Iranian Artists in Diaspora Against War on Iran

For several days now, Iran has faced an illegal invasion carried out by the United States and Israel.

Across the diaspora, wherever we live, we watch with deep concern as bombs fall on our country of origin. At the moment of writing, the situation has escalated into the carpet bombing of the capital and other major cities, alongside attacks on Iranian civilian infrastructure. We are moved not into silence but into responsibility. We feel wounded twice, by the violence of the weapons and by the aggression of the narrative that accompanies this war. We refuse to allow our country to be turned into a geopolitical battlefield under the guise of freedom and democracy.

In many Western media outlets, Iran is often presented as a homogeneous, irrational, fanatical block, and part of the Iranian diaspora is even expected to applaud the bombings in the name of freedom. We, Iranian artists of the diaspora, reject this political and media staging.

We urge the nuance of our position being acknowledged as some of us may have fled censorship and repression or chose to live abroad, but fleeing oppression does not mean wishing for the destruction of a country. One can denounce repression without calling for bombs, criticize power without supporting a war, live in exile without calling for collapse and chaos.

As an independent group of Iranian artists with diverse backgrounds, we firmly condemn this illegal and unprovoked war of aggression against  Iran. It is a blatant violation of international law. We clearly affirm our attachment to Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Many of us had lived in Iran, studied there, and while we appreciate and encourage all grassroots efforts in Iran toward the independence, freedom of expression and human rights, we never degrade ourselves as to imagine a foreign country is allowed to pave that path for us. Iranians internal grievances must be respected as much as their territorial  integrity. Neither of the two are out for grabs.

We do not naïvely believe that war or economic sanctions bring freedom. The recent histories of Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan prove the very opposite. The 1953 overthrow of the government of democratic leader Mohammad Mossadegh, through a CIA and MI6-orchestrated coup, remains one of the starkest examples of foreign interference in Iran’s political life. Both violent interventions and economic coercion, before and after that moment, have repeatedly undermined Iranian democratic efforts. To present these same forces today as instruments of liberation is nothing but dangerous political blindness.

The rhetoric that claims to distinguish a “regime” to be struck from a “people” to be spared is a convenient fiction. We never condone assassinations or bombings, whatever the pretext, because in reality bombs do not recognize such boundaries. When schools, hospitals, or residential neighborhoods are hit, an entire society is wounded.

Iran is a millennia-old civilization, whose people have long been dignified, resilient and deeply attached to their independence. No lasting democratic development is possible without peace and stability. As artists, we know that the first casualty of war is always the complexity of societies. Our work carries the contradictions of exile and memory and refuses to let our country be reduced to a cliché. We resist the reductive binaries of war and flattening a historic and complex society into numbers of the living and the dead.

Finally, we call on artists of the diaspora for whom Iran is not a simple political object but a homeland, to join this independent and non-aligned voice, committed to peace and respect for human dignity.

Collective of independent Iranian artists in the diaspora

(The signatories are members of a collective of Iranian artists and writers living out of Iran, wishing to open a space for critical and non-aligned reflection on the political and cultural issues related to Iran.)

Find all the signatories: https://forms.gle/jo2qc7Up9xUpa4sM8