The following was a speech delivered by an Iranian-Australian member of Red Ant at the 2026 Naarm May Day rally.

Hello comrades. First, I’d like to acknowledge that we’re gathering on the stolen land of Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging and to all First Nations people here today. We’re here to stand in solidarity with the people, specifically workers in West Asia against the US and Israeli war of aggression. As an Iranian-Australian communist, I’d like to use this opportunity to talk about how we, workers and people of the Global North can stand in solidarity with people in the Global South in this war of aggression.

Despite the obviousness of the idea of international solidarity and a long tradition behind it, practicing solidarity at each point in the history remains a complex task in need of deep political deliberation. Besides class consciousness, we need to consider that we are acting in a unipolar world with one hegemonic power, the US. No other nation comes even close to the US in terms of ability and willingness to project military power to disrupt, destroy, and create monopoly in order to dictate terms of trade amongst all nations. Labeling other nations resistance against US aggression as ‘imperial rivalry’ overlooks this reality and is the first step towards sub optimal political action.

We also need to be aware that the Left in Global North is not a decisive force. At this point in time, we are unable to mobilize on a scale that determines the direction of our nations. But we can challenge the narrative that justifies the direction our nation is going towards. Looking at the political events in 21st century shows a clear pattern of narrative making that creates pretexts for US aggression, an aggression that aims at changing whatever is left over from the Cold War era in West Asia. Demonizing the sovereign or semi-sovereign states by repeating baseless or exaggerated claims, placing sanctions on them to weaken nations to the point of surrender, and finally attacking them.

In response to this pattern, any act of solidarity that we organize needs to counter the narrative created by the mass media in the Global North. The narrative that paints people in the Global South as voice-less, powerless, victims in need of Global North intervention to “liberate” them from their misery. This is the narrative that justifies sanctions and eventually makes people in West Asia bombard-able. They’re framed as so miserable that even if they die under the bombs, it’s an end to their misery. We need to be aware that our intentions do not necessarily define the effect of our deeds. If what we say sits well with the main stream narrative, then we’re feeding it rather that resisting it; regardless of our intent.

When we criticize the states on the receiving end of the US aggression, of course in solidarity with the working class there, we need to be clear that these states are like ANY other capitalist state, they just act under a harsher reality and have to expose their true nature more vividly. This does not justify sanctions that inevitably hit the ordinary people harder than states. Nor does it justify so called humanitarian intervention. As no-one demands humanitarian intervention into the US to liberate Americans from their state, no one should do so about any other nation-state.

You may think that appealing to the nation-state is backward, but I remind you that we’re not living in the heydays of communism and socialism when revolution was in the air. We’ve gone so far back and need to paddle from there. We are in a time that first task of any socialist and communist is to stop the global dominant power from manipulating the situation in their own country and in any other sovereign nation-state just to let the organic forces battle each other out and define their own direction of movement. It’s time for us in the Global North to change the way we support the struggles in the Global South. Our focus should be on demanding relief from all unilateral sanctions and all other sorts of coercion imposed by the empire on them.

US HANDS OFF WEST OF ASIA!