From Vietnam to Tehran: When human rights become a war pretext

By Bhabani Shankar Nayak* 

The so-called liberal henchmen of imperialism have begun to perpetuate the old binary in order to justify an unprovoked attack on Iran and the killing of its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with other religious, civilian, and military leaders. These warmongering actions are being framed in the name of freedom, democracy, human rights, and women's rights, even as schools and hospitals are bombed, killing large numbers of schoolgirls and civilians. The unprecedented deaths and widespread destitution are part of an imperialist design to instil fear and force the surrender of people and their resources. Yet the people of Iran are resisting the combined onslaught of Israeli Zionists and American imperialists. There is no justification for the military actions of Israel and the United States against Iran, but liberal intellectuals are constructing a false binary — invoking the democratic rights and women's freedom of Iranians — to rationalise war.

Imperialist, Zionist, and Western interventions have never supported democratic, liberal, progressive, ecological, or feminist struggles for deepening democracy and citizenship rights. Western interventions led by Yankee imperialism continue to follow an old grammar of dominance — forming alliances with reactionary forces in order to undermine democracy and human rights. From Libya and Venezuela to Iran, imperialist interventions are designed to create fear and crisis in order to control political power and capture natural resources. These imperialist wars do not serve people or the planet; rather, they facilitate the expansion of unfettered capitalism based on the exploitation of human beings and nature.

The arm-twisting of countries through threats of higher tariffs, trade embargoes, conditional free trade agreements, the freezing of sovereign wealth, sanctions, and even wars is not designed merely for regime change. Rather, it reflects an old imperialist strategy of political and economic annexation. Wars are simply an extension of this colonial policy of annexation, intended to ensure unchallenged dominance and to pursue capitalist expansion without barriers.

As Vladimir Lenin argued, imperialism is not only "the highest stage of capitalism" but also a "special stage of capitalism" that ensures capitalist monopoly and undermines individual freedom in all spheres of society — economic, political, social, and cultural. Democratic diversity is anathema to capitalism. Therefore, imperialism destroys various forms of democracy and diversity in order to secure the hegemony of capitalism. This hegemony is sustained through dominant political power concomitant with the requirements of capitalist expansion, relying on slave or low-paid wage labour and the extraction of cheap, and often free, natural resources. US imperialism and its European allies are facilitating such a process at the cost of people and the planet. The ruling elites of the United States and Western Europe are constructing false narratives of human rights and democracy in order to pursue their imperialist, colonial, and capitalist agendas across the world.

All forms of capitalism and its cultural and economic ideologies are facing an existential crisis, having failed to provide peace, prosperity, and genuine individual freedom. Industrial capitalism, led by so-called free markets, has facilitated the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few while marginalising people across the world. Capitalism has also failed to promote the kind of industrial and agrarian transformation necessary to generate mass employment. In the process of capitalist accumulation, it has transformed many economic and social activities into profit- and pleasure-seeking, alienating pursuits. These illusions of individual freedom and prosperity have increasingly placed capitalism under public scrutiny.

In such a context, imperialist forces use wars, conflicts, and military domination to divert people's resistance to capitalism. Imperialism not only militarises the public imagination by perpetuating wars in the name of nationalism, patriotism, freedom, human rights, and democracy, but also creates false binaries to justify military interventions, conflicts, and regime-change operations. In doing so, it strips away reason and human dignity while dehumanising people by instilling alienation, fear, threat, and a constant sense of crisis in everyday life.

The hegemony of capitalist and imperialist power, and the ideologies that sustain it, is fundamentally opposed to life on the planet. Therefore, struggles against imperialism are struggles for the survival of people with human dignity. The quest for genuine individual freedom and democracy can be realised only by defeating all forms of imperialism and capitalism.

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*Academic based in UK