The People First: Rohini Hensman on Democracy, Resistance, and the Global Left

NB: An important interview about an important book. DS

Documents unearthed by Robert Parry and reported in an article entitled When Israel/Neocons Favoured Iran show that Israel’s Likud government of Menachem Begin became an important source of covert arms supplies to Iran after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, with the profits being invested in Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Hensman insists on a kind of internationalism rooted in solidarity with people – not states, not factions, not slogans.

Autocrats may call upon a variety of beliefs to back their claims to absolute power, but their agenda remains the same: to negate human rights and crush democracy. If they come from a Muslim background, like Khamenei and his predecessor Khomeini, or al-Baghdadi and his successors, they use their own somewhat different visions of Islamic supremacism; Netanyahu appeals to a Zionist vision of a Jewish-supremacist state; Putin goes back to Russian supremacism; Assad pretended to be secular but favoured his own Alawite community and persecuted Sunnis; Trump’s ideology is White-supremacism in tandem with unhindered capitalist exploitation and corruption.

Siyavash Shahabi

There are moments when political confusion doesn’t just disorient you—it makes you feel betrayed. As an Iranian writer and activist in exile, I have spent years trying to understand not only the regime I escaped, but also the silences and excuses that surround it. I have watched with disbelief as many people—especially those who identify as anti-imperialists—express support or neutrality toward regimes like Assad’s in Syria or Khamenei’s in Iran. The same regimes that torture students, shoot protesters, jail workers, and execute women in public. All of this, ignored or minimized, simply because these regimes say they oppose the West.

In that confusion, I came across Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism by Rohini Hensman. It was not just another left critique. It was, for me, a political lifeline. The book begins with a simple but courageous premise: that the left’s support for authoritarian regimes under the banner of “anti-imperialism” has become one of the great moral and strategic failures of our time.

Published in 2018, Indefensible reads like a map of political self-rescue. With clarity and insistence, Hensman takes us through some of the most misrepresented struggles of recent history—from Syria and Ukraine to Bosnia, Iran, and Iraq—and shows how so much of the global left has ended up siding, whether explicitly or through silence, with counter-revolution. At the heart of her critique is what she calls “pseudo-anti-imperialism”: a worldview that sees U.S. empire as the only real enemy, and automatically absolves any force that claims to resist it, no matter how brutal or reactionary.

But Hensman’s book is not just a critique—it’s also a re-grounding. A Sri Lankan socialist and feminist based in India, she brings to this work the experience of having lived through the collapse of revolutionary hopes and the betrayal of democratic movements—not in abstraction, but in flesh. Whether speaking of Tamil resistance and state violence in Sri Lanka, the rise of Hindutva in India, or the crushing of popular uprisings in the Arab world, she insists on a kind of internationalism rooted in solidarity with people—not states, not factions, not slogans.

I contacted her because I needed clarity, and because Indefensible gave me more than analysis—it gave me a political language that didn’t force me to choose between resisting imperialism and defending human dignity. In our conversation, she spoke with the same urgency and honesty that fills her book. What follows is not only an account of that dialogue, but an attempt to continue the political task Indefensible began: to reclaim anti-imperialism from those who’ve turned it into a mask for authoritarianism—and to return it to those fighting for democracy, freedom, and life itself.

What prompted you to write Indefensible, and what do you hope leftists take away from it, especially those who continue to support authoritarian regimes in the name of anti-imperialism?

I welcomed the uprising in Syria along with all the other Arab uprisings, and was alarmed at the degree of repression that it met from the Assad regime. What disturbed me most of all was that by contrast to protests against, say, Israeli assaults on Palestine, protests against the brutality of the Assad regime and its allies – Hezbollah, Iran, Iraqi militias and Russia – were hardly seen anywhere.

Watching Al Jazeera coverage of the slaughter in Aleppo combined with the lack of outrage from the left literally made me ill, so I started writing as a way of expressing my solidarity with the struggle of Syrians for dignity and democracy. But as I wrote, I discovered that the failure of large sections of the left on Syria was part of a much larger problem, and so it turned into a book analysing what I called ‘pseudo-anti-imperialism,’ taking up cases of it in Russia and Ukraine, Bosnia and Kosovo, Iran and Iraq as well as Syria.

Basically, their vision of the world was West-centric and Orientalist; they failed to see that ordinary people in other parts of the world like Libya and Syria had agency and the desire for democracy, so they clubbed the democratic uprisings in these countries with the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. I contrasted this with genuine anti-imperialism, which opposes all imperialisms and supports all democratic revolutions.

My hope was and is that socialists who read it will understand that opposing only Western imperialism and failing to express any solidarity with people struggling against other imperialisms or authoritarian regimes is a betrayal of socialist values.

You challenge a significant strand of the left that sees any enemy of the U.S. as inherently progressive. What historical or theoretical missteps do you think led to this distortion?

I trace this tendency back to the degeneration of the Russian revolution and the failure of much of the left to come to terms with it. Of course, the Russian revolution took place in dire circumstances and would inevitably have faced huge problems, but a principled commitment to democracy on the part of Russian leaders would have saved it from becoming the authoritarian and imperialist monster it became.

Lenin played an ambiguous role. On the one hand, he encouraged an enormous centralization of power in the hands of the Bolshevik Party, which allowed the most totalitarian elements to take control of it, while his failure to allow the Constituent Assembly to do its work resulted in the state becoming an amalgam of bourgeois and Tsarist elements, as he himself acknowledged shortly before his death. On the other hand, Lenin hated what he called ‘Great-Russian chauvinism,’ by which he meant ethnic Russian supremacism and imperialist domination of former Tsarist colonies.

For him, Russian imperialism had to be opposed in exactly the same way as Western imperialism. He clashed with Stalin on this point and tried to ensure that the constitution of the USSR would allow for equality between Russia and its former colonies.

After Lenin’s death, Stalin reversed his policies but didn’t change the constitution, because he wanted to present himself as Lenin’s true heir. Yet hardly any Communists and fellow-travelers, nor even Trotskyists and other anti-Stalinists, highlighted his oppression of former colonies. A few anti-Stalinists denounced his 1939 pact with Hitler, which also had an imperialist dimension, but most continued to call the Soviet Union a workers’ state, and for mainstream Communists it was a socialist country.

So Western and especially US imperialism was the main enemy. Anyone who posed as an opponent of US imperialism, even if too brutal and authoritarian to be characterized as progressive, could hope to evade scrutiny and condemnation of their crimes.

You group together figures like Putin, Khamenei, Assad, Netanyahu, Trump, and even al-Baghdadi—not despite their ideological differences, but because of their shared contempt for human rights and democracy. What do you think explains the growing affinity between far-right movements and authoritarian states across such seemingly different ideological and cultural contexts?

Autocrats may call upon a variety of ideological or religious beliefs to back their claims to absolute power, but their agenda remains the same: to negate human rights and crush democracy. If they come from a Muslim background, like Khamenei and his predecessor Khomeini, or al-Baghdadi and his successors, they use their own somewhat different visions of Islamic supremacism; Netanyahu appeals to a Zionist vision of a Jewish-supremacist state; Putin goes back to the greatness of the Tsarist empire and Russian supremacism; Assad pretended to be secular but favoured his own Alawite community and persecuted Sunnis; Trump’s ideology is White-supremacism in tandem with unhindered capitalist exploitation and corruption.

But they all seek to wipe out dissidence or resistance to their executive actions, moulding state institutions to conform to their dictatorial inclinations. Once in power, they make it almost impossible to remove them. In rare instances, the strength of pre-existing democratic institutions and popular beliefs may stand in their way, as in the case of Trump, or the patent incompetence and corruption of their regime may lead to its collapse in the face of a minor push, as in the case of Assad.

How should we understand the alliances of convenience among authoritarian regimes—whether secular, theocratic, or populist—when they all oppose popular uprisings and democratic revolutions?

In a way, you have answered your own question: they form opportunistic alliances with groups and regimes that appear to be completely hostile because they have a common interest in crushing democracy. The United States and Islamists in Iran appear to be on opposite sides, and you would think there’s been no room for wheeling and dealing. Yet they have collaborated on numerous occasions.

The 1953 coup against secular, democratic Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was orchestrated by the CIA and MI6, but approved by Khomeini and carried out on the ground by Islamist mullahs and knife-wielding gangs. When over 50 US citizens were taken hostage in their embassy in Tehran in 1979, it was a huge embarrassment to then-president Carter, who had been critical of human rights abuses by the Islamic regime.

His failure to get the hostages released ensured he lost the next election to Reagan, who had no such qualms about human rights. In a highly significant move, Khomeini released the hostages on the day of Reagan’s inauguration. Documents unearthed by Robert Parry and reported in an article entitled ‘When Israel/Neocons Favoured Iran’ show that Israel’s Likud government of Menachem Begin became an important source of covert arms supplies to Iran after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, with the profits being invested in Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

The Israeli Labour Party’s desire to get in on this act paved the way to the Iran-Contra scandal in 1985–86, when Reagan authorized the secret sale of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to Iran via Israel and used the proceeds to fund the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua. By this point, Saddam Hussein had long been calling for a ceasefire and negotiations in the Iran-Iraq war, but Israel regarded him as their greatest enemy and wanted him defeated, and American neocons agreed.

So you had Iranian Islamists, Israeli Zionists and American neoconservatives all on the same side, despite huge ideological differences. More recently, in response to the Syrian uprising in 2011, Assad not only released around 1500 well-connected Islamists from its prisons but actually gave them arms and facilitated the influx of foreign Islamists.

Finally, it has just been reported that Israel-backed militias linked to ISIS are being allowed by the IDF to loot the miserable amounts of aid sent to Gaza.

Your chapter on Iran details the tragic alliance between some Marxist groups and the emerging theocracy. Do you see parallels in current leftist support for Iran’s regime? What lessons are still being ignored?

I would like to answer your question by referring to an interview with Chahla Chafiq in Jacobin, since her political positions are so close to mine but she was a participant in the Iranian revolution whereas I was not. She explains that the Tudeh party was the classic pro-Soviet party and the Fedayeen guerilla movement also aligned with the Soviet Union although less so, whereas she belonged to ‘Line Three,’ the independent left, which believed that the Soviets were an imperialist force.

The Soviet-aligned parties supported Khomeini because they believed he was anti-imperialist, because he referred to the United States as ‘Big Satan’ and Western Europe as ‘Small Satan’. But all the left groups agreed on the anti-Western-imperialist line, so even the independent left was confused. Feminism was seen as Western and rejected by the left, which thought that any problems of women’s rights, civil rights or human rights in general could be fixed by socialism: a position that Chafiq in retrospect thought was the biggest error.

When American feminist Kate Millet, who had worked with a group of Iranian dissenters campaigning against the Shah, visited Iran soon after the 1979 revolution in response to an invitation by Iranian feminists and joined a women’s March 8^th demonstration protesting against compulsory veiling, she was vilified by pseudo-anti-imperialists in Iran as well as the US, saying, ‘What right do you have, from what position are you speaking?

We’re anti-imperialists.’ To me, this borders on insanity. Millet worked in solidarity with the people of Iran against the Shah, who was installed in a CIA-sponsored coup: doesn’t that make her anti-imperialist? But no, she’s not anti-imperialist according to these pseudo-anti-imperialists because she also demonstrated in solidarity with Iranian women! Similarly, any expressions of solidarity with Iranian workers, ethnic minorities or LGBT+ people makes you pro-imperialist according to their definition!

Independent socialists like Chafiq have learned from the dire consequences of the mistake they made, but much of the international left has not moved on. They were more outraged at the killing of Qasem Soleimani, a mass murderer, than the killing of thousands of peaceful protesters: more in solidarity with the oppressive regime than the people oppressed by it. They are still stuck in Stalinist Cold-War narratives, where Western imperialism is the only enemy and anyone claiming to oppose it deserves solidarity, no matter how despotic they are.

They constantly question or deny the agency of the amazingly courageous people who risk everything to struggle for freedom from such despotism, suggesting, for example, that Iranians fighting for democracy are either monarchists or are being manipulated by the West.

https://firenexttime.net/the-people-first-rohini-hensman-on-democracy-resistance-and-the-global-left/

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