A Westerner’s denial is not just “a denial.”
A westerner’s denial is not just “a denial.” It’s a legitimization and a sign-off on the regime’s killing machine to continue. It’s tricky to explain, but I’ll try my best. The West is the center of attention for the world: the US, UN, the EU, the media, and western citizens. They are (kinda) privileged, and most other countries see them as models, as holders of discourse, as some sort of a privileged and more factual fact. Some sort of a truer True.
Not only the Islamic Republic regime but many other dictators and regimes try to appeal to the West, buy into their opinions, media, and so on, to make them speak the words that can be used for coloring more legitimacy and legitimization on a wider scale globally.
Get Ziya Sadr’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
How do we Iranians claim this?
Well, we had to scream at the top of our lungs to make prisoners’ names be known to the world so they wouldn’t be hanged by the regime, and it worked many times. Once we got westerners on our side, the regime pulled back to reduce their damage to their internal and foreign legitimacy posture.
Even I myself was helped by the Twitter storms shouting my name to get me out of the regime’s prison. I remember my interrogator coming to my cell, taking me to make a forced phone call to my family, asking them to stop the Twitter storm.
We raised our voices so loud that finally, and after decades of terror, the EU designated the IRGC as terrorists. If it wasn’t for this damage to the regime’s legitimacy that they started with the killings and the people’s continuous cries, it wouldn’t have happened.
Now, you, as a Westerner, the next time you use your words, consider that your discourse, maybe not explicitly but, believe me, very very directly provides the killing machine legitimacy and enables them to carry on with their atrocities, unbothered and without an obstacle. We’ve been in this for decades. we’ve seen how they bring up a westerner’s tweets or interviews or whatever you lay out there, and they show it on the regime’s TV (propaganda machine) as an effort to build up legitimacy for calling the protesters Mossad or CIA, or whatever suits their case, to 1) enrage their hardline supporters more and strengthen their killing appetite and 2) legitimize their killings on the street for both internal and global spectators.
So next time you throw out words, remember that these words may be used to kill people while you could have used them to rescue people.
