages, too. Roja is an independent internationalist collective of Kurdish, Afghan (Hazara), and Iranian feminists, based in Paris, that was founded in 2022 in response to the Women, Life, Freedom protests in Iran.

      The statement embeds the events of the war in the context of recent Iranian history, critically assesses the military interventions in the “War on Terror,” such as in Afghanistan and Iraq, and insists that there is no such thing as a “just” war or justified bombing. With analytical clarity, Roja takes a stand against attempts at discursive appropriation from all sides. In the discussion about the so-called Twelve-Day War, supporters of the alleged “preemptive strike” who push the narrative of Israel’s self-defense and “regime change” in Iran are pitted against those who stylize the Islamic regime as an anti-imperialist resistance force to protect the Muslim peoples from Western superpowers. While monarchist groups justify civilian casualties as acceptable collateral damage in the fight against the Islamic regime, the regime deliberately exploits the situation to repress political opponents and marginalized groups.

      Roja condemns Israel’s war and the US intervention just as strongly as it condemns the patriarchal-repressive regime of the Islamic Republic: “Genocidal imperialist projects will never liberate us, nor will patriarchal nationalist regimes protect us.” It recognizes that Israel’s war, which was supposedly directed only against Iranian nuclear facilities and regime officials, attacks the entire population of Iran and also and foremost the principles and actors of the women, life, freedom protests. In addition, it criticizes those who cannot differentiate between grassroots resistance movements and the actions of a state power, thereby rendering invisible decades of self-organization of the working class, to give one example.

      The collective does not relativize, but rather offers differentiated criticism of the governments of both countries: the Israeli government, which, according to renowned experts and human rights organizations, is currently committing genocide in Gaza and has been denying Palestinians self-determination for decades; and the Iranian government, which has been oppressing, persecuting, and executing opposition members, ethnic minorities, women, and many others for decades. Iran, Roja demands, must not be turned into a second Libya through external intervention, nor must it become the scene of renewed mass executions by the Islamic regime, as in the summer of 1988.

      By showing solidarity with grassroots resistance movements “from Kabul to Tehran, from Kurdistan to Palestine, from Ahvaz to Tabriz, from Balochistan to Syria and Lebanon,” the collective rejects all attempts to legitimize state warfare and external regime change efforts. Only resistance movements from below can achieve long-term change through political means.

      ↗ „https://de.crimethinc.com/2025/06/23/women-life-freedom-against-the-war-a-statement-against-genocidal-israel-and-the-repressive-islamic-republic.

    • From bystander to accomplice

      Sarah Schulman: The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, New York (Penguin Random House) 2025, 320 pp.

      The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity is the latest book by Sarah Schulman, a US writer, educator, and activist, perhaps best known to the wider public for her monumental oral history of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Part political memoir, part manual, the book offers nuanced reflections on the practice of solidarity and features some highly quotable definitions such as: “Solidarity is the essential human process of recognizing that other people are real and their experiences matter,” and “Solidarity is the action behind the revelation that each of us, individually, are not the only people with dreams.” 

      While the book’s focus is on solidarity Palestine (a cause Schulman has been involved in since 2009), the author also draws on her broader activist, artistic, and teaching work, offering examples of solidarity in action, from clandestine reproductive rights activism to informal support groups formed within the exclusionary spaces of New York’s theater scene. Beyond her own experiences, Schulman finds valuable lessons in the work of Vivian Gornick, Wilmette Brown, and Jean Genet, among others.

      Embracing its inherent messiness, Schulman convincingly argues that ”solidarity is possible without ideological purity, without 100 percent didacticism of motive, and yet despite contradictions, it can still be important, evolve, and have an impact.” But perhaps the most important wisdom Schulman offers — rooted in decades of organizing and heartbreak — is her honest and lucid acknowledgment of the difficulty and necessity of coalition politics in solidarity work: “There is an unease in coalition because we sacrifice the very specific personal politics that none of us can achieve alone, for a more compromised collective. But without that flexibility, no movement building would be able to take place. It is the change, the peace, and the justice we seek that are more important than being right in our living rooms.” 

      ↗ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/771411/the-fantasy-and-necessity-of-solidarity-by-sarah-schulman/