Forty years ago, activism helped topple an evil regime in South Africa. Now Iranians need us — and the world looks away. What happened?
Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash
I’d love nothing more right now than to write about something frivolous, human, with a dash of humor. I could talk about my adult kids, a yeast cake gone wrong, or even better, my mother. But right now, my simmering rage that wraps itself around this topsy turvy world is hunting for a place where it can be held; it demands a voice.
The angry larva that churns and bubbles in my belly gives me no peace. My sense of helplessness deafens me. And words are all I have.
I’ll start with a highly pixelated memory. I’m in my mid-teens, and my walls are plastered with pictures of my favorite pop stars. My daily diet is Weetabix and shepherd’s pie. Flora margarine had replaced butter on the shelf of our refrigerator, to my deep chagrin. The world news is not part of my daily informational diet, but I am obsessed with the pop charts — same thing, more or less. When my pop idols get involved in world events, so do I.
Yes, they’ve gone political. They sing about injustices, unfairness, and South Africa. Welcome to the dawn of pop activism, the era of Live Aid and We Are the World.
I don’t remember how I first learned of Apartheid — probably on TV. Images of Mandela were as ubiquitous as ads for Coca-Cola — 23 years cutting stone on Robben Island hadn’t taken away his thirst for freedom.
The pop stage became an op-ed for a mass protest movement that swept the world. We were all South Africa. It barely seemed possible that a cruel fascist regime preaching a widely rejected racist doctrine still existed in the 80’s. We would put a stop to it. And we did.
If Sting and the Eurythmics backed the ANC, then so did I. “Free Nelson Mandela!” we screamed at discos and protests. Satellite TV changed everything. It beamed the crackdowns, Winnie’s marches, and Mandela’s unmistakable voice into living rooms worldwide, speeding the collapse of Apartheid and clearing the path for his election as the nation’s first Black president. I saw a simple equation of good against evil, of freedom overcoming tyranny. I knew nothing of geopolitics and self-interest. At the time, I was unaware of how this anti-Apartheid movement united the political left and right, religious and secular, Black and white, temporarily sweeping away our differences.
The movement was peaceful but powerful. I just saw it all as vibrant, alive, unifying, and above all, very musical. The beating African drums symbolized the world’s heartbeat — an activist’s battle cry for change.
It is astonishing to think that once, corporations, nations, religious representatives, and activists alike formed a unified coalition that boycotted, sanctioned, and condemned South Africa. No influencer in sight.
When Apartheid ended, we were exultant. But I don’t think we were shocked. We had overcome. The events that unfolded in the next decade — the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe — further strengthened our belief that we, the nations of the West, were on the right side of history. “Hey, hey… I saved the world today,” the lyrics of the Eurythmics encapsulated an era of infectious optimism.
Life was indeed simpler then — our narrative of the good West versus evil communism and fascism was easily digestible, fed to us by a handful of TV channels, our media gatekeepers.
And in a way, it worked. We understood what the West stood for. We were proud of our democratic values that led to the downfall of a terrible regime and filled with admiration for those who fought for freedom.
Music, the purest expression of our shared humanity, united us.
We are now 40 years on. I proudly recount my memories of the “Free Mandela” era to anyone prepared to listen. My wonderful students, who are now the age I once was when I quietly penciled “Free Mandela” in giant letters on my English notebook, are convinced that mankind has advanced since then. Somehow they delude themselves that we are forever forward marching — that technological and moral progress work the same way. World War II happened but never again. Apartheid happened — what a horrible way to treat people, but now it’s over. Never again. I don’t have the courage to break it to them that they are tragically mistaken.
Our high-speed era of over-information is barely comparable to the ridiculously expensive TV satellite dishes of the 80’s and 90’s — they are now tin-can relics of a bygone era. Nowadays it’s not a question of obtaining information; it’s the issue of what to do with it all.
Even if the main news channels fail to report it, even if the Iranian internet is blocked, enough news leaks out for us to know that the 90 million Iranians need our help. Desperately.
An Islamic fundamentalist regime has broken a nation on every level — physical, spiritual, moral — and reduced it to destitution. They don’t have a Western-backed ANC, nor do they have a bevvy of pop stars giving solidarity concerts at Times Square. Nonetheless, day after day they raise their own voices, risking their lives — out of despair, yes, but even more because freedom matters that much to them.
Why then is the free world not in unanimous support of this movement? Is it because Iran is considered a “Middle Eastern country”? Is it because we are afraid of the accusation of Islamophobia? Is it because the optics aren’t quite right?
The moral equation could not be any clearer than it was for South Africa in the 1980s — not only is the regime evil, but it spreads its evil throughout the world via its terror proxies. Right now it is killing its citizens with impunity. So where are they — the activists, the corporations, the religious representatives? Is Trump the only one man enough to condemn? Is that it — a cough and a sneeze from the UN as they shuffle papers and make politically correct sounds?
Photo by Jacob Bentzinger on Unsplash
Where’s Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga? What happened to “Free Iran Now”? Where’s the flotilla?
Above all, where’s the press? The BBC? CNN? Why are they using the word “protests” to plaster over the erasure of an entire country? Why, when the Iranian people had taken to the streets in 30 cities two weeks ago, did the legacy media choose to ignore a revolution in the making, preferring to focus on Maduro, Davos, and Grok deepfakes?
The voice of the Iranian people is unified and unequivocal — calling for the end to an extremist Islamic dictatorship. But our voice, the voice that can and does change world events, has fractured into a million pieces, fragmented into condemnations behind closed doors, a modest protest here and there, and deafening silence.
The same people who tied themselves to monuments in solidarity with the Palestinian people label the Iran saga as “complicated.” This trope is eerily familiar. Did I miss the brief that dictated that our response to genocide depends on political affiliations? Certain ideological blocs hesitate to criticize Iran for fear of appearing Islamophobic; others prefer a hands-off approach couched in the language of national sovereignty. Each group has its own reasons, none of them compelling enough to justify silence.
If there is another side to this story, then someone please tell me what it is. Tell me a convincing narrative that justifies the actions of bullies who have systematically destroyed a once wealthy country in its entirety, damning them to become water beggars; who beat, raped, and murdered women in jails for refusing to wear a veil; who silenced opposition and stole their people’s money to build a nuclear arsenal and wage never-ending wars with Israel and the US via its proxies.
If there isn’t one, we, the West, have a moral duty to stand with Iran. And if we don’t, then we are no better than the cowering bullies who line their pockets at the expense of the bodies and souls of a nation held hostage. We are the morally questionable ones. Or perhaps we are just paying lip service to outdated concepts of democracy and individual freedom. We simply aren’t willing to fight for them anymore.
In the ’80s, nation states demanded a moral stance against Apartheid.
Nowadays morality has become twisted by corporations and interest groups until it is no longer recognizable. We have become emotional monocrop farmers, sowing only outrage across the vast fields of our attention. And like any land worked without rest, the soil has thinned to dust. Empathy simply cannot take root in depleted ground.
If January 2026 had happened in 1985, it wouldn’t have been Mandela’s image plastered on our screens but the lion and sun flag. “Free, free Iran!” we would have screamed. The entire free world would have stood in solidarity with the Iranian expat community on every street corner.
Worst of all, the disturbing reality of what’s going down in Iran is only accessible via alternative media outlets (shoutout: Tousi TV), who reveal the bitter truth in videos and voice recordings, livestreamed from Starlink devices when they aren’t being jammed.
Surely, if a country is depriving its citizens of contact with the outside world, then something pretty horrible is going down — just look at Tiananmen Square. But the world’s disturbing silence in the face of real evil (nobody could call the IRGC “freedom fighters,” after all) has forced us to peel away the thin facade of “business as usual” and take a peek at what’s really going on. We ourselves are in an emergency state of absolute moral bankruptcy.
We have arrived at the tipping point of post-nation-state, post-empathy, post-truth, and post-morality, and replaced our worldview with fake news, propaganda, manufactured rage, and virtue signaling.
If your truth button is still somehow intact, then hold on tight and don’t let anyone within ten yards of it. COVID has nothing on the infectiousness of our new moral blindness.
A truth-seeking narrative has no copyright; it can be bought, sold, doctored, and rewritten. Quality reporting has given way to propaganda, and truth has left the building.
Yes, I get it — Iran doesn’t neatly tie into the same story as South Africa. Iran has been sanctioned and condemned. Nobody has ever called them the “good guys” on the world stage. But this isn’t about political alliances, trade, and oil. It isn’t about what the Saudis or the Qataris want. It is the basic equation of freedom versus oppression.
Photo by Tianlei Wu on Unsplash
It is these very freedoms that have allowed me to write and publish, to bemoan this and that, and vent on a public forum. It permits others to read my work, to agree or disagree. I cannot take these freedoms for granted. Because if I do, then one day it will be me or my children or my grandchildren yelling on the streets, facing arbitrary arrest, torture, or death.
In my mid-teens, I was far from politics. Yet somewhere in my hormonally charged brain, I understood what it meant to belong to the West: the difference between freedom and tyranny, democracy and dictatorship. The shadow of Nazi atrocities loomed large, and the daily fear endured by those behind the Iron Curtain was no urban myth.
The country I was born and raised in, Britain, was the proud home of a protest movement that rallied against the world’s most despicable villains. My idols sang and strummed their guitars as an expression of that which is now being slowly eroded.
Now, our moral stance on Iran has become muddied. Our reaction to injustice is as personal and fragmented as our diversified taste in music. Our feeds mirror and feed into a confirmation-bias echo chamber in a never-ending loop of shiny sycophancy. We feel the smugness of empty TikToks with reductive statements that briefly resonate, and then pool back into a flood of amnesiac, AI-fueled slop. The world hears the words “protests in Iran” as mere background noise as we incessantly scroll.
October 7th was a grim rehearsal. It showed how quickly new media could manufacture global moral blindness. Israel became the canary in the coal mine: victims blamed, perpetrators praised, and algorithms humming along exactly as designed. Facts and falsehoods fused into one feed; legacy media amplified the distortions. And now, as another nation begs the world to intervene — when the perpetrators no longer fit the convenient script of “freedom fighters” — we confront a different kind of darkness. Not the darkness imposed on the oppressed, but the blackness of our own moral decay.
The Iranian morgues are overflowing with the bodies of people who died fighting for freedom — the same freedom we consume so casually, as if it were fast food. That, perhaps, is the saddest truth of all. My hope is that when Iranians finally win it — and I believe they will — they’ll cherish it enough to remind us of what we’ve been in danger of forgetting.