Once again, I am left breathless by a beautiful internationalist mural in Colombia. On March 5, the Instagram @comrevco (Grupo Comunista Revolucionario, Colombia) posted a video of the making of a huge street mural in Cali illustrated with the face of Toomaj Salehi, imprisoned rapper in Iran, and a woman standing on a burning dumpster waving her hijab (headscarf) on a stick. The slogan reads, “¡Libertad para Toomaj Salehi y todos los presos políticos en Irán!” (Free Toomaj Salehi and all political prisoners in Iran!).

Here is our repost of the video on X:

This is only the latest in a series of visually stunning and sharply internationalist actions. 

Some ten days before, the comrevs in Colombia and supporters of the Free Iran’s Political Prisoners campaign (whose beautiful work we’ve also seen in @quemarlajaula) had joined a concert in support of the Palestinian people in Bogotá. The images and video capture the impact of two huge banners, one with beautiful drawings of political prisoners in Iran and the other a drawing of a Palestinian woman fighter in a keffiyeh, with the words (translated from Spanish) “Stop the Zionist/Imperialist occupation! Free Palestine! What Palestine needs is Revolution, Nothing Less!” 

Revcom.us reposted it at the time, but I’d like to draw some lessons more broadly.

I find it both moving and edifying to see how these comrades brought forward in a living and concrete way these two streams of revolution, i.e., the just struggle of the Palestinian people against the genocide being committed by Israel with the full support of U.S. imperialism (on one side) and the just struggle of the people of Iran against the fundamentalist Islamic regime (on the other side), powerfully represented by the political prisoners and especially the women fearlessly challenging patriarchy and misogyny. Given the fraught situation in the Middle East, where the U.S. and Iran threaten each other and jockey for regional dominance, too many people are caught up in the deadly logic of the “enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

I see in one of the videos a real-life antidote: At a book table a woman passes out a flyer, agitating first about Palestine, then flips the flyer over and points to the image of Toomaj Salehi and talks about executions in Iran. Well, it brought tears to my eyes. I know from my own experience that this is NOT spontaneously going to find majority agreement at a Palestinian rally OR the Iranian diaspora, so this position stands out all the more as a model. 

Going back a few months through their IG posts, it struck me how two days after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israeli areas, @comrevco posted the following graphic quoting Bob Avakian re the two outmodeds¹ where both the Islamic fundamentalists and the U.S. imperialists are bloody-jawed, disintegrating vultures, but the U,S, is clearly the larger danger. 

Over the next week, this graphic is shown being posted in cities and universities, also showing gatherings of people on the street discussing it. What a powerful application of Bob Avakian’s pioneering analysis having a concrete impact in far-flung parts of the world!

It brings home the profound, on-the-ground reality behind the part of IEC’s Emergency Appeal which reads: “We the people of the U.S. and Iran, along with the people of the world, have OUR shared interests, as part of getting to a better world…” 

In conclusion, I hope that people in the U.S. can learn from both the polemical stand that these Colombian comrades are taking, their creativity and artistry, and follow and share these posts more widely. Especially in these rare times when decades worth of change are telescoped into months or weeks, we shouldn’t underestimate the dynamic of sparks of resistance and revolution spreading around the world.