The Weaponisation of Diaspora Psychopathy

As Donald J. Trump, commander-in-chief of the American Empire and known associate of the child-sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, continues to ravage communities and people across the world; this time by starting an utterly unnecessary and deeply unpopular war with Iran at the behest of Israel, the efforts to justify his latest act of barbarity – which has already upended the lives of millions in Iran, Lebanon, and beyond – have been handed over to those who, without fail, always find ways to rationalise the irrational: segments of the Iranian diaspora.

This is not new, nor is it unique to Iranians abroad. Whenever the US and its Western allies want to wage an imperialist war of aggression, neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists alike routinely parade the most extremist elements within diaspora communities from adversarial countries to justify their actions. From the United States’s enduring blockade against Cuba, which grows more cruel every day, to Trump’s illegal kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, the communities most vocally championing these atrocities – and being centred by the media – have been the Cuban and Venezuelan diasporas in Miami. We are once again seeing the same playbook in action, now with the most radical Iranians based in Los Angeles and beyond.

Their voices, no matter how anti-intellectual or fringe, are plastered across the media and parroted endlessly, shaping and framing the US’s wars – in the case of Iran, Israel’s war – as humanitarian and just, rather than what they are: tyrannous, exploitative, and illegal. And their perspectives, rooted in privilege and often utterly psychotic, have been effective at confusing scores of people, clouding the judgments of many, including those who are well-intentioned but politically and historically illiterate. So, it is necessary to cut to the core of, and be wary of, one of empire’s enduring tactics to manufacture consent for its neo-colonial crimes: weaponising diaspora communities.

Diaspora Psychopathy

On March 1, shortly after the United States and Israel began carpet bombing Iran, the so-called Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad went on CNN to gleefully celebrate the killing of hundreds of civilians in her country. A clip from that interview has since gone viral, in part because of its sheer lunacy. “This is a Berlin Wall moment. Let’s tear this wall down; then America will be safe without the Islamic Republic,” she exclaims, before swiftly following it up with: “I love America. I love Iran.” From the various reactions to this, perhaps the most astute observation was that of Jacobin writer Branko Marcetic, who wrote of the exchange: “This is a uniquely American type of immigrant you won’t find anywhere else: the person whose life’s work & entire reason for coming is having the US bomb their country.”

This interview is not isolated. All across the Western corporate media – from US-based channels like Fox and CNN, to those across the Atlantic, like Sky News and DW – analysis surrounding another illegal war, which will have unforeseen consequences that will reverberate in every corner of the world, has been handed over almost entirely to self-proclaimed Iranian activists, most of whom lack any political, military, or academic expertise, and all of whom passionately speak about how happy they are that the US bombing is their country – usually citing the need to dismantle the Iranian government because it kills and tortures its own citizens. Of course, while they explain how the cruelty of Iran’s theocratic regime justifies regime change, they don’t speak about the 165 girls killed by Israel and the US in a school in Minab. Nor are they asked about it, which may just be a good thing, because I shudder at the kind of explanations they may come up with to justify the targeted killing of children, live on television.

Move over to social media, though, and you no longer need to wonder how someone may make excuses for the deliberate killing of children in their own homeland. Across Twitter and Instagram, various accounts, plenty of which are being run by diaspora Iranians, claim that the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) bombed the school, even after this was debunked. It is a curious claim to make when Israel, with the West’s support, and not Iran, has spent the last two years habitually blowing up schools and hospitals in Gaza. This pathetic deflection is usually coupled with the weaponisation of the thousands of Iranians killed in the recent waves of protests, with wildly varying, usually unsubstantiated figures, which I’ve seen go up to 80,000 depending on the gravity of the atrocities they’re deployed as a shield to deflect from. The sacrifices of Iranian protestors, killed for seeking a better and freer future, are being denigrated to serve the colonial project of Greater Israel.

It’s clear that no matter what happens in the coming days – how many more schools or hospitals Israel and the US destroy; or indeed whether or not Iran’s government falls – these people will find ways to rationalise and justify any act of savagery, including those worse than the crimes committed by Iran’s ruthless theocratic government, which is why they’re boosted by Elon Musk and welcomed by the Murdoch and Ellison press.

Understanding Right-Wing Diaspora Politics

Since the US and Israel’s war on Iran began, the focus has centred around the feelings of certain people within the Iranian diaspora, however, such sentiment is not limited to Iranian Americans; as Marcetic suggests, it is characteristic of many immigrants based in the US. For another example, we need only look towards Cuban Americans.

On January 29, shortly before Trump placed Iran in his crosshairs, the American despot issued an executive order threatening tariffs on any country that supplies oil directly or indirectly to Cuba. This has resulted in dire, apocalyptic conditions on the island, which have prevented Cuban society from functioning. People are starving. Yet many Cuban Americans support this madness absolutely. For them, people starving is a price worth paying to be free from the brutal rule of a supposedly oppressive government.

Ask them why this price is worth paying, though, and they’ll say that the island languishes in poverty, while refusing to accept that its destitution is a direct consequence of the embargo they champion – an illegal blockade historically supported by only two states: the US and Israel. They advocate for the blockade, and then say it is weaponised by the Cuban government to hide its incompetence. This lunacy is regularly on display in Instagram comments, news broadcasts, and even the posts of Cuban American pop stars. It is encapsulated by a Fidel Castro quote: “You strangle us for forty years and then criticise us for the way we breathe.”

It is often the same story when you look at the opinions of many Venezuelans, South Africans, or Brazilians – really, immigrants from any country presently considered adversarial by the State Department – in the US and broader diaspora. The question then is: why do so many in the diaspora actually harbour such unhinged views? Why are so many the way they are? To understand, especially in the Cuban context, but generally, too, one must look at how they end up in the United States.

Many Cubans who fled to the US did so in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. Most of those who left were privileged landowners who enjoyed the profits of privatised Cuban sugar plantations, which Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government seized and nationalised. These exiles were welcomed by the US as a matter of policy – and have continued to be welcomed despite growing anti-immigrant sentiments in the coming decades – and were also deployed in the failed Bay of Pigs plot to overthrow the Cuban Revolution in 1961. Most of them were beneficiaries of a deeply exploitative system of neoliberalism and crony capitalism, which they want to see Cuba return to.

The story is not dissimilar for the sizable diaspora communities from Iran, many of whom left in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and were welcomed by the West, were the Country’s pre-revolutionary elites: former state officials, industrial capitalists, and wealthy landowners. It is the same story with Venezuelan exiles, as well as those from many other countries. In fact, there remain Vietnamese immigrants in the US, many of whom came to the so-called land of the free from South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, who continue to resent Ho Chi Minh, even as many Americans now view him favourably. Many still refer to April 30, 1975, Vietnam’s Liberation Day, or, as it is known in the US, The Fall of Saigon, as Black Friday or “the day the country was lost”. Their views are shaped by their personal histories and experiences, and are in no way reflective of the majority or even plurality of those who live in their countries of origin. Reflecting on this is an important lesson in the intersection between imperialism and class interests.

However, it is crucial also to remember that not everyone in these diasporas thinks in the same way. There are millions of people from these countries living in the US, and they all have diverse political views shaped by their experiences and circumstances. They are not monoliths. A recent poll by the National Iranian American Council found that half of all polled Iranian Americans opposed war on Iran, a figure that will only increase in coming weeks because of the brutal, lasting consequences this war will have on those living in Iran.

The reason it seems like the only thing all Cubans and Iranians want is for the US to come to their countries’ rescue – after ravaging them with sanctions and destabilisation – by bombing them is because that is exactly what the State Department and CIA, and the stenographers for US imperial foreign policy in the corporate media, want you to think. The views of anti-imperialist Cubans and Iranians are never given a platform. Cuban journalist Liz Oliva Fernandéz made this point on the Chapo Trap House podcast recently, asking how many of the Cuban Americans brought on to the corporate media to discuss the island and the six-decade-long embargo it has been subjected to look like her? Oliva Fernandéz is, like hundreds of thousands from Cuba, a Black woman.

And it must be noted, too, that in recent years, there have been waves of migrants from many of these countries, notably Cuba, emigrating to the US as a consequence of instability and a lack of opportunity. Many of these newer immigrants hold a deeper affection for their homelands than their predecessors; yet it is not their perspectives that appear on news channels, never mind those of the Cubans, Venezuelans, or Iranians on the ground – for they do not uncritically parrot what the US State Department says.

So, the sole purpose of deploying this twisted, flawed interpretation of standpoint epistemology is to give imperialism a humanitarian cover. It is camouflage that remains valuable to war hawks across the US political spectrum and the military-industrial complex, even if Trump may not care very much about it.

Rejecting This Trap

Regardless of what the English-speaking and financially well-off diaspora thinks and how that is weaponised, though, the most important takeaway from the recent imperial actions in Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran is that they show us an inherent flaw in the liberal, imperial interpretation of identity politics. This cynical “listen to what the people want” framing traps swaths of people into rationalising, if not supporting, crimes that wreak havoc in the Global South, supported only by the most extreme segments of overseas communities, many of whom are completely detached from the reality “back home”. The assertion that Reza Pahlavi, son of the brutal Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who, through his secret police SAVAK, tortured and murdered thousands of the Shah’s opponents with ghastly methods including electric shock, whipping, beating, and rape, would be welcomed by all Iranians is just one example of that.

These dishonest invocations of identity politics deflect from the gross crimes being committed; from UNESCO sites being destroyed; from neighbourhoods being flattened; from tens of thousands being forced to leave their homes at a moment’s notice, perhaps never to return; from the principle of sovereignty, which is the cornerstone of our so-called age of nations, being violated.

We must not fall victim to the weaponisation of diaspora psychopathy wielded so flagrantly by the agents of empire. This psychopathy is not representative of the multi-faceted, nuanced views and desires held by diaspora communities, much less of those suffering in their homelands. And it is certainly not representative of the interests or desires of those being killed in a war they had no say in.

Instead, we must always arrive at our conclusions by focusing on facts, analysis, principles, and history, and by researching and reading extensively. And if those conclusions allow us to rationalise children being blown up in schools, or to believe that an apartheid state that has committed genocide wants to liberate Iranian women, then there is no hope left for us.

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