ﻣﺎﻧﺎ ﻧﻴﺴﺘﺎﻧﻲ Mana Neyestani

Roger Waters—especially during the Pink Floyd era—has been a hero to several generations of us Iranians. His album The Wall inspired all of us to stand up against oppressive systems. I do not know how many of the thousands killed in the recent revolutionary uprising were fans and lovers of Pink Floyd, or how many knew his lyrics by heart. That is why, when I read what Roger Waters had said about the Iranian people’s movement, my heart sank even more.

Dear Mr. Waters, this is not the first time that intellectuals, because of ideological alignments, have denied reality. History has recorded how Jean-Paul Sartre, for many years, denied the repression, censorship, and mass killings in the Soviet Siberian camps due to his attachment to communism and his alliance against the United States. He even prevented his colleagues from publishing news about these crimes, to the point that Albert Camus, disillusioned by these lies, turned his back on him. Only when the Soviet Union invaded Prague did Sartre finally raise his voice in protest. These facts remain as dark stains on the record of an important thinker like Sartre, preserved in history—lessons from which we should learn.

For nearly a decade now, the majority of Iranian society—hopeless about any reform or change within the Shiite dictatorship of the Islamic Republic, which has also turned into a corrupt economic mafia—has carried out numerous uprisings. The most recent one, according to documents, videos, and reports, brought an enormous crowd of people, exhausted by mental control, captivity, and servitude, into the streets. They were met with bloodshed by the regime’s executioners and their foreign mercenaries. Thousands have been killed; thousands more arrested, tortured, or are awaiting severe punishment, simply because they want a secular and free government, and because no peaceful path toward achieving this demand has been left open to them.

When they took over regime-run stores—the agents of their poverty and misery—they symbolically scattered rice outside to loudly and clearly say that they are hungry, yet they place freedom and human dignity above everything else. For more than seven days now, the murderous regime, claiming to be fighting “armed terrorists” and “agents of Mossad and the CIA,” has completely cut off the Iranian people’s connection to the outside world by shutting down the international internet, in order to conceal its crimes and prevent the horrifying scale of brutality and slaughter from reaching others through the voices of victims and survivors.

And people like you, instead of emphasizing the silencing of the Iranian people’s voices and relying on grassroots narratives, seem to listen to and repeat—within your circle of leftist allies—the regime’s preferred narrative, a narrative that appears to have gained your own approval as well.
Iranians love you and your work. Do not betray them—stand with them.

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