Who is more qualified to understand the profound terror of marginalization and living in constant fear than those whose entire existence has been pushed to the margins for years and years? The “Committee of Communist Queers,” however, does not turn this marginalization into an identity or a victimhood. Instead, they use the margins as a launching point to confront the oppressive core of the situation and seek allies among the trampled and excluded—among Afghan migrants who, these days, must live in constant fear.
Fear of military and security squads, plainclothes agents, neighbors, passersby, and locals. Fear of employers and coworkers. They are people who can be easily abducted and killed. People who can be expelled from schools and workplaces—as if there were schools or workplaces for them to begin with—with the ease of sipping water. People who are incessantly stigmatized in the media while armies of thugs and fascist hooligans, Dracula-like monsters with “Tharallah” headbands or lion-and-sun tattoos, the united front of Aryans and Shi’as, and even fascists from perpetually oppressed nations, threaten them online and openly call for bloodshed.
All of this is intimately and viscerally understood by our comrades in the “Committee of Communist Queers,” who have been forced to hide everything about themselves from even their closest connections, to bear the stigma, and to exist as lepers in society.
This is the voice of Communist Queers, rising from the margins in solidarity with Afghan migrants:
We are here! We will stay here! We will live here and fight!
A translation of one of the leaflets has been distributed:
We Are Here
We will neither leave this place nor remain silent under your oppression and tyranny.
By our mere presence, we crack the rigid walls of the prison in your minds, and with our resistance, we destroy the artificial and institutionalized barriers imposed on bodies and lands.
We Will Stay Here
We stay to fight against your discriminatory laws—laws that each day tighten their grip around the throats of yet another group of people, seeking to crush them.
The crimes this government commits today, and the betrayal of those who align themselves with it against us, our lives, and our bodies, are not for security, economic stability, or justice.
Rather, they are the embodiment of xenophobia and racism, championed by supporters from the depths of Qom to the shores of Los Angeles: from opportunistic profiteers to those shouting, “Reza Shah, may your soul rest in peace,” all united in their consensus.
We Live and Fight Here
We stay to expose the reactionary foundations of the nation-state, whose pillars are built neither on ethics nor on logic.
We stay to unmask the hands that, instead of opposing the leaders of this capitalist system, the corrupt employers, and the criminal managers, or resisting the mercenary soldiers with guns in their hands, race to spill our blood in their thirst for violence. We stay to resist, to defend ourselves and others who, over the past century, have been labeled as criminals, terrorists, disruptors, invaders, and corrupters in the name of protecting the homeland. We stay to fight for the liberation of ourselves and others.
The Pink Triangle
The pink triangle was originally used by the Nazis as a mark of shame to identify homosexuals in forced labor camps. But later, it was reclaimed by liberation movements among queer groups as a symbol of their resistance and struggle.
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