On Monday 24 August, Caitlin Johnstone published a piece under the title “It’s Obnoxious For Westerners To Criticize The Targets Of The Western Empire”. The operative sentence runs: “If you are a westerner your ONLY job is to oppose the abuses of the western empire. Not Iran. Not China. Not Russia, Cuba or North Korea.” Underneath it on X the replies came in. Amen. Amen. Well said. Well said. Well said.
A doctrine fitted into a hundred and twenty-five characters. It went into the group chat of the Spotlight Socialist Network that morning with the note “Controversial but there is some truth to this.” The exchange ran for eleven hours. By half past one the following afternoon I was out of the group, and by a quarter past three anybody who defended what I had said was being told they would follow me.
Three days before Johnstone published, on 21 August, a Hong Kong court convicted Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung of incitement to subversion. The offence was organising candlelit vigils for the dead of Tiananmen. Lee is sixty-nine and was general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions until the state squeezed it out of existence in 2021; he has been held since April of that year, five years and four months. Chow is a barrister who conducted her own defence and has described being restrained in handcuffs built to cause pain. They face ten years each, and the sentencing has not yet been listed.
I put the ITUC statement into the chat at six minutes past two on the Monday afternoon. Nothing came back. Nearly three hours later I put it again, this time as a question about the jailed trade unionists, and the answer arrived in under a minute: “Not another target of US Imperialism being thrown into the mix. Are you only an expert on places where the West wishes to change the regime or something? 😂”
Temper had nothing to do with that. The position had been set out in full over the preceding hours and it holds together on its own terms. Workers in states that Washington has marked should not be encouraged to move against their rulers, because the vacuum would be filled by a puppet. Solidarity acquires a geography. It runs to workers whose governments are allied to the United States and stops at the border of the states that oppose it. The emoji is what that border looks like when a sixty-nine-year-old union man is walked up to it and somebody asks for a ruling.
The list is doing the work here. Iran, China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, and no exit condition attached to any of them. Membership is conferred by Washington’s hostility, and Washington’s hostility does not lapse, so nothing that happens in the world can move a country off the list. There is no future in which a Chinese trade unionist becomes supportable. Not after a ceasefire, not after a change of administration in Washington, not ever. That is a peculiar result for a doctrine which presents itself as a question of timing, and more peculiar still for one that most of the people repeating it would say they hold provisionally, subject to conditions, in the current conjuncture.
The question that produced the removal was put at four minutes to five. If workers in China or in Iran organise against their government, do you support solidarity with them. It was asked again in different words a minute later, and again in relation to the Hong Kong convictions. Across the eleven hours and the hundred-odd messages that followed, the thread moved to Gallup polling on Ukrainian war weariness, to the Odesa trade union building, to Crimea, to the proposition that Russophobia is akin to Hitler’s hatred of Jews. Nobody refused the question and nobody argued it down. It had nowhere to land. Answering yes dissolves the geography. Answering no has to be done out loud, in front of a few hundred people, some of whom are new.
In August 1968 the Soviet leadership announced that it was suppressing “counter-revolutionary forces which have entered into collusion with foreign forces hostile to socialism”. Every component of that sentence was available in the chat on Monday. One contributor held that the Iranian protests of this spring were a Mossad and CIA operation. Another, more carefully, that they were small and leaderless and “turned violent, seriously so. In a manner that any government would inevitably feel forced to respond”, adding that the Islamic Republic had acknowledged some of the grievances as legitimate. The careful version is the one to watch, because it concedes everything a defender of the repression needs and nothing that would cost the defender his self-image. There were people in 1968 who wrote those sentences about Prague, and they were socialists, and most of them were sincere. The verdict in Hong Kong came down on the fifty-eighth anniversary of the tanks going in. Nobody in the chat mentioned it and there is no particular reason why they should have; anniversaries are not arguments.
The same operation ran on the history. I had said that after Iraq’s invasion was thrown back, Tehran faced a choice between peace and an invasion of its own, and that Israel resourced the second. Two people answered by producing 1980. One posted a link to the Wikipedia article on the Iraqi invasion of Iran under the words “So Iran invaded Iraq?” The other wrote, accurately, that in 1980 it was Iraq, then a client of Washington, that invaded Iran. Both statements are true. Both of them change the subject, because the war had a second half. Iraq invaded in September 1980. By May 1982 Iran had retaken Khorramshahr and cleared its own soil. Saddam then offered to pull back to the international border, using the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that June as his cover for wanting out. Khomeini refused him. On 13 July around a hundred thousand Iranians went over the border towards Basra, and six weeks later some twelve thousand of them were dead and the line had not moved. That was the choice I was describing, and Israel was arming the side that made it: seventy-five million dollars of anti-tank guns and shells in the first year of Operation Seashell, and a further hundred and thirty-six million through Yaakov Nimrodi in 1981 for Lance and Hawk missiles, contracted with the defence ministry in Tehran. The state now held up as the reason no westerner may criticise Tehran was, at the time, one of Tehran’s arms dealers.
The obvious reading is that the men posting 1980 at me had never read past the first year of the war. That is not quite right either. A true fact about a different year, produced in place of an answer, is the emoji with a footnote attached, and it takes less work than reading does. Red Mole is running the reply in the archive series: the JRCL Political Bureau’s statement of 22 July 1982, written nine days into the Basra offensive by socialists who had defended Iran against the Iraqi invasion and would not follow it across the border.
Several people intervened during the evening and hardly any of them on the politics. The objection that carried was about tone, and it was put with real feeling by a member who wanted to know why a chat that should be bringing people in had spent a day making them feel stupid. She is not wrong about the effect. Anybody who has sat in a branch meeting watching two men re-fight a 1953 split has felt exactly what she was describing, and the impulse to say take it outside is decent. It also does work that its author never intended. By Tuesday lunchtime the case for removal had been relieved of any duty to show that the politics were mistaken, because disruptive was doing the job instead, and the administrator making the case could open by saying that she likes a good debate. Which she may well.
The argument ran past midnight. By the following lunchtime the group had been closed to member contributions, so that the only way to answer anything said in it was a private message to the administrator. At eight minutes past twelve she noted that I had been chucking around my redmole links again. Two minutes later came a list of phobias with my name attached to it: Palestinian-phobia, Islamophobia, Iran-phobia, Russia-phobia, China-phobia, and a trend. Then, at 12:14, the charge that I had shown my hand with “but the middle east couldn’t survive without US intervention”. That is not a sentence I wrote, or anything close to one. What I had asked was how the American bases were to be got out of the region at all while the Iranian and Arab bourgeoisie went on ruling it, since the only force capable of doing the getting out is the workers and oppressed masses of the region. None of it could be answered where it was said.
I was in a university café in Manchester, halfway into a beetroot and sauerkraut toastie, typing the correction to her privately because private was the only direction left. My second message went at 12:17:02. Hers went into the group ten seconds after it, opening with the thought that she likes a good debate as much as the next person and closing with a proposal to remove the imperialists. Objections were to be sent to her privately. Mine had already gone, forty-five seconds early, and was about something else.
She answered at nine minutes past one. “Give me a break. You said as much and Im wise to you now.” I wrote back that I had said the opposite, and that of course I do not support the American bases remaining, which was a repeat of what I had already said in the group on Monday, when saying things in the group was still possible. Thirteen minutes after that she produced the quotation. “What does it mean for the US to leave the region? How does that happen without supporting the workers and oppressed masses to overturn the capitalist elites across the middle east? Because if the US bases closed tomorrow, the Iranian and Arab bourgeoisie would continue their current opppression.” Then, on its own line, “Really?” Then, “Don’t fucking gaslight me.”
She had gone and found it. The passage calls for the workers and oppressed masses of the Middle East to overturn the capitalist elites who rule them, and it was produced as proof of imperialism by the person producing it. There is nothing in that to argue with, and that is the difficulty. Said as much had already done its work: the charge no longer needed the sentence to exist, because wise to you had changed what kind of proceeding this was. Somebody who has been detected does not get to produce evidence. His evidence is part of the concealment. Don’t fucking gaslight me, said to a man asking to be quoted accurately, is that rule spoken out loud. The sentence and the refutation of the charge are the same sentence, which ought to settle it and does not.
At half past one she posted the passage into the group, tagged to a member who had complained the night before about the tone of the argument, with a line under it: “Earlier comment by Duncan 👆”. I was removed at 13:31. Not knowing that, I carried on for another two minutes, setting out to her that those rulers belong to the same capitalist system as Washington, and that the most effective way to be rid of the bases is to be rid of the rulers. Her last message came at 13:33. “Not interested in anything you have to say anymore. Good bye.”
What happened next took place in a group I was no longer in, and reached me the same afternoon. The announcement went up at 13:38. Two minutes later somebody asked why, and whether I had behaved badly towards anyone, and two people liked the question. The answer at 13:44 was that I had been pushing imperialist crap for a long time, and that suggesting the middle east can’t rule themselves was the last fucking straw.
Then the passage was read. At 13:54 the member it had been tagged to quoted it back into the group and said what it says, that I had been advocating supporting the workers and oppressed masses to overturn the capitalist elites across the middle east. Three people liked that. Just after two another member wrote that varying socialist opinions in a socialist network are healthy and that he had seen nobody promoting imperialism the day before, having disagreed with much of what I said without finding any of it offensive. Three likes for that as well. A third quoted my line about not supporting the bases and told the administrator directly that she had it wrong and that I am not an imperialist. At seven minutes past two a fourth member offered that I sounded as though I could well be an infiltrator. Infiltrating a socialist WhatsApp group in order to argue for jailed Hong Kong trade unionists would be a long game played for a very small prize, and nobody asked what the point of it would be.
The argument went on for another hour and it went badly for the prosecution. Two members took apart the inference that expecting bourgeois forces to fill a vacuum amounts to wanting them there, one of them noting that believing a thing will happen is not the same as wanting it to.
The defence put up for me was gentler on the other side than I would have been. There is no vacuum. The Arab and Iranian bourgeoisies rule those countries now, and the American bases are there to keep the region safe for extraction, with the local rulers co-opted into the arrangement and conducting themselves as partners in it, because what they want out of it is money. Both sides spent the spring calling each other the great enemy and both swallowed that to get at it. On 18 June, at Versailles, Trump and the Islamic Republic signed a preliminary agreement that reopened the Strait of Hormuz, unfroze tens of billions in Iranian assets, and carried an American pledge to work with regional partners on a fund of at least three hundred billion dollars for Iranian reconstruction. Close every base tomorrow and the same class owns the same oilfields and jails the same trade unionists, which is either an argument for getting rid of the rulers as well or an argument for doing nothing at all, and the group never reached the point of deciding which.
At ten past three, with the exchange running that way, the group was closed to all but admins for the second time that day. A minute after the door shut came “pausing to catch up”. At 15:17 the charge reached its final form. “Duncan expressed a view that middle eastern countries were incapable of governing themselves and needed imperialist intervention. Thats an age old imperialist white supremacist view that I will not tolerate in this group. He has been removed as a result. Anyone persisting in defending that position will be removed.” Then, on its own line, “no ifs no buts”. Three people liked it.
Note what had to happen to the charge to get it there. On Monday I was an imperialist. By Tuesday lunchtime I was an imperialist who had said a sentence I had not said. By a quarter past three the sentence had become a white supremacist view, and defending the man who had not said it was itself an offence carrying the same penalty. The charge is that I believe the peoples of the Middle East cannot govern themselves. The position it was issued in defence of holds that if Iranians brought down their own government the result would be a Western puppet, because Washington would install one and nothing Iranians did could stop it. Somebody in that exchange has a low estimate of what the people of the region are capable of, and it is not the man who was removed. The group was reopened immediately afterwards, which is the part worth sitting with. It was safe to reopen.
At nine minutes past seven the member who had asked what I had actually done wrong came back at length. He agreed entirely about opposing white supremacy and about opposing imperialism, could not see how anything I had written came into either category, said he did not know me or my politics and had found my position strange, and asked whether somebody would explain how what I said supported white supremacy. The answer at 19:15 was the passage, posted for the fourth time in six hours, tagged to him, under the words “Read this and let it sink in.” By a quarter to eight one contributor had assigned me to a social-imperialist trend whose evasions and doublethink were sophisticated, and another had recalled that my attack on Professor Marandi was awful.
The attack on Professor Marandi had happened eight days earlier. On 17 August somebody posted a clip of him taking apart Alan Dershowitz. The administrator commended it to the group as a blistering takedown and a second member called it brilliant. Marandi teaches at the University of Tehran and has been a key resource supporting Iran’s nuclear negotiations; Javad Zarif, Iran’s Vice President until March 2025, thanked him publicly for his services as a liaison with Western media. I asked how a man in that position came to be circulating uncritically in a socialist group, and said that what counts in politics is what you are for, and that Marandi is for the theocratic gangsters who would be happy enough to deal with the Dershowitzes of this world. That was the attack. On Tuesday night it came back as a count in the indictment, alongside the observation that Marandi may be a gangster or support them but that we have no evidence he is. Then the group was closed again.
What I have no good answer for is what all that defending was worth. The layer I had been worried about turned out to defend me at length, without knowing me, quoting me accurately, and getting liked for it. A few hundred people, most of them in none of the small organisations, is the exact layer any regroupment has to win, and on Tuesday afternoon several of them read the passage and said what it said, and were then told that anyone persisting would be removed. They did not persist. I am not certain I would have, in a group where I had friends. The administrator owns the group, and nothing in a WhatsApp group goes to a vote, so the people defending me had exactly the standing I had, which was none. Somebody closed the argument while they were winning it, and whether an argument that ends that way leaves anything behind in the people who were winning it I do not know. A room would have held it longer. There was the Connections Convention in Sheffield in June, and the Socialist Federation has a Congress in the Midlands coming this autumn, and those rooms are filled by people already in something, which is the difficulty, because the layer I am describing is defined by being in nothing. Whether the two can be got into the same room I do not know, and the next two months are about to supply a great many rooms without answering it.
Somewhere in the middle of Monday evening, between the exchange about Mariupol and the exchange about NATO enlargement, the week’s meetings went up in the chat. Thursday at six, a meeting on the state of Your Party opened by somebody from its executive, with two other groups invited to send speakers on next steps. The notices kept going out underneath the argument all evening and they are going out still, and the network will carry on doing a good deal more than nothing without me in it. Lee Cheuk-yan will be sentenced in the autumn. In two days nobody mentioned him again, including the people defending me, and whether anybody in that group can be brought to say plainly that his jailers are the enemy is a question I no longer know how to put to them, and being outside the group does not make it easier to put.
Note: A preview link to this article was shared with Spotlight for comment yesterday afternoon. No response was received in the following few hours, but comments are open on this post.