The Deactivation of Solidarity
IRAN: CALM AS A WEAPON
Iran has just replayed the same brutal lesson once again. A society rises, the regime absorbs the shock, and then “calm” returns on the regime’s terms. Streets fall silent not because the conflict has been resolved, but because the security apparatus has learned to price dissent in injuries, prisons, and funerals. The final product is not stability. It is enforced normality — the kind that turns silence into a public utility.
POLAND ON X: AGENCY DELETED
What interests me far more than the crackdown itself is the international echo — especially the one coming from Poland on X. One would expect at least the elementary reflex of recognition: a society confronting a regime, paying a terrible price, and needing, at minimum, the world’s moral clarity. Instead we see the familiar shortcut: not defense of the Iranian public, but the instantly comforting sentence: “Israel fueled it,” “it was a provocation,” “someone else’s game.”
This is not analysis. This is outsourcing responsibility for perception. It replaces a concrete, material machine of repression with a convenient external culprit. And it delivers something priceless to the regime: it helps erase the people as agents of their own history. The Iranian public is reduced to scenery. The only “real” actor left on stage is the foreign conspirator. The regime does not even have to persuade. It only has to suppress. A segment of foreign commentary will complete the conversion — laundering repression straight into geopolitics.
THE POLISH PARADOX: THE 1980s MIRROR
There is a second, especially bitter layer in the Polish version of this reflex. Poland in the 1980s was exactly that battlefield: society versus regime-project. Large parts of the civilized world supported Polish resistance materially, politically, informationally, and symbolically. And the propaganda template used against Poland was identical to what we hear today: “it’s not the people,” “it’s external instigators,” “foreign services are behind it.”
Poles recognized that narrative then for exactly what it was: an attempt to steal agency from the public and to justify repression as a form of defense. And now parts of the same society — in its online bloodstream — produce a mirror image of that very template, only this time directed at someone else.
Moral memory does not die by forgetting facts. It dies when a society refuses to recognize the same structure when it returns wearing a different costume.
OCTOBER 7: HOW “SOLIDARITY” BECAME A SWITCH
This is also why October 7 matters here. After the Hamas massacre, there was a moment when “solidarity with Israel” functioned as an almost automatic moral reflex in much of the world: recognition that civilians were slaughtered, that a state had been attacked, that basic moral language still existed. Then the reflex fragmented, hardened into camps, and in many circles flipped into something else entirely: a permission slip to treat the attack as either a footnote, a propaganda object, or a moral bargaining chip.
In Poland’s online discourse, that shift produced a specific pathology: “solidarity” became performative when it served identity, and disposable when it demanded consistency. The same feed that could demand uncompromising clarity after October 7 can, months later, deny agency to Iranians facing their own security apparatus, because the only acceptable explanatory key has to orbit Israel. In other words, solidarity is no longer a stance toward human exposure; it is a switch controlled by narrative alignment.
FREE PALESTINE AUTOPILOT: ISRAEL AS DEFAULT GRAVITY
There is another circuit running on autopilot: the “Free Palestine” reflex in its most simplistic form. In practice it often looks like this: if Iran is mentioned at all, it is mentioned only to redirect attention back to Israel; if silence dominates, it is because Iranian victims do not fit neatly into the ready-made story in which every event must be decoded as a Western or Israeli plot.
The result is a strange moral inversion. A society being beaten by its own regime is not treated as a society with agency and suffering, but as a stage prop in an external drama. When the only acceptable explanatory key is “Israel,” the Iranian public becomes invisible by definition. That is not solidarity. That is narrative possession.
ISRAEL: THE SENTIMENTAL SHORTCUT
Now add Israel, because the Polish online reflex is fixated on Israel anyway. Israeli reactions cover a wide spectrum, but one motif deserves to be doused with cold water: the sudden resurrection of sentimental talk about “Persians as the natural friends of Israel” the moment the regime falls. Netanyahu has framed the Iranian people as potential partners once tyranny is removed — as though decades of proxy war, mutual demonization, and deep regional trauma could be dissolved with one optimistic sentence.
Yes, there is a historical memory of pre-1979 relations. Yes, many Iranians intensely oppose the regime. But “natural friendship” is not a geopolitical substance. It is a slogan. People can share a common interest in the collapse of a regime and still share extremely little about the world that comes after. A society is not a blank page waiting for someone else’s preferred future. When rhetoric turns an entire people into a projected ally, it stops being solidarity and becomes a screen.
TURKEY: GATEKEEPING RISK
Which brings us to the strangest actor in this theater: Turkey. Ankara signals that it will not accept a strike on Iran, warns against outside escalation, and speaks the language of stability and negotiation. That can sound responsible. It can also be read as infrastructure logic: borders, energy routes, trade corridors, migration pressure, regional leverage. Turkey wants to remain a gatekeeper of risk, not the victim of someone else’s escalation.
And here I deliberately leave a sharp line — half-question, half-claim, purely rhetorical — because it exposes the mechanism even before anyone “proves” it as fact: if Turkish weapons show up “as evidence,” not in the hands of protesters but circulating inside the ecosystem of the security forces, will we call it Turkish meddling, or will we finally admit what regimes do in plain sight: manufacture pretexts by turning objects into arguments?
THE SYNDROME: WHY THIS IS NOT “JUST A BAD TAKE”
This is not an isolated reflex. The same Polish circuits that default to “it was Israel” also normalize Kremlin-flavored “realism,” flirt with Holocaust denial as if truth were a negotiable prop, and attack continued support for Ukraine as if survival were optional. These are not three separate scandals. They are one syndrome: the demotion of agency, the laundering of tyranny into “complexity,” and the conversion of historical reality into a political toy.
Because this is what regimes export most efficiently: not ideology, but permission structures. They export the permission to replace society with narrative, to downgrade people into pawns, to treat brutality as “complexity,” and to treat complexity as a reason to do nothing.
CLOSING: WHAT DEACTIVATION LOOKS LIKE
This is the real scandal of the Polish X-echo on Iran. It is not merely a wrong opinion. It is a symptom. A society that once desperately needed and received global solidarity now contains growing pockets that are structurally incapable of recognizing solidarity when it is demanded by others. The old moral reflex has been replaced by a newer reflex: outsource causality, outsource responsibility, outsource empathy, then congratulate yourself for being “hard-headed” and “realistic.”
Final cold observation: when “it was Israel” becomes the default explanation for events that are visibly, concretely, locally driven by a regime’s violence against its own people, you do not end up with a critique of Israel. You end up providing a service to tyranny. You end up performing the regime’s favorite trick: turning the people into background noise.
Solidarity did not vanish. It was deactivated. And if a society that once lived off global solidarity cannot reactivate it for others, then the lesson of its own past was not learned. It was consumed.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
