January 26, 2026
Daily Links page at Yves' Naked Capitalism pointed to a piece about Iran published by Sidecar, the blog-site of the New Left Review.
Neither NLR nor Sidecar are on my daily reading list though I have linked to several Sidecar piece in my Week-In-Review collection.
According to its About page:
The criteria for publication on Sidecar will be saying something - about persons, processes, events, structures - that is not being said elsewhere, but deserves to be.
The Sidecar piece linked via Naked Capitalism, Scylla and Charybdis by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, certainly does NOT match that criteria.
The piece is about the recent regime change protest in Iran and the government reaction to it. Its take on the course of action by either side reads like a direct copy from a CIA controlled main stream outlet.
There is little mentioning of rioters or violent protesting in it:
The protests that began in Tehran on 28 December spread with remarkable speed to provincial cities and towns such as Hamedan, Mashhad, Tabriz, Izeh, Qom, Marvdasht, Abdanan, Kerman, Arak, Isfahan and Malekshahi.
...
The digital circulation of images and testimonies helped synchronize local grievances, but it was the confluence of economic injury and deeper social exhaustion that gave the protests their national reach. Violence deployed by security forces against protesters in provincial cities such as Ilam and Marvdasht further inflamed public outrage, and even as Tehran initially remained relatively quiescent, demonstrations elsewhere had already begun to assume an explicitly anti-regime character.
The state initially appeared to recognize the danger of escalation. Officials acknowledged the economic grievances of the protesters, while the governor of the central bank was replaced.
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The Pezeshkian government's posture of limited tolerance evaporated within days, as effective control passed to the security apparatus: the various arms of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, alongside the military, judiciary and intelligence services. It will be the task of historians to reconstruct precisely what transpired between 8 and 10 January. In the midst of an almost total internet blackout and an abundance of misinformation, establishing a definitive chronology remains difficult. Nonetheless, an outline of events is beginning to come into focus.
Following the initial bazaar protests and their diffusion across multiple provinces, Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran's deposed monarch, issued a public call for Iranians to take to the streets and overthrow the regime. According to numerous eyewitness accounts, the demonstrations on 8 January were exceptionally large and for the most part peaceful. [...] In the aftermath of the night-time demonstrations, the state's messaging hardened. Security forces sent warning text messages to millions of mobile phones and the Chief Justice, Gholamreza Mohseni-Ejei, issued a series of stern warnings, threatening severe consequences for anyone who joined further protests. This tactic appears to have deterred some participation the following day. Even so, on 9 January a substantial and highly committed core of protesters returned to the streets.
They were met with unprecedented violence. Videos circulated showing security units firing directly into crowds, storming hospitals, assaulting injured protesters and medical staff, and pursuing demonstrators into spaces that had previously retained a degree of informal immunity.
How does that account differ from anything what 'western' main stream outlets have written. The government forces, just out of nowhere, were using violence against 'for the most part peaceful' protests ? Sure, and 'it will be the task of historians to reconstruct' that because we lack information?
After a lot of sociological, pseudo-left blubber Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, the author of the piece, finally admits that there was extensive violence on the protesters site. But he immediately excuses it as having been caused by 'years of repression':
At the same time, there is video evidence of armed protesters confronting security forces with knives, machetes and in some cases firearms, an indication of how years of repression has radicalized segments of the opposition. There were also multiple reports of arson attacks against government buildings, as well as mosques and state television and radio facilities, indicating the extent to which the protest had shifted into a more openly insurgent register in some localities.
The geography of the repression that followed was markedly uneven. In some areas, brief but ferocious crackdowns left dozens dead within hours; in others, prolonged clashes unfolded over successive nights. These differences, however, do not detract from the overarching pattern. What took place was not a series of isolated excesses or lapses in discipline, but the systematic deployment of lethal force by the state against civilian protesters.
Further down in his too long piece the author finally admits that CIA and Mossad agents played a role in all this. But he insist that their role was just minor:
To acknowledge this is not to credit the regime's claim that the mobilization was foreign-engineered. A nationwide uprising, rooted in years of social and economic degradation, cannot be reduced to the machinations of external intelligence services, even if there is little doubt that Israeli and US intelligence agencies have sought to hijack the protests.
How well paid or stupid must one be to describe an obvious imperial regime change operation as 'rooted in years of social and economic degradation' without pointing out that the 'social and economic degradation' are an active part of the regime change plans.
Contrast the above confused writing with the clarity with which John Mearsheimer lays out the facts:
what happened in Iran is an attempt by the Israeli & American tag team to overthrow the government in Tehran and break apart Iran, much the way the US, Turkey, and Israel fractured Syria. The playbook in Iran is one we have seen before. It has four elements.
First, the US has long been working to wreck the Iranian economy with sanctions.
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Second, the tag team went to work in late December 2025 to foment and support violent protests that would precipitate a violent government response, which would hopefully set off a spiral of violence that the government could not control.
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Third, the Western media played along with the tag team and purveyed the story that the protests were principally a response to the policies of an evil government in Tehran, not because of outside interference. Moreover, the protests were peaceful and it was the government that initiated the violence.
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Fourth, the US military (and maybe the Israeli military) was primed to attack Iran once the protests had reached critical mass, finishing off the regime and creating chaos in Iran that would hopefully break the country apart.
But the strategy failed, mainly because the Iranian government was able to shut down the protests quickly and decisively.
The failed regime change attempt has caused some 3,200 casualties.
The official statistics on the casualties from the recent unrest in #Iran have been released: 2,427 innocent citizens, including security forces and ordinary people, were martyred in terrorist attacks, and 690 armed terrorists were killed.
In total, 3,117 people lost their lives.
The material damage was also heavy.
That NLR and Sidecar are publishing a piece that plays down and tries to hide the externally induced, extremely brutal regime change riots as 'for the most part peaceful' protests happening after 'years of repression' is a testament of how much the 'academic left' has lost its focus.
Analyzing local class policies in a middle sized country matters little when a great power is out to destroy it. When discussing local grievances it is important to keep the big picture in mind. For 47 year now the imperial forces in the U.S. and Britain have been out to destroy the Islamic Republic and to re-enslave the Iranian people. That is the major framework through which Iran must be analyzed. Other local issues are mostly embroidering details.
Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.