Photo by Jerry “Woody” / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0
The Iranian diaspora keeps sending its people to the barricades.
The people at the barricades keep dying. The diaspora keeps forgetting.
In Quebec, every licence plate bears three words: Je me souviens—I remember. Not celebration, but defiance against erasure. Quebec remembers conquest, linguistic suppression, systematic subordination. The motto declares that historical suffering, honestly remembered, becomes resistance—and forgetting is the final capitulation.
The Iranian diaspora needs its own licence plate. Not because circumstances are identical, but because the pathology is: promised liberation, betrayal, catastrophe, then insistence that the next promise will be different. Quebec remembers because forgetting means consenting to the wound’s conditions. Iranians abroad, with striking regularity, choose to forget—and in that forgetting, consent to their own irrelevance and the suffering of those inside Iran who pay the price for diaspora credulity.
The Mahshahr petrochemical complex—decades of industrial capacity, thousands of livelihoods—is now rubble. And in the aftermath, something remarkable: the monarchist camp that spent months cheerleading for devastating strikes, for making Iran “come to its senses,” began frantically deleting posts. One advisor compared Trump to Truman, reaching for historical analogy to justify economic nuclear warfare against an entire population. This is not a U-turn. This is scrambling for cover after realizing the blunder’s magnitude, offering the coward’s erasure—the deleted tweet, the revised talking point, the sudden discovery that perhaps cheering for your country’s immolation was poor optics.
What must be said plainly: those who argued the Islamic Republic must “come to its senses”—euphemism for total, unconditional surrender—were not engaging in strategic thinking but in fantasy dressed as geopolitics. This depravity posits that a state will voluntarily dissolve itself under foreign military pressure, that a government will simply hand over power because bombs fall. It has never worked. It will never work. It is the logic of the colonial administrator demanding capitulation while calling it liberation—and those who peddle it are complicit in every drop of blood that follows.
In January 2025, monarchist networks issued urgent calls: take to the streets, the international community stands ready. Thousands responded with incomprehensible bravery. What met them was not promised support but state repression’s full machinery—mass arrests, live ammunition, killings. The foreign assistance never materialized. Those who responded paid with their bodies, their freedom, their lives. The figures who issued the calls paid with nothing. This is the asymmetry defining diaspora politics: courage expended is always others’—those inside Iran responding to calls from exile’s safety.
After Minab—168 schoolchildren killed in US-Israeli operations—the silence from prominent monarchist figures was striking. No condemnation. No grief. Yet when American soldiers faced danger, the same circles found voice with remarkable speed. The juxtaposition: 168 Iranian children dead, met with silence; American soldiers endangered, met with performative anguish. The calculation reveals a hierarchy where some lives receive mourning based not on intrinsic worth but on differential utility in pursuing foreign patronage. Minab’s children have every right to find this intolerable.
When Mahsa Amini’s murder ignited the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, monarchist figures swiftly claimed leadership—appearing on Western media, framing the uprising as precursor to monarchist transition. The movement was brutally suppressed. Over 500 killed. The broad coalition the moment demanded was never built. Secular republicans, leftists, ethnic minorities, feminist organizers saw not leadership but appropriation.
The figurehead model—positioning a single inherited figure as Iran’s inevitable democratic leader—has produced four decades of failure so consistent it demands explanation beyond bad luck. The burden of proof rests with those advocating continuation, not with those questioning it. The case must be made on evidence—organizational capacity, coalition breadth, demonstrated accountability—not on inherited symbolism or accusations of disloyalty for asking questions.
What the Iranian opposition needs is not a better figurehead but democratic infrastructure: coalition platforms accommodating ideological diversity, institutional capacity with transparent decision-making, honest strategic assessment distinguishing what external powers say from what they’ll do, democratic culture where dissent isn’t treason, and distributed leadership across networks already doing the work—women’s rights organizations, labor unions, ethnic minority advocates. They lack media visibility but possess organizational substance.
The question for the Iranian diaspora is whether it possesses courage to remember—not selectively, not sentimentally, but with ruthless honesty. To remember January 2025. To remember Mahshahr, April 2026. To remember Mahsa Amini. To remember Flight 752’s 176 murdered passengers. To remember the 1988 mass executions, November 2019’s massacre, every life the Islamic Republic has ground beneath its machinery.
And now, to remember the deleted posts, the frantic backpedaling, the Trump-Truman analogies grasping for justification after industrial infrastructure lies in ruins. To remember who cheered while bombs fell, who remained silent when children died, who discovered moral discomfort only after realizing the optics were unfavorable. Memory cannot be partisan. It must encompass regime crimes and opposition failures—not because these are morally equivalent, but because selective remembrance is itself complicity.
Quebec chose to remember because forgetting meant consenting to subjugation. The Iranian diaspora must choose to remember because forgetting—on any side, about any crime—means consenting to perpetuation of the very cycles that have cost so many lives.
After Mahshahr, there is no more room for forgetting. The petrochemical ashes settle not just on industrial ruins but on every hollow promise, every deleted post, every moment of cowardice dressed as strategy. This is the reckoning that can no longer be postponed.
Je me souviens. We remember. And this time, memory will not be negotiable.
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