History will remember those who supported Iran in the West as fascists - opinion

To any future historian reading this: begin by reversing the labels. That is the only way this period will make sense.

The antifascists policed speech. The antiracists sorted people by race. The fact-checkers became propagandists. The peacemakers found their peace by supporting violent regimes. Every name was the opposite of what it really was.

Once you understand that inversion, you can understand why so many self-declared champions of human rights could not recognize tyranny when it wrapped itself in anti-Western slogans.

They could not say: good riddance.

Instead, they found ways to blame the West. Anything to avoid naming the regime for what it is.

Hasan Piker put on a fake Iranian accent to mock the death toll and dismissed tens of thousands of dead protesters as exaggerated propaganda. New York's socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani called it "an illegal war of aggression." Not a word about the regime that had massacred its own people weeks earlier. Ilhan Omar said America "loves to strike Muslim countries," turning the destruction of a theocratic killing machine into an accusation of bigotry.

Masih Alinejad, the Iranian journalist who has spent her life fighting the regime these people cannot bring themselves to name, responded to Omar with a letter from a woman wounded by IRGC bullets. The letter asked a simple question none of them will ever answer: where was your outrage when the regime was waging war on its own people? Where were your protests when women were being blinded and teenagers were being hanged?

Nowhere. Their outrage was never about victims. It was about who was holding the gun. When a Western democracy pulls the trigger, they have the condemnations ready. When the IRGC does it, suddenly everything is complicated and nuanced.

When Khamenei died, Iranians poured into the streets. Not to mourn. To celebrate. In cities across the country, people danced and chanted "Death to Khamenei." Not American agents. Not Israeli assets. Just people who had lived under a theocratic dictatorship their entire lives and could not contain their relief that it might finally be ending.

The IRGC opened fire on them and shut off the Internet. Again.

Ask yourself how long it would take these same people to call that what it is if a Western government did it. Seconds. For the IRGC, not a single word.

That is moral asymmetry. A reflex, trained over decades, that sorts the world's atrocities into two categories: the ones that count and the ones that don't. If America did it, it counts. If Israel did it, it counts double. If the IRGC did it while waving an anti-Western banner, it doesn't count at all.

This is not new. Churchill was called reckless, warmongering, and dangerous. He was hated by the respectable consensus of his time. It was very popular to say no to war with Nazi Germany.

Western intellectuals toured the Soviet Union and saw paradise. They knew about the prisons. They knew about the purges. They just didn't care, because the ideology opposed the right enemies.

They called those people useful idiots. The useful idiots of our time are worse because they have less excuses. The IRGC's crimes are public record, documented and designated by twenty-seven European democracies.

But the instinct is the same. If a regime defines itself against the West, it enters a protected moral category. Its repression becomes context. Its victims become footnotes. Its militias become "resistance." Every so-called peace activist turns out to be an apologist for authoritarianism, and that has been true for as long as any of us have been alive.

But history always catches up: there was a totalitarian system, and it had to be confronted. Israel and America saw it. A regime that has terrorized its own people for nearly half a century. Proxy armies across a region. A nuclear weapon within reach. They acted. The ayatollah is dead. The IRGC's command structure is shattered. And Iranians, the actual people, the ones the Western left claims to care about, danced in the streets.

History will not remember this as aggression. It will remember it as overdue.

The antifascists defended authoritarian power, so long as it humiliated their own societies. The peacemakers excused violence, so long as it was aimed outward. The champions of the oppressed went mute the moment the oppressor checked the right ideological boxes.

History is patient. It has seen this before.

And when it looks back on this moment, it will remember who could see tyranny clearly.

And who chose not to.