Trump “defends” the right to protest in Iran, criminalizes protest in Washington
By
E.P. Milligan
8 January 2018
US President Donald Trump last week published a series of tweets denouncing the Iranian government’s crackdown on protests against austerity and social inequality that shook the bourgeois-clerical regime. The protests, which heralded the entry of the Iranian working class into struggle against the right-wing nationalist regime, left over 20 dead in clashes with government forces and hundreds more arrested.
Trump began a day after the first protests, calling on the Iranian government to “respect their people’s rights, including right to express themselves. The world is watching!”
Having done his best to starve the Iranian population by means of economic sanctions, repeatedly threatened it with war, and banned Iranians from entering the US, Trump offered crocodile tears to the “great Iranian people,” who “have little food, big inflation and no human rights.”
Over the ensuing days, he issued a barrage of tweets decrying “human rights violations” by the regime, at one point criticizing it because it had “closed down the Internet so that peaceful demonstrators cannot communicate.” Last Wednesday, Trump tweeted a veiled threat of direct US intervention, promising the Iranian people, “You will see great support from the United States at the appropriate time!”
As a historically oppressed country, Iran must be defended against imperialist bullying and aggression. This does not, however, imply any political support for the Iranian government, which is a capitalist regime representing the interests of the clerical establishment, the bazaar merchants and big business. Behind the smokescreen of anti-US rhetoric it carries out a policy of…