Dissident writers, activists, and former and current political prisoners in the West have released a compelling and humane open letter to Iran’s imprisoned activists.

We write to you from a place of deep solidarity, our hearts heavy with the knowledge of the struggle you face within Iran’s prisons: the torture, the systematic neglect, the enforced silence, and the brutal reality of sham trials and executions. As former and current political prisoners, activists, and scholars committed to the global project of abolition, anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism, we see you across the distances of geography and the silence of censorship and internet blackouts. And we stand in solidarity with you, as you are at the intersection of two sources of oppression.
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Your struggle is as global as our collective dreams of freedom and dignity. We stand with you, and we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism. We invite global civil society and anti-imperialist activists and organizations to extend their unconditional support and solidarity to all incarcerated kin fighting for our collective liberation, to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners and uplift their voices, to put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative, and to call upon that government to immediately stop all the executions and free all political prisoners.

The Iranian authorities must stop their inhumane practice of death and incarceration now. And the US and Israel must end their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate our communities.

The writers take a metaphor from Siamak Namazi, an Iranian American who spent eight years in the country’s notorious Evin prison: ““What I hear from prisoners and my friends there is that they feel stuck between the two blades of a scissors, the evil regime that imprisons and tortures them and a foreign force dropping bombs on their heads in the name of freedom,” he told journalists in 2025, shortly after Israel bombed that prison, killing 80 guards, prisoners, and civilians.

Predictably, there has been a rejoinder to this letter from within the left. Vijay Prashad has risen to say that anti-imperialist solidarity with Iran’s military resistance the the US–Israeli war isn’t hollow at all. Prashad seems to miss that the letter wasn’t directed at any government, but from outsiders of one society to another, and he alleges that the writers’ metaphor is wrong: the scissors’ “blades are unequal” and “the image makes the aggressor and the attacked appear as parallel sources of the same danger.”

Prashad’s argument is not just worn out — from being repeated so many times in so many different contexts. It builds on a shocking refusal of memory. Counting only the most recent uprising, in late 2025 and early 2026, the blades of violence from without the country and from the Islamic Republic security force are similarly deadly.

The glaring and tragic reality is that by the one measure that matters the most, human lives lost, the repression of the past year’s protests was as destructive as the external war. The Iranian government’s own figure of deaths in the protests, 3,117, is scarcely smaller than its count of the deaths from two rounds of war: 3,528. Human rights monitors and medical source have reported figures up to ten times as high in the repression. The blade cutting Iran from within is certainly no less sharp than the missiles and bombs sent by the United States.

While not the only place it can start, deep solidarity can begin by treating each life and each death as worth just as much as ours.

Photos: Left: mourner sits next to the grave of slain protester Ali in Tehran (Guardian gallery) / Right: mourners crouch atop grave of slain schoolchild, Minab (Andolu Agency gallery).