Slavoj Žižek Addresses Iranians During 2022 Protests

Dear friends:

It’s not enough to say that I’m fully in solidarity with your struggle with the “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi”¹ protests. It’s much more that I want to say.

Your struggle has literally—this is not a rhetorical exaggeration—world historical importance, because it serves a lesson also to us in the so-called developed West.

We have our own feminism. In its predominant form, it is the so-called politically correct #MeToo feminism, where it is clear that it mostly attracts and mobilizes (upper) middle-class women. It solicits them to assert their specific identity, mostly excluding, opposing men, while your struggle in Iran is precisely feminist protest which immediately includes also men, men that know well that the oppression of women in Iran also involves their own oppression, that Iranian men will not be really free without the full freedom of women. We, mostly in the West, men in the West, we don’t know this.

Second thing. The victim was a Kurdish young woman. But again, it’s not that now Kurds want identity, their specific way of life… No, it became clear to Iranians that the oppression of Kurds is just a moment of the general political oppression in Iran. Without freedom for the Kurdish people, the majority of Iranians, who are of course not Kurds, will not be free.

The same goes for the third aspect of your protests: the struggle against religious fundamentalism. You see it very clearly how so-called morality police which means brutal physical police oppression is the other side the necessary support of religious fundamentalism.

And what you also clearly see is that all these three levels of the struggle are three aspects of one and the same struggle. This is what we don’t see in the West. And we will have to learn this. It’s not that we in the West already live in freedom and we can sympathize with you, giving you the patronizing message that ultimately you just have to catch up with us, with Western liberal democracy. No! Western liberal democracy is today in deep crisis: Anti-feminism, political violence, religious violence are all exploding. And we will have to follow you to organize protests which bring all these different forms of unfreedom, of violence, together. So what I especially like about your protests is that all of a sudden you know all those cliches about cultural differences — you cannot understand us — we cannot understand you — are all of a sudden obliterated. They disappeared. The moment I learned about your protests, I knew it: I am part of that same struggle.

And, again, to conclude, what I also learned is that I don’t have anything to teach you here. I have to learn from you. That’s why I expect a lot from your struggle. Maybe, in the short term, police oppression will strangle it. But I’m sure that the underground work of your spirit will continue, because you fight for Justice and Freedom. And, as you prove today, and you already did it with other protests in the past, that fight for political spiritual freedom cannot ever be fully strangled. It survives.

So I wish you all the best, not as an external observer of your struggle but as I hope in some sense also a participant in it. It’s the same struggle. Although it has different forms in different countries, but it’s one and the same struggle. We are part of it.

I’m just sad that I am not younger, healthier, because I feel guilty in some naïve sense of not being with you there. That’s, I think, my Duty. So please, go on, don’t lose your faith. At the end, even if this will happen after some years, you will win.

Thank you