The United States and Israel have launched a major military attack against Iran, triggering retaliation across the region and plunging the country into war. These strikes came even as nuclear negotiations between Washington and Tehran were progressing, raising questions about why diplomacy gave way to force so abruptly. The conflict has already cost civilian lives — including Iranian schoolchildren — and has spread beyond Iran’s borders.

Last year, I warned that allowing Israel to act with impunity in the region would lead to broader and more devastating consequences. That warning has now come to pass. What comes next is uncertain. What is clear, however, is that we must resist the idea that only two paths lie ahead.

Before this invasion, Iran was already in crisis. The rial had plummeted, and inflation had surged, fueled in part by Western sanctions. What began as demonstrations over collapsing currency values and rising costs of living expanded into broader unrest against the political system. Shopkeepers, women, students, and many others took to the streets demanding economic justice, basic freedoms, and an end to government repression.

These voices do not disappear in wartime. But war reshapes the terrain on which they struggle. War narrows political space and heightens repression, burying legitimate demands beneath the language of national emergency.

In other words, war does not resolve Iran’s internal political crisis. It intensifies it. It strengthens hardliners and collapses political space at the very moment protesters need the greatest room to breathe. If the stated goal is freedom for Iranians, this war moves in the opposite direction.

Iran has been here before — caught between internal revolt and external intervention. That tension has shaped much of the country’s modern history.

In 1979, a broad coalition of workers, students, feminists, socialists, and Islamists rose up to overthrow the Shah. What followed was not pluralistic democracy but the consolidation of power by one faction that criminalized dissent and eliminated its former allies, giving rise to the Islamic Republic. The Iran-Iraq war only accelerated this consolidation of power. The narrowing of political space reshaped Iranian society and contributed to the departure of millions.

Those of us who descend from the leftists that the revolution imprisoned, exiled, and executed, carry that history with us. We were raised on stories of a revolution whose emancipatory potential was ultimately usurped. That inheritance demands vigilance.

The lesson is not that revolution is futile. It is that authoritarianism thrives in moments of violence and instability. The collapse of a regime does not automatically produce democracy. Liberation movements can be co-opted. Broad coalitions can harden into singular authority. The language of freedom can be weaponized to justify new forms of oppression. 

This is what makes this moment so fraught.

Within parts of the diaspora community, there is a troubling strain of authoritarian nostalgia — a romanticization of a monarchy that itself was repressive. In recent years, some of its most visible advocates have aligned themselves with Christian nationalists in the United States, hardline Zionists, and other segments of the far-right. Their rhetoric invokes civilizational myths of Persian exceptionalism and Aryan lineage — narratives that mirror ethnonationalist frameworks elsewhere, where identity and hierarchy are used to justify political dominance.

At the same time, the United States and Israel have clear geopolitical interests in weakening or toppling the Islamic Republic, even as their actions are publicly framed as solidarity with Iranian protesters. These convergences are not incidental. They reveal how easily the language of liberation can be mobilized in service of militarized geopolitical agendas.

On one side stands theocratic authoritarianism. On the other, militarized ethnonationalism dressed up as rescue. Neither offers democracy or pluralism. Neither offers safety for ordinary people. Despite what some folks may want to suggest, neither choices are particularly good.  How change is pursued matters as much as the change itself.

If we genuinely support Iranian self-determination, we must refuse the lie that violence is a shortcut to liberation. The first demand must be to end this war, which has the potential of becoming a much larger and deadly global conflict. 

Solidarity means centering those most affected. It means listening to grassroots organizers, labour activists, feminists, students, and ethnic minorities inside Iran rather than projecting agendas from abroad. It means defending civilian life first and foremost.

Democracy requires pluralism, freedom of speech, and political contestation — not unity through violence or repression. We have seen what happens when broad movements collapse into a single voice claiming exclusive legitimacy. Iranians cannot endure another half-century of authoritarianism under a different name.

Those of us shaped by a leftist political inheritance have a particular responsibility in this moment. Our tradition teaches us to oppose fascism in all its forms — whether cloaked in religious authority, nationalist mythology, or imperial dominance. It teaches us that Khamenei, Trump, and Netanyahu are not moral opposites simply because they denounce one another. They represent similar projects of power, each willing to sacrifice human rights for their broader ideological ambitions. And it insists that anti-imperialism and anti-authoritarianism must stand together, because abandoning one strengthens the other.

This is a more nuanced position and, I lament, a more difficult one to hold. In a Manichaean world of sound bites, of “us” versus “them,” we have to remember who “we” are, and who “they” represent, lest we become pawns in someone’s twisted game.

Those who participated in the 1979 revolution believed they were building something expansive. They marched because they envisioned a future free from repression. Many paid dearly when that horizon narrowed — as did the nation itself.

If this is another turning point, then our responsibility is to ensure that whatever comes next does not silence the very voices it claims to liberate. That the mistakes of the past aren’t repeated under new banners. 

Too many Iranians have already been killed under the Islamic Republic. Their deaths must not become the pretext for greater bloodshed and another authoritarian order. Only genuine political freedom — plural, contested, and self-determined — will honour them.

Jasmine Ramze Rezaee is located in Toronto where she writes about justice and emancipatory politics.