On the long list of things that bother me about much of the left today, especially in the West, is its allergy to patriotism. In my own understanding of human commitments, loving your country and holding socialist ideals are not contradictory commitments. One can easily maintain both. But the history of the left shows that there has never been anything obvious or untroublesome about this combination of allegiances. My own story helps to explain why.
My path to this dual identity has been long and winding. Born in 1988 in Tehran, I grew up in the immediate post-Soviet era when most varieties of leftism had gone seriously out of fashion, especially among my fellow teenagers in a country that had fallen victim to its own revolutionary utopianism. But I had already been swimming against the current — I identified myself as a Marxist in my early teens, whatever one could mean by such labels at that time. But this identification never made me any less of an Iranian patriot or, to use a common Persian term, Irandoost, roughly translatable as “Iran-lover.”