On the Weaponisation of Historical Morality and the Erasure of Conscience
There is a phrase that circulates through political rhetoric with the confidence of an axiom and the substance of a mirage: stand on the right side of history. It is uttered with the gravity of moral certainty — by presidents and pundits, by those who wield power and those who merely perform proximity to it. It has been repeated so often, and deployed so promiscuously, that it has achieved what all effective propaganda achieves: it no longer requires justification. It simply is. And in that unchallenged existence lies its most dangerous function.
But let us pause and ask: what does it actually mean? History, as a discipline and as lived inheritance, does not possess sides. It is not a courtroom with a dock and a bench. History is — to borrow from Walter Benjamin — wreckage upon wreckage, debris at the feet of the angel who would like to stay and make whole what has been smashed, but who is propelled irresistibly into the future by the storm we call progress. The “right side of history” is not determined by justice. It is determined by survival — by who remains standing when the dust settles, and who commands the pen that writes the aftermath.
The Grammar of Domination
Antonio Gramsci, writing from the confines of a fascist prison, understood this with devastating clarity. Hegemony, he argued, is not merely the exercise of force but the manufacture of consent — the process by which the ruling class embeds its interests so deeply within common sense that they cease to appear as interests and begin to appear as nature, as inevitability, as “the right side of history.” The phrase does not describe a moral position. It constructs one. It is not an observation about where justice resides; it is a speech act that claims to decide where justice resides — and in doing so, silences every competing claim.
Michel Foucault would recognise this mechanism intimately. Power, he demonstrated, does not operate solely through prohibition and punishment. Its most potent mode is productive: it produces knowledge, it produces subjects, it produces the very categories through which we understand ourselves. When someone declares that you are on the “wrong side of history,” they are not merely disagreeing with you. They are performing an act of epistemic exclusion — removing you from the circle of those whose speech is granted the dignity of being heard. The phrase functions, in Foucault’s terms, as a technology of power: not an argument to be met with counter-argument, but a classification that renders counter-argument illegitimate before it is uttered.
The Manufacture of the Sub-Human
It is here that the phrase reveals its most corrosive function — one that Hannah Arendt would have identified with chilling precision. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt traced how dehumanisation operates not through the sudden eruption of violence but through the patient erosion of a person’s standing as a political being — stripped first of rights, then of belonging, then of the very quality of humanity itself, until violence against them ceases to register as violence at all.
The phrase “the right side of history” operates within this architecture. When it is wielded — as it is now, conspicuously, by a segment of the Iranian diaspora cheering for the US-Israeli military posture toward Iran — it does not merely express a political preference. It performs a partition. Those who align with the dominant narrative are granted the status of moral subjects. Those who dissent — who question the wisdom of invasion, who refuse to celebrate bombs falling on a nation of eighty-eight million souls — are cast into the outer darkness of the “wrong side.” Once there, they are no longer interlocutors. They are, in the language Giorgio Agamben has given us, reduced to bare life — homo sacer, the figure who exists outside the protection of law and the recognition of the political community.
This is not hyperbole. It is the operational logic of the phrase. Its primary function is the elimination of difference — the flattening of a complex political landscape into a binary of the righteous and the damned. What we are left with is a distorted image of humanity itself: one in which human beings are only those who align with the dominant manufactured narrative, and all others are surplus, expendable, unworthy of moral consideration.
The Neo-Fascist Echo
Let us be precise, because this connects to currents far larger than any single diaspora debate. The twenty-first century has witnessed the resurgence of a political logic supposed to have been buried in the rubble of the mid-twentieth century: eliminationism dressed in the vocabulary of liberation. From ethno-nationalist movements sweeping Europe to authoritarian populisms across the Americas, from the normalisation of collective punishment in Gaza to the rhetoric of “civilisational struggle” from Washington and Tel Aviv, a pattern emerges that Umberto Eco, in his prescient taxonomy of Ur-Fascism, would recognise instantly: the cult of action for action’s sake, the rejection of criticism as treason, the obsession with an existential plot — and above all, the conviction that disagreement is betrayal.
The phrase “the right side of history” is the rhetorical fingerprint of this logic. It forecloses debate not by winning it but by abolishing it. It does not persuade; it conscripts. And in the Iranian diaspora context, it performs a function breathtaking in its cynicism: it asks Iranians to celebrate the very forces that have imposed sanctions starving their relatives, funded proxy wars destabilising their region, and maintained a geopolitical architecture designed not to liberate Iran but to subordinate it. The “right side of history,” in this rendering, is indistinguishable from the winning side of empire.
History Without Truth Is Not History
And here we arrive at the deepest fraud: the invocation of “history” itself. What history? Whose history? History, to deserve the name, requires a commitment to truth prior to and independent of political convenience — what Paul Ricœur called the “critical moment,” the willingness to subject one’s own narrative to the same scrutiny one applies to one’s adversaries. Without this, what is called “history” is merely curated narrative: half-truths arranged not to illuminate the past but to manufacture consent for the present.
We live in the age of post-truth — but the phrase itself is a concession we should refuse. There is no “post” to truth. There is only truth and its deliberate obscuration. Those who deploy “the right side of history” with such casual authority have confused the pen spun in the service of power with the pen that serves the historical record. As I have argued elsewhere — in the context of inflated atrocity figures and the manufacture of indifference — when numbers are fabricated, when grievances are instrumentalised, when the dead are counted not to honour them but to weaponise them, it is not justice that is served. It is the architecture of war — the same architecture now being assembled, brick by rhetorical brick, around the case for military confrontation with Iran.
The Battle We Are Fighting
What, then, is to be done? The answer is not complicated, though it is demanding. It is the oldest and most difficult of human obligations: to resist.
To resist dehumanisation — the quiet, daily work of insisting that those who think differently remain fully human, fully entitled to speak. To resist the normalisation of violence — the slow anaesthetisation of conscience that allows us to accept bombing campaigns as “liberation” and collective punishment as “strategy.” To resist the erasure of conscience in the name of history — the seductive invitation to surrender moral judgement to a phrase that asks us to stop thinking and start choosing sides.
Arendt warned that the most dangerous evil is not radical but banal — the product not of monstrous ideology but of the catastrophic failure to think. “The right side of history” is an invitation to precisely this failure. It asks us to replace judgement with allegiance, inquiry with obedience, conscience with conformity. It offers the comfort of moral certainty at the price of moral agency.
Stand upright before this mockery of truth. History does not have a right side. It has only the truth — fragile, contested, infinitely precious — and those willing to defend it at the cost of their own comfort, their own belonging, their own place in the manufactured consensus. The right side, if it exists at all, belongs to those who, in Gramsci’s enduring formulation, maintain pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will — who see the world as it is and refuse to stop demanding what it ought to be.
For when we allow a phrase to do the thinking we refuse to do ourselves, we do not stand on any side of history. We stand outside it entirely — complicit in its worst chapters, and absent from its best.
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