Politics, People and Power :

People with left-wing politics do not have the same luxury that the extreme fascist right often appears to have: the luxury of reducing the world to a single motivating idea and acting from that alone. Their position is often more demanding, more contradictory, and far less emotionally convenient. They are required to hold complexity where others embrace simplicity, to think critically where others react instinctively, and to remain morally consistent in situations that offer no clean answers.

This burden becomes especially visible in moments of war and geopolitical conflict, where the moral tension is not simply opposition to war in the abstract, but opposition to war against regimes that are not supported in the first place. A person may strongly oppose authoritarian governments—whether in Iran, Iraq, Libya, or elsewhere—and reject their repression, including their treatment of women, minorities, and political dissidents. At the same time, they may also be confronted with the actions of their own governments: military interventions, sanctions, and policies that inflict widespread suffering on civilian populations. This creates an uncomfortable but necessary duality: it must be possible to say, at the same time, that a regime, to put it mildly, is objectionable and that bombing it is also objectionable. The challenge is not choosing one side over the other, but recognizing that both can be wrong at the same time. This is not a contradiction. It is a commitment to principles over convenience.

The right often does not present itself as facing the same dilemma. Its narratives are frequently built on exclusion, fear, and reduction. They offer clarity at the cost of truth. Hatred simplifies the world. But any politics rooted in justice cannot afford that simplification. It must grapple with nuance, even when nuance is politically disadvantageous.

This is why the responsibility of people in the West is so specific. They cannot directly reshape the internal politics of other countries, but they are implicated in the external pressures placed upon them. 

Sanctions that impoverish populations while strengthening ruling elites, and wars that destroy societies under the pretext of liberation, are actions carried out in their name. In Iran, sanctions have not only squeezed ordinary people through inflation, currency collapse, and loss of livelihoods—they have also expanded the power of regime-linked networks and smugglers. As formal trade channels close, informal and illicit routes controlled by actors tied to the state, particularly security institutions, become more profitable and central to the economy. Oil, fuel, goods, and money move through opaque systems that benefit insiders, while the wider population is pushed into precarity. The paradox is clear: the harsher the external pressure, the more it consolidates the very structures it aims to weaken, enriching regime smugglers while leaving society poorer and less able to challenge power from within—while war further entrenches this dynamic. It disrupts daily life at the most basic level, from access to healthcare and education to the stability of jobs and income. For ordinary people, war is not an abstract geopolitical event but a constant source of fear, loss, and long-term uncertainty that reshapes entire communities. When such wars are imposed by powerful actors like Israel and the United States—with a history and motives that many view as questionable or inconsistent—the sense of injustice deepens, making the human impact even more severe and harder to justify or accept.

Opposing them is not an endorsement of the regimes they target; it is a refusal to participate in collective harm. Ultimately, the task is not to resolve complexity but to endure it: to remain consistent in opposing injustice, regardless of its source; to resist the temptation of easy answers; and to accept that ethical clarity often requires holding multiple uncomfortable truths at once.