Arash Davari
This chapter considers unlikely affinities between liberal human rights discourse and Marxist theories of guerrilla warfare. Commonly seen as worlds apart, these modes of action converged after 1968 in their parallel emphasis on spectacle. Both aimed to capture the attention of prospective spectators and witnesses. As each shaped the other, the intended audience of the spectacles turned inward. To demonstrate, this chapter presents a history of activist discourse in 1970s Iran, where we see a shift in the use of human rights discourse, from moral appeals about injustice directed at powerful parties abroad to spectacular projections of aggrievement and loss directed at one’s own community. Conventional distinctions between individualism and collectivism, and guerrilla warfare (deemed revolutionary) and human rights (deemed counterrevolutionary), become tenuous as a result. While liberal and Marxist activists were marginal to the mass movement of the late 1970s, their unintended collaboration draws a sketch of the collective subjectivity that later prevailed.