The Iranian Spirit of Defiance

Throughout history, human societies have been tested through various calamitous events—wars, natural disasters, persecutions, and others. The victims have on many occasions demonstrated an indomitable spirit in putting up resistance. This is something the Iranian people are showing.

Pranay Kumar Shome

Shattered buildings, lost lives, ruined dreams of life, cries of agony—these are some of the scenes the Iranian people are currently experiencing amidst the ongoing war in West Asia. On February 28, the US and Israel launched an air campaign to try and bring the Islamic Republic of Iran to its knees. Their goals were threefold — enact a regime change, undermine Iran’s conventional and unconventional military capabilities, and appropriate Iran’s hydrocarbon resources.

More than a month later, Iran stands tall. Despite suffering heavily in the illegal aerial campaign of the United States and Israel, ordinary Iranians are demonstrating a remarkable degree of solidarity. This is not only reflective of the spirit of civilizational resistance of the Iranian people but also shows their deep reverence for the theocratic government of Iran.

The Global South must support Iran in these trying times and call out the hypocrisy of the West, who always tries to give moral sermons about actions of states being rooted in international law, but themselves don’t follow the rulebook

In the latest tirade against Iran on social media, the American president, Donald Trump, has threatened Iran to reach a negotiated settlement within a very short span of time or risk witnessing Iran’s power plants being targeted in an “unprecedented air campaign”.

In response, the government of Iran has called on the ordinary people, particularly the youth of the country, to take to the streets and form human chains around power plants to protect them.

In this context, it becomes essential to decode the nature of this announcement.

The History of the Spirit of Resistance

In hindsight, this appeal by the Iranian government may seem rather different. But upon a deeper analysis, it becomes clear that it embodies the Shia spirit of resistance that has a long tradition dating back to the days of the martyrdom of Hussein ibn Ali, a grandson of Prophet Mohammed, in the Battle of Karbala.

Following this tradition, important political and military figures have been martyred for the cause of the country and its people. Notable figures in this context include Qasem Soleimani, the late commander of the Quds Force who was killed by the US forces in a targeted drone attack; Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a top nuclear scientist of Iran who was assassinated by Israel in a covert operation; and most recently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the late Supreme Leader of Iran; and Ali Larijani, former Secretary General of the Supreme National Security Council of the country, among other top military and political figures.

Defiance of Tech Hegemony

In his book Prison Notebooks, the Italian neo-Marxist philosopher and thinker Antonio Gramsci coined the concept of hegemony. Hegemony, for him, represented a zeitgeist—a new defining idea of the times in which an individual is living and how the acceptance of that idea is generated by developing legitimacy—which is to be done by conquering the civil society, which he calls the ‘structures of legitimation’.

In the context of the ongoing war, America and Israel have successfully been able to generate legitimacy about their ‘overwhelming power’ through the use of state-of-the-art weapons integrated with cutting-edge technology through a targeted narrative warfare campaign. However, Iran is successfully defying that ideational hegemony by highlighting how, in calling on the ordinary citizens of Iran to defy this attempted demonstration of force, Iran won’t be beaten into submission. Iran, therefore, is trying to reclaim the domain of global civil society through the use of the human body as a symbolic gesture of building counter-hegemony through the ‘structures of legitimation.’

In doing so, Iran is trying to demonstrate the symbolic superiority of the organic, soulful resistance of the East against the inorganic, mechanical hegemony of the United States and Israel. In addition to this, it must be understood that the West, through its high-tech weaponry, is trying to sanitize death, whereas the Iranian spirit of resistance, which is manifesting itself in the appeal of the Iranian government to form human chains, is the expression of ‘humanization’ of targets—representing an attempt to break the mechanical distance the West relies on.

Iran is setting a template for the countries of the Global South that they must not give up; they must not succumb to the exercise of hegemony by the West, both in military as well as in financial terms. Further, the Global South must support Iran in these trying times and call out the hypocrisy of the West, who always tries to give moral sermons about actions of states being rooted in international law, but themselves don’t follow the rulebook.

Pranay Kumar Shome, a research analyst who is a PhD candidate at Mahatma Gandhi Central University, Bihar, India