Shoja Azari, is an Iranian visual artist and filmmaker based in New York, working with Sherin Neshat, his life-long partner and comrade, on art projects of note and substance. Their last project is Land of Dreams, a magnificent new film set in the United States but ever so redolent of meaning viz. the New Iranian Revolution that Shoja writes about below. After demonstrating how central developments in Iran have been in world affairs since the 1950s, and especially since 1979, Shoja asks the largest and most pertinent of questions: Will the international left once again betray the Iranian people? To which question I would add: Will the international left once again betray itself by betraying the Iranian people?
The 1979 Iranian revolution coincided with the emergence of the neoliberal order and the domination of financial capitalism in the world. Today’s new revolutionary movement coincides with financialised capitalism’s deepest, most profound, crisis since the 1920s.
When the 1979 revolution entered its final stages, and the demise of Shah’s regime seemed inevitable, the US and the West, at the height of the cold war, aligned with the most reactionary factions within the movement, namely, the Islamic fundamentalists led by Khomeini. At the same time, intellectuals and the left until then, the vanguard
— source yanisvaroufakis.eu | Yanis Varoufakis | 24/10/2022