feminism that i was yeah this was

that and it was that specific it took that specific shape i mean azar nafises was the most famous but there was a whole slew of them and it was always presented around this thing of like islam is the question islam is the problem and sort of solving this problem for the west is this unique duty of of of us westoids and so I guess at the outset, the thing I would want to say is that taking a step back from, of course, I was too young to be involved in any of these social movements you're citing.

I was just an online guy.

I was early online.

I've been online catastrophically so since probably I was 12.

It was then that we got, it's the Reading Lolita in Tehran, that horrible thing.

Um, but yeah, the, so like that for me, like the sort of the, the, the internet, the role of the internet in, as a kind of radicalizing force in all of this and how there were just these insane forums, you remember little green footballs, this insanely racist.

late 90s, I want to say.

Yeah

... whatever voices.

Is that, 'cause what's happened? In the last eight months, Iran has done something that the world thought was unthinkable.

Iran defeated the US empire, destroyed the bases of its power, dialed back the, dialed back the extreme arrogance and violence that the US has been able to throw at a vast swath of the re- just because of destroying the bases.

I mean, this is one of the great moments in anti-imperialist history, and these people Ha- want us to believe, and they use a bunch of names, whoever wrote this used their influence over these people who are nothing, who are, most of whom have never said much about Iran, who have no influence on Iranians.

Iranians would not know who Bernadine Dohrn is.

No one know...

Yeah

Sina, anything you would add before we jump in and meet our contestants?

Yeah, no, thanks for that.

Thanks for that intro, guys.

That's a good and that's a useful framework.

Navid is always saying this stuff and using me as some strange tanky paragon.

This is like a running gag we have going literally for years.

So just ignore everything he says when it comes to me.

I think there's this just this point of like you can only be for violence if it's like some romanticized underdog, you know, against against the empire um but you know that's i think that that even that is is something that's a little bit racialized as well and and people aren't always you know people are fine with the janitors on the death star dying but you know that's because luke is white if luke skywalker had been muslim and they would have been like that's some suicide bombing But it's also

Sina, anything you would add before we jump in and meet our contestants?

Yeah, no, thanks for that.

Thanks for that intro, guys.

That's a good, and that's a useful framework.

Navid is always saying this stuff and using me as some strange tanky paragon.

This is, like, a running gag we have going literally for years.

So just ignore everything he says when it comes to me.

One more-

[laughs]

And I did a 3,000 shows in the period just before my silent strike, I guess.

But, and one of the rec- a bunch of sort of recurring thoughts have come back to me, and I...

And then in the wake of the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini, of sha- of martyr Khomeini, really, that's what he's, that's what he's become, it's made me really think about just the depth of this.

I've also been...

And, and, and how a single human life can have such a huge role In history and how, like, despite what, like, my Marxist training, and I, these aren't anathema, but it kind of is that, like, the great man theory of history.

You sometimes, you sometimes see, like, okay, I could buy that.

But sure.

And like, apparently, I mean, you know, if like their football accomplishments don't mean anything but all they need them is to just like say a sentence about the quote-unquote regime and like that alone will earn their respect so now for everyone for instance like Sardar Azmoon is like this you know hero right like this because he's been dropped from the squad uh and and this is like not unusual as well like on political differences there's been a number of players who get left out of world cup squad But this, again, this, what Sina was talking about, this whole exceptionalizing language whenever, you know, Iran is spoken about was like, uh, yeah, no, I just, I just don't understand why you're spending thousands of dollars just to like go and cheer for the other team.

No, yeah, there's, there's a degree of like, I don't know, um, What do you even describe? I mean, I should have gotten the videos ready of them because the comical, this sort of cartoonish nature of these Pahlavoids is something to behold.

But here's the thing, like we won't, the nature of American Iranian identity or Iranian American identity is, is such that you have a class of people who arrived to the country either in the lead up to the revolution or after the fact.

And these were these people of the Ancien Regime.

Like that's who they were.

And some of them today are like, you know, even rebranded as like, oh, resistoids.

But they're like children of the old regime.

admin.

Yeah

... yeah, like against time.

But like a basically like the...

A- and for me, I've always understand it like when you say, oh, something's anachronistic, people say that it's like, it feels like it's the word expired, which is true, but it's more that in something like this, it's not that the US, it's not that the...

Like when you talk about an empire expiring, it's more that its way of, its way that it buil- that it imperi- that it does its imperializing, uh, which is to say, which is how it empires, is no longer viable.

Like the, it, that it could get chased out so thoroughly, humiliated so brutally, just the r- have everything a- and, and achieve nothing, and on top of that, lose all of its investments for 30 years, and something much more difficult, uh, in some ways because that stuff, at least in theory, could be replaced, which it can't, sorry, but as Mikey pointed out, that was a 30-year buildup that, like, you just can't, like, you can't do, like, Star Trek replicator.

But something else was lost too, which was that sense of, oh, stability and, like it's about, the US was a bouncer at, like, the nightclub called West Asia, and bouncers, as m- as, you know, it's pretty clear, aren't like, they aren't an army, right? That, like, if you, like, fight a bouncer and beat a bouncer up, the bouncer's power has been exposed as, like, ultimately fictitious.

Yeah