NHL releases the 2025-26 schedule, the last 82-game season before new CBA increases it to 84
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Bielefeld (Allemagne) : Free Maja! Le bureau du Procureur attaqué
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"de.indymedia.org / lundi 14 juillet 2025 Dans nos pensées, nous sommes beaucoup aux côtés de Maja, en ce moment. Pour donner une petite forme d’expression à notre soutien à Maja, dans la nuit du 13 au 14 juillet, nous avons … Continuer la lecture →"

Against Imperial Memory: The “Long War” on Iran

We live in a moment where critique risks flattening into instinct, where binaries do not merely polarize, but offer the illusion of coherence. Liberal humanism and conservative militarism, in their supposed opposition, often co-produce a world where historical struggle collapses into media soundbites, and moral clarity becomes a function of narrative simplification. Events like October 7 are swiftly severed from their historical contexts, recast not as echoes of long-standing structural violence but as ruptures demanding immediate condemnation, stripped of their genealogies and folded neatly into the grammar of spectacle.

In the shadow of the latest escalation, and before the next inevitable one, this strategic amnesia is no longer merely a failure of history, but a calculated act of memory-taming: a theft of the past, curated by those determined to keep its meaning sterile, singular, and useful only for our despair and compliance. To position ourselves meaningfully within this engineered reality, we must first revive the memory that charts the future we seek.

Within this logic of compression, a documentary like Al-Jazeera’s Long War begins its historical narrative. Released two years ago, the film exemplifies the framing dictated by Western powers portrayed by oil-funded outlets: that Iran’s antagonism toward the West begins with the 1979 Revolution, as though British gunboats, oil concessions, and CIA coups had not already laid the groundwork long before Khomeini’s sermons.

But revolutions are rarely the origin of antagonism. They are the breaking points of accumulated struggle. Iran’s 20th century, as historian Ervand Abrahamian shows in Iran Between Two Revolutions, was riddled with unresolved tensions over foreign interference, most visibly in the oil economy. The 1901 oil concession, granted during the late Qajar era, gave Britain near-total control over Iran’s oil resources, directly alienating the very social forces that would later fuel widespread resistance: the bazaar merchants, the clerical establishment, and the emerging professional class.

The Tobacco Protest of 1891–92 was one such expression. Not yet a revolution, but more than dissent, it marked one of the earliest moments when foreign control was met with mass refusal. Sparked by a royal concession granting the British monopoly over Iran’s tobacco trade, the protest quickly escalated into a nationwide boycott. A fatwa by Mirza Hasan Shirazi declaring tobacco use haram shut down consumption across the country, forcing the Shah to cancel the deal. In this context, the fatwa becomes not merely a religious ruling but a mobilization of the sacred against the infrastructural. Such a moment resists easy categorization and thus sits uneasily with liberal sensibilities, because here, resistance arrives not through policy briefs but through a theological injunction that suspends imperial aggression. Indeed, the historical fusion of religion and politics in this region, and its transformations, demand an analytical framework that transcends imported frameworks of thought, which often flatten, or even actively obscure, local realities.

The Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11 continued this refusal of passive sovereignty. It was as much a revolt against monarchical arbitrariness as against the way imperial power was smuggled in through the language of “development” and reform. The demand for a parliament (Majles) and national control over concessions signaled a profound desire for representation, and crucially, marked a pivotal turn: the attempt to institutionalize resistance and translate it into durable political architecture. The revolution’s motto, that the country was being “sold to the British” and that foreign economic policies were “destroying Iran’s economy”, spoke directly to the need to empower the Majles with the final say over concessions.

In 1953, the coup against Mohammad Mossadegh brought the question of imperial authorship back to the surface. Mossadegh, who despite leading a secular, democratically elected government, did not conform to the West’s prescribed mold. When he moved to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), Britain responded with a global boycott and lobbied the United States to intervene. Playing on Cold War anxieties, they cited the growing influence of the communist Tudeh Party, whose anti-imperialist platform resonated deeply with a population long disaffected by foreign control. The CIA and MI6, through Operation Ajax and Operation Boot, orchestrated the coup that reinstated the Shah and dismantled the broad-based movement that had rallied around Mossadegh. The arrests, censorship, and violence that followed accumulated into what would eventually erupt in 1979.

The explicit targeting of “Westoxification” (Gharbzadegi) became a central pillar of this new ideological infrastructure, framing the incoming revolution not merely as a domestic uprising but as a comprehensive reassertion of Iranian sovereignty against global imperial designs

What followed the coup was not merely a reinstatement of the Shah, but a full-scale US-engineered reordering of the Iranian state. The Shah’s regime became the linchpin of a new imperial logic: one that fused modernization with repression, economic growth with deepening inequality, and military buildup with political suffocation. US advisers flowed into Tehran alongside arms deals and development plans. SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, was trained and equipped by the CIA and Mossad, tasked with rooting out dissent, especially from the left and the religious opposition. The countryside was remade under the banner of land reform, a reform largely designed to modernize agrarian structures rather than truly empower the peasantry, leading to significant rural displacement. Oil wealth also flowed disproportionately into state coffers, consolidating the regime’s power and enriching its elite. Iran was rendered both a marketplace for US capital and a garrison for regional containment.

The repressed memory of Mossadegh’s nationalization, however, persisted beneath the surface, feeding underground organizing, clandestine literature, and a growing sense that development without dignity was just another form of subjugation. This antagonism, forged in decades of foreign interference and internal repression, began to coalesce into organized networks. From student cells in universities to religious circles within the bazaars and mosques, and even among disaffected elements of the military, a diverse constellation of groups, often drawing on both modern nationalist and Shia revolutionary thought, systematically articulated a rejection of Western dominance. This institutionalization was not uniform; it manifested in the development of a shared lexicon of defiance, the forging of clandestine communication channels, and the construction of parallel social and political structures designed to counter the Shah’s regime and its perceived foreign backing. The explicit targeting of “Westoxification” (Gharbzadegi) became a central pillar of this new ideological infrastructure, framing the incoming revolution not merely as a domestic uprising but as a comprehensive reassertion of Iranian sovereignty against global imperial designs, and crucially, as a distinctive political imagination. It heralded a new model of power structure, specifically the innovative infusion of the modern “state” or “republican” form with Islamic governance, a synthesis previously unprecedented at such scale. Despite its inherent contradictions, this foundational shift represents a unique turning point in the region’s history, and the last successful revolution to overthrow a monarchy and fundamentally reconfigure its political system. The Republic did not invent anti-imperialist legitimacy; it inherited, translated, and institutionalized it. As Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi argues, Iranian nationalism was not born in rejection of progress, but as a counter-vision of modernity forged under the pressure of foreign domination. The Republic inherited this vision, repurposing it through the rhetoric of resistance. This legacy helps explain not only the regime’s ideological posture but also the broader sense of solidarity and nationalism displayed by the Iranian people, including those who oppose the regime, during the recent US-backed Israeli war.

It is worth noting that during the decades of US-backed modernization in Iran, Gulf monarchies were being fastened into a parallel imperial order, an arrangement of outsourced sovereignty: their external security ensured, their oil flowed, and their obedience guaranteed. While the Shah styled himself as the Gulf’s policeman, the monarchies performed submission as pragmatism, normalizing foreign presence through soft diplomacy and petro-dollar realignments. Under the US “Twin Pillars” strategy, Iran and Saudi Arabia were cast as co-guardians of Western interests in the Gulf, a pairing that saw the Shah assert regional leadership not only militarily but through OPEC’s oil diplomacy, shaping pricing and production decisions the Gulf would initially follow. But as Iran’s revolutionary rupture broke with this consensus, Gulf monarchies doubled down on the model of compliance, turning petro-influence into a currency of preservation rather than transformation. What followed was not simply geopolitical recalibration, but the slow, deliberate manufacturing of a sectarian grammar, where Iran’s Shia-inflected defiance was strategically recast as a threat to the Sunni regional order, transforming a political rupture into a sectarian crisis, which offered imperial alliances a convenient cover for what remained a strategy of suppression and control.

What matters now is not mythologizing Iran, but restoring context, refusing the amnesia that reduces every confrontation to a clash of liberal values rather than a struggle over history.

With the advent of the revolution, the new Islamic Republic moved quickly: expelling US advisors, seizing the US Embassy in Tehran as a symbolic blow against the “Great Satan,” nationalizing remaining foreign assets, severing diplomatic ties with Israel, and backing resistance movements across the region as part of a broader national defense strategy, fundamentally aimed against US influence. Anti-imperialism was no longer a slogan from the margins; it was policy, law, and export. This institutionalization of refusal, rooted as much in theology as in the memory of coups and concessions, was intolerable to a global order built on containment and compliance. The US, now deprived of its most stable outpost in the region, responded through encirclement. Economic sanctions quickly followed the severing of ties, and Washington’s support for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the devastating 1980-1988 war further solidified Iran’s perception of the US as an active adversary, often seen as an “imposed war.” Sanctions, assassinations, and media demonization became the tools of a long containment strategy. In this context, the latest Israeli war can be read as a continuation of that same logic: a war explicitly aimed at regime change, as exemplified by calls from figures like Netanyahu urging the Iranian people to “seize the chance.” This toppling of the state, however, is strategically inseparable from the dismantling of the historical narrative and the revolutionary legitimacy it claims, thereby resurrecting the fabricated illusion of the Shah’s past as Iran’s only acceptable trajectory.

Western observers, as Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi notes in Foucault in Iran, have long misunderstood this history, trapped in binaries of secular versus religious, modern versus traditional. That misreading persists. The fixation on clerical power often obscures the longer arc of anti-imperialist sentiment, how it has been co-opted, institutionalized, and at times betrayed by the very state claiming to carry it forward.

This context doesn’t call for yet another account of Western hypocrisy on “individual freedoms,” “terrorism,” or Iran’s “nuclear threat”. That story is already well-exposed. The irony, for those willing to see it, is blinding. What matters now is not mythologizing Iran, but restoring context, refusing the amnesia that reduces every confrontation to a clash of liberal values rather than a struggle over history, over material conditions, and over the unfinished battle for liberation.

This is not a call to romanticize the Islamic Republic either. It is a call to historicize; to resist the smoothing violence of media cycles and the branding of geopolitics. Because when memory collapses under spectacle, we lose the ability to locate ourselves within an Axis, an Axis that carries memory, enacts refusal, and points toward liberation.

The Empire, it seems, is always allowed a long memory. For that, this kind of historical grounding is not indulgent; it is necessary.

Because without memory, there is no direction.
And without direction, liberation becomes little more than a slogan.

source: Al Akhbar

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#colonialism #imperialism #iran #repression #resistance #westAsia

Against Imperial Memory: The “Long War” on Iran
abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/203…

"We live in a moment where critique risks flattening into instinct, where binaries do not merely polarize, but offer the illusion of coherence. Liberal humanism and conservative militarism, in their…"

At least 21 people killed in stampede, suffocation at GHF site in Gaza | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera
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"Gaza’s Health Ministry says tear gas was fired on Wednesday at crowds of Palestinians at aid facility in Khan Younis."

#Palestine #Gaza #Israel #GHF
@palestine

At least 21 people killed in stampede, suffocation at GHF site in Gaza

Gaza’s Health Ministry says tear gas was fired on Wednesday at crowds of Palestinians at aid facility in Khan Younis.

^{Al Jazeera}

Gaza’s vulnerable suffer war’s toll: Malnourished, maimed and displaced | Interactive News | Al Jazeera
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"Conditions worsen with widespread hunger, life-altering injuries and near-total displacement and destruction."

#Palestine #Gaza #Israel
@palestine

Gaza’s vulnerable suffer war’s toll: Malnourished, maimed and displaced

^{Marium Ali (Al Jazeera)}

‘Death Toll’: Toll Holdings Drives Genocide

On 16 July 2025, actionists targeted the global head office of Toll Holdings on St Kilda Road Melbourne, smashing the facade and dousing the building with red paint.

We demand that Toll drop all partnerships with Thales, NIOA, and other arms dealers.

We demand that Toll cease providing services for the ‘australian’ colonial occupation, including its military and mining sectors and border regime.

We demand that Japan Post direct Toll, its wholly owned subsidiary, to drop all partnerships and cease providing services for Thales, NIOA and other arms dealers, in line with international law.

– – –

‘Death Toll’: Toll Holdings Drives Genocide

The supply chain for genocidal weapons includes logistics firms. Multiple ‘Australian’ companies, including Toll Holdings, have been identified transporting weapons for export to the US where they are used to support ‘Israel’s murderous campaign against Palestine. Building off Palestine Action’s successful campaigns against Kuehne+Nagel and Front Runner Logistics, which culminated in those firms dropping contracts with Elbit Systems, we declare a goal of forcing Toll to cease abetting genocide and renounce all contracts with Thales, NIOA and any other weapons manufacturers.

A range of weapons and components are produced in ‘Australia’, including at government-owned sites at Benalla (‘Victoria’) and Mulwala (‘New South Wales’). Operated by Thales, the world’s 16^th largest arms dealer, and by NIOA, a weapons company which also supplies the ‘Australian’ police, the Benalla factory manufactures ‘a variety of ordnance, including artillery shells and large bombs’. At Mulwala ‘the volatile materials that fill artillery, bombs and rifle rounds are made’. A union representative for workers at these sites has said: ‘The workers at these sites make bullets, bombs and shells… They don’t build anything’. Production at these factories comprises a ‘second supply line’ for the US military, used to ‘replenish U.S. stockpiles or be sold to American partners’ of which ‘Israel’ is at the forefront. Netanyahu has stated that what ‘Israel’ needs from the US is ‘munitions, munitions, munitions’. This is salient in context of the IOF practice of indiscriminate shelling and saturation bombing, a strategy befitting of their legendary cowardice and disregard for life.

Toll provides equipment to physically transport genocidal weapons. They also support the arms trade by enabling Thales and other weapons manufacturers to invest and operate at low financial risk. Their trucks have been observed and photographed entering Point Wilson pier, a dedicated Victorian facility for military imports and exports including ‘explosive ordnance’, to meet ships en route to Sunny Point, the primary terminal for shipment of weapons and ammunition for the US military. Thales calls Toll a ‘key transport partner’. Toll describes Thales as ‘a very important part of our business’, assigning staff with titles like Senior Manager Explosive Services to oversee the partnership. NIOA has also ‘partnered with Toll Logistics-Mining/Toll Global Forwarding’ to deliver 155mm shells. These relationships underpin the weapons dealers’ access to insurance, credit and financial services – a commercial position underwritten, not only by any trucks and equipment used to transport arms, but by all assets owned by Toll, whose ongoing viability as a company is needed to secure the stability of services provided.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has issued an advisory ruling declaring ‘Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories to be illegal, and has ordered states to ‘take urgent steps to prevent ongoing international crimes, including by imposing a comprehensive arms embargo against Israel’. This is not to say the bounds of pro-Palestinian solidarity or Palestinian resistance should be delimited by international law, which has comprehensively failed Palestinians. These rulings are cited, not as an arbiter of morality, but a lever to be leveraged via broader social movements and freedom struggles.

Toll Holdings is owned by Japan Post, which itself is part-owned by the Japanese government. Toll boasts in weapons trade publications that the ‘As a division of Japan Post, the Toll Group brings substantial and secure financial backing… ensuring Toll is a low-risk, trusted and reliable partner’. While many Japanese call for stability and peace, they are forced to underwrite military escalation in Palestine, Iran and across the Middle East through investment in Toll. In February 2024, the Japanese conglomerate Itochu ended its ‘strategic co-operation’ with Elbit Systems, in line with the ICJ ruling and against a backdrop of domestic protests, a threatened Malaysian boycott of the Itochu-owned chain Family Mart, and Palestine Action’s ongoing direct action campaign against Elbit.

In so-called ‘Australia’, increasing investment in arms manufacturing occurs in the context of AUKUS, the trilateral militaristic alliance with the UK and the US. AUKUS signifies ‘Australia’s deepening embeddedness into the US military-industrial complex and as a servant or junior partner under US-hegemony. Major state expenditure on arms and armament production, including $220 million at the Benalla and Mulwala sites announced in 2023, coincides with the hollowing out of domestic social services and quality of life.

The Benalla and Mulwala factories produce unguided 155-millimeter artillery shells, non-precision weapons that are not even purported to minimise deaths among non-combatants. A senior ‘Israeli’ official has been quoted describing the 155mm shells as being in ‘increasingly short supply’ and suggesting that ‘Israel’ ‘might lose the war’ because it is running out of ammunition. Delaying, disrupting or cutting off the supply of these munitions may be immediately material and life-saving for Palestinians.

Much of ‘Australian’ arms production is concentrated in remote, centralised and/or government-owned facilities, including those at Benalla and Mulwala. At military sites, security is high and the consequences of action may be severe. Toll Holdings is a privately-owned company whose assets are dispersed and move through ordinary communities. People have a right to resist the flow of weapons, or assets that support this genocidal trade, through their homes.

All Toll Holdings assets in so-called ‘Australia’ are on Aboriginal land, where no consent for settler-colonisers to underwrite genocide has been given. NIOA Munitions, which has partnered with Toll, is also a major supplier for ‘Australian’ police, producing 70 percent of their ammunition as at 2017. Munitions used to repress, terrorise and dispossess Aboriginal communities are manufactured by NIOA, likely including the bullets that murdered Kumanjayi Walker. Toll also provides logistics for unauthorised mining in violation of First Nations sovereignty, and for offshore immigration detention camps, thus facilitating ‘Australia’s white supremacist colonial occupation and border regime.

Toll Holdings is a platinum sponsor of Land Forces, the largest arms trade exhibition in the Southern hemisphere. In ‘Brisbane’, Toll partner with Leonardo to provide helicopters for the ‘Australian military’. Toll Fuels trucks have been photographed supplying ‘Australian’ navy ships, reflecting the deep intertwinement of this company with ‘Australian’ militarism and imperialism.

All sites and equipment used or owned by Toll Holdings are legitimate targets for anti-genocide action. This may include sabotage, vandalism, blockades, strikes, occupations and all forms of material resistance and disruption. Everything is on the table.

*’Australia’ and ‘Israel’ are in quote marks to denote the illegitimacy of these occupying colonial entities.

tolldeath.noblogs.org

Submitted Anonymously

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#australia #DirectAction #palestine #resistance #Solidarity

‘Death Toll’: Toll Holdings Drives Genocide
abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/203…

"On 16 July 2025, actionists targeted the global head office of Toll Holdings on St Kilda Road Melbourne, smashing the facade and dousing the building with red paint. We demand…"