The people of Iran are rising up once again. What can we do to help? An open letter to Canadians of conscience
Sid Shniad
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January 13, 2026
The people of Iran are rising up once again. What can we do to help?
An open letter to Canadians of conscience
The protests that began on December 28, have brought to the streets a broad cross section of people calling for economic justice and political change, demanding dignity and freedom. Witnessing from afar the brutal and murderous suppression of protests by the government of the Islamic Republic, many of us outside Iran are compelled to raise our voices in support of the protests and in solidarity with the people who have taken to the streets with little more than their lives. While the IRI regime has made it all but impossible to obtain independent news, the corporate Western media and their Persian language satellites are busy pushing dangerous sectarian narratives and manufacturing consent for imperialist interests. We must reject the imposition of exploitative scenarios in place of supporting the legitimate demands of the Iranian people.
There is nothing new about the scenarios of direct military intervention, increased sanctions, and parachuted self-proclaimed leaders pushed by their visibility in the diaspora and backed by big money. Of these so-called leaders, the diasporic Iranian political right and their Zionists and MAGA allies have settled on Reza Pahlavi, promoting him aggressively — even violently as we have seen in some protests outside Iran. Those of us who truly care about the right of Iranians to live with dignity and freedom have to be extra vigilant, and differentiate between demands from inside Iran for the end of the IRI dictatorship and the Trump-Natanyahu agenda for further dominance in the region by undermining the viability of a sovereign Iran. We must not become mouthpieces for the same criminals who are committing genocide in Gaza and further expanding it through broader Palestine.
What does history tell us about this moment?
This moment in Iranian history has to be understood as the continuation of a long line of uprisings for democratic governance, economic sovereignty, and political alternatives to autocratic rule. Up to now, these movements have been derailed, frustrated, or subverted through the machinations of Western powers and domestic demogogues and reactionaries working in tandem.
At the dawn of the 20th century, the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911) demanded the end of monarchy and its replacement with a republican system. However, the Islamic reactionaries on the one hand and the British and Russian empires on the other, installed a soldier to the highest seat of power, as the first king in the Pahlavi line. During WWII, when the first Pahlavi lost his usefulness, the Allied powers replaced him with his 19-y-o son who effectively signed over any semblance of political sovereignty in Iran.
The grassroots victory of the Oil Nationalization Movement (1949-1953) radicalized to the point that the second Pahlavi, this vessel of the West, fled the country, only to be returned with a military coup d’etat designed by the CIA and MI5 that also orchestrated reactionary Islamic clerics’ opposition to the democratically elected nationalist government. Upon reinstatement, Mohamad Reza Shah arrested thousands, executed hundreds, and established the infamous SAVAK with the assistance of the CIA and tutelage of the Mossad. As the Supreme King he presided over a regime of terror, the looting of Iran’s resources, and the building of a military that acted as the regional arm of the US, while millions of Iranians were pushed into marginal survival in urban peripheries.
Between the late 1960s and 1979, the opposition to Pahlavi despotism was shaped by forces with strong roots in leftist and liberation politics with grassroots connection to the working class, culminating in the 1979 Revolution that saw popular mobilization as general strikes and massive street protests demanding economic independence (esteghlal) and freedom (azadi). Once it became clear that the people of Iran would not tolerate the Pahlavi Shah any longer, Western governments, in order to thwart the possibility of democratic socialism in Iran, supported the Islamic fundamentalists who, contrary to popular misperception and revisionist history, have always been the West’s go-to in Iran and elsewhere in the region.
Over the past forty-eight years, the clerical regime of the IRI has succeeded where the monarchy had tried but failed: It has all but annihilated the nationalist and leftist forces inside Iran. There has been a succession of uprisings by women, ethnic groups, students, and workers demanding political reform and social and economic justice. But the IRI has brutally suppressed all of them. It has targeted, killed or imprisoned civic leaders including student activists, journalists, lawyers, artists, union activists, writers, teachers, and doctors. It is the apparent vacuum of leadership that MAGA, Zionists, and the supporters of Reza Pahlavi are now banking on.
What can we do at present?
People of conscience in Canada must not be limited to only rhetoric about the Iranians’ right to protest and self-determination through democratic means. We must be able to see that a king replacing the clerics is no meaningful move forward and in fact goes against the goals that Iranians have been struggling for in the past century and a half. We must actively oppose foreign intervention and economic sanctions that are hurting Iranian people, while demanding that the IRI adhere to human rights mandates.
Iranian people do not need white Western saviours, nor do they need a king. Mindlessly transposing MAGA logic to “Make Iran Great Again” is the recipe for Trump’s politics of criminality and interference in the service of the super-rich that treat us all as disposable. We must speak out against the US agenda of regime change and the threats of military intervention. We must refuse to accept that the only choice for the Iranian people is between foreign occupation and iron fist repression.
The current economic crisis of runaway inflation that has caused so much hardship for the people is to a large degree caused by the economic sanctions against Iran that Canada is a part of. The sanctions have created fertile conditions for the spread of corruption on the one hand and on the other are imposing collective punishment on Iranians. The UN Special Rapporteur on Effects of Sanctions and Human Rights has urged the countries imposing unilateral trade blockades to stop violating the Geneva conventions and UN charter by doing so. We must demand that Canada end debilitating economic sanctions against Iran that have created rampant black market for necessities of life.
We must have our ears to the ground to hear the voices of the people inside Iran, and demand a peaceful and judicial approach to the IRI. We must demand that international humanitarian law be put to the forefront so the people of Iran can breathe once more. We must firmly stand against the brutality of the IRI against Iranians as we stand against the criminal Western fascists that are annexing territories and installing vassals like the genocidal colonial regimes of the 18th and 19th century. We must demand the immediate and unconditional end to suppression of protests. We must demand the immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners.
Womxn, Life, Freedom is more than a slogan. It is a global imperative now more than ever.
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