The Twin Wisdoms

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast In a recent ninety-minute conversation with Sobhan Yahyaei for the Farsi Panorama podcast — the inaugural episode of a season titled Life in a Time of War — I tried to think aloud about the trilateral confrontation involving Iran, the United States and Israel, the predicament of the Iranian diaspora, and the cultural sediment from which a future Iran might be reassembled. What follows is a written distillation of that conversation, sharpened where the medium of speech compelled compression, and folded into the longer arc of arguments I have been pursuing in The Twin Wisdoms. A Cold Spring It was the ninth of Ordibehesht, and Tehran was still cold. Sobhan Yahyaei opened our conversation by remarking on the unseasonable chill, hinting that the bitter winter of 1404 — political, psychological — has not yet released its grip on the Iranian collective mind. He was calling from Tehran, from a new studio called Hamārā, the previous one having been lost. I was in London. We were connected over Telegram — that most Iranian of workarounds — under conditions of dire internet scarcity: Iran remains under a sustained digital blockade, with the vast majority of the population denied reliable access to the open internet. The line faltered more than once. That the conversation happened at all is, in its modest way, a political act. It is one episode in a season explicitly framed around Life in a Time of War, and it accumulates by sitting alongside the recent dialogues Hossein Hamdieh has conducted with Hamid Dabashi and Esfandyar Batmanghelidj in the Borj series — conversations whose threads I have tried to take up elsewhere on these pages. My first proposition is structural. The confrontation between Iran, the United States and Israel is not, in its deepest stratum, a confrontation of interests. It is a confrontation of ignorances. Each side processes the other through media-generated caricatures shaped by security apparatuses and political establishments whose interests rarely coincide with the welfare of ordinary human beings. Israel I would describe — and the description is descriptive, not polemical — as a rogue actor whose disruptive interventions deepen regional hostilities. Its conduct is the late, lingering claw of European colonialism, embedded after the older imperial structures collapsed. The United States, in turn, slid into the vacated colonial position; what was draped during the late twentieth century in the language of international institutions has, since the dawn of the twenty-first, been brazenly cast aside. To miss this overarching frame is to guarantee that one’s analysis will be shallow. I anticipate the predictable rejoinder: “Colonialism, imperialism — these are the tired vocabularies of a stale left.” They are not. To register the realities of colonialism and Orientalism is a mainstream academic position, not a fringe radicalism. The vocabulary is uncomfortable for a particular kind of Iranian audience because it implicates more than one party, and an audience trained to want a single villain finds multi-causal analysis unbearable. The Allergy and the Argument Yahyaei pressed me on precisely this point. Chap hargez nafahmīd — “the left never understood” — has acquired the status of folk wisdom. He noted, fairly, that many Iranians today recoil instinctively from academic critiques of capitalism and imperialism. Why? My answer was diagnostic, not denunciatory. What is being expressed in that slogan is not a coherent ideological position. It is a symptom. It is the desperation of a people squeezed between internal authoritarianism and external coercion, who have knocked on too many doors that refused to open and who now, in their rage, want the entire wall torn down. The reaction is human. It is also analytically empty. Pressed on what they mean by “left,” the slogan’s adherents typically cannot say. The word has devolved into an abusive term, an insult aimed at anyone who dissents from the prevailing emergency mood. The exquisite irony is that the society these speakers idealise — with functioning healthcare, decent schools, a roof over every head — is precisely the social-democratic arrangement the intellectual left has theorised for a century. They are cursing their own utopia. This is not unique to Iran. It is a structural feature of societies under prolonged stress. The economically marginalised American who voted for Donald Trump out of spite for a complacent establishment, the British voter who chose Brexit to scapegoat foreign labour for domestic decay — these are the same gestures, performed in different idioms. Iranians are not exhibiting a peculiar national pathology. They are reacting, predictably, to severe economic and political disenfranchisement. And what they want, beneath the slogans, is what every human population wants: a roof that does not leak, food for their children, a decent school, and a glimmer of hope. The Loud, the Silent, and the Funded Here the temptation is to speak of “the Iranians abroad” as a single body, to be condemned or defended in toto. I have refused this elsewhere on these pages, and I refused it again with Yahyaei. There is no monolithic diaspora. There is a loud diaspora, and there is a silent one, and the two have very little to do with each other. The loud diaspora dominates platforms, media outlets and placards. It is the diaspora of the slogan ‘death to the three corrupt: mullah, the leftist and the Mujahid’ — which constructs a monolithic in-group and consigns everyone else to an enemy camp. It is the diaspora that, in certain quarters, celebrated the bombing of its own homeland. It is, in many cases, a diaspora bankrolled not by independent Iranian entrepreneurs but by foreign state actors and intelligence services whose financial transparency is non-existent. The output of certain Persian-language outlets — Iran International, Manoto — is what I would call, with full deliberation, intellectual filth, deliberately manufactured to produce a skewed and standardised polarisation. By British legal standards much of what they broadcast borders on incitement; but because the broadcasts are in Persian and invisible to the host society, no one prosecutes. The silent diaspora is larger, more variegated, and infinitely more interesting. It is the diaspora that endowed Ehsan Yarshater’s Encyclopædia Iranica. But beside diaspora, we can still speak of the atmosphere and vision that sustained the Institute of Ismaili Studies’ Encyclopaedia Islamica, that funded Jane Lewisohn’s Golha project — a meticulous archive of the entire classical Persian musical heritage. These are unflashy enterprises. They do not trend. Bombs cannot destroy the poetry of Hafez or the verse of Houshang Ebtehaj; sanctions cannot reach a recording of Golha. The silent diaspora is the actual infrastructure of cultural continuity — the patient, unglamorous labour without which any future river has no bed. One cannot simultaneously claim the mantle of liberal modernity and rage against the academic critique of liberal modernity. To do so is to want, at once, the prestige of the West and exemption from its self-criticism. This is not a coherent intellectual posture. It is wounded pride dressed up as politics. Iranshahr as Common Starting Point Yahyaei asked whether a plural, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional society like Iran can articulate a common national interest. My answer: yes, but only if we identify its foundation correctly. The foundation is not ideology. It is not religion. It is not ethnicity. It is not even language. It is humanism — the unglamorous insistence that the human being, any human being, precedes belief, mother tongue, gender, skin colour or place of birth. The human being is the axis and centre of all values. Everything else is superstructure. I anchor this in the cultural geography of Iranshahr — not as a nationalist slogan but as a layered, composite reality. Iranian culture is an irreducibly intertwined tapestry of pre-Islamic, Islamic, Shia, Sunni, Zoroastrian, Christian, Jewish, Bahāʼī, Kurdish, Turkic, Lor and Baluch threads, bound together by the unifying medium of the Persian language. The Shāhnāmeh itself, contrary to the fantasy of a “pure Persian” text, was composed in the Islamic cultural milieu of the fourth Hijri century. Ferdowsi’s Persian is not pre-Islamic nostalgia; it is a magnificent synthesis. Synthesis, not purity, is the signature of this civilisation. Both the nativist purification project — which fantasises about an Iran cleansed of its Arab or Islamic heritage — and the theocratic monopoly project — which insists on a uniform Twelver Shia identity — are, spitting into the wind. The Scholars of Ray Now to the harder proposition. Yahyaei pressed me on the moral status of those diaspora actors who lobby foreign governments for intensified sanctions or direct military intervention. I did not equivocate. To petition foreign powers for war on one’s own homeland is to manufacture consent for violence in the precise sense Herman and Chomsky gave to the phrase. The blood is on the hands of those who supplied the pretext for foreign action. Once the machinery was set in motion, the lobbyists discovered they could no longer stop it; their agency, real in the pushing, evaporated at the moment of consequence. There is a historical parallel I drew in the conversation, and I want to restate it because it captures the structural recurrence of the pattern. In the thirteenth century, the jurists and theologians of Ray and Qazvin wrote letters to the Mongol khan inviting him to destroy the Ismaili state of Alamut. A Muslim community wrote to a non-Muslim conqueror asking him to annihilate a Muslim community that thought differently. The Mongol invasion that followed devastated all of Iran, not merely Alamut. The scholars’ complicity did not diminish the Mongol crime; nor did the Mongol crime exonerate the scholars. History does not distribute guilt in clean portions. Everyone involved carried a share, and the civilisation paid the price. The parallel to the present is exact. We have our Mongols — the nuclear-armed powers that bombed Iran for fifty days and failed to bring it to its knees. We have our incompetent Khwārazmshāh — the porcupine reflex of a domestic governance that treats both citizens and outside world as threats. And we have our scholars of Ray — the diaspora voices that supplied intellectual cover for external aggression. None of these actors cancels the guilt of the others. The Patience That Outlasts I want to end where I ended with Yahyaei: with a carefully hedged optimism. I believe — and I frame this as a conjecture, subject to falsification, as any honest proposition must be — that Iran will reach a form of stability within five years, driven not by the will of any government but by the irrepressible momentum of its people and its culture. The evidence is not statistical. It is civilisational. A culture that has absorbed Mongol invasions, Arab conquests, Turkic migrations and two revolutions, and emerged each time with its literary and philosophical traditions intact, possesses a resilience that transcends any individual political arrangement. The German chancellor expected the war to end in three days. It lasted fifty, and Iran did not break. When the flights were grounded, diaspora Iranians purchased tickets to fly back, travelling overland through Turkey to reach their families — not out of ideology but out of an organic bond no sanction or bombardment can sever. These are the droplets. The river forms when we defend the space between us against the forces — external and internal — that profit from its closure. Pablo Neruda wrote that one can cut all the flowers, but cannot prevent the coming of spring. Sayeh — Houshang Ebtehaj — said it differently: The red rose will bloom, whether you will it or not, though a hundred autumns bring ruin. This is not sentimentality. It is the most hard-headed realism available to us: the recognition that life, culture and human dignity are structural forces, not contingent ones, and that they will outlast every attempt to suppress them. The task is not to wait for the spring. The task is to become the patient, unglamorous labour through which spring builds itself — and, while we are at it, to stop writing letters to the Khan. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

The following is the full text of my talk delivered at the 13th Annual Iftar at Alyth Synagogue in North London on 8th March. It was offered in the moments before Jewish, Christian, and Muslim guests broke bread together at Iftar — an occasion made particularly poignant by a broader climate in which conflict had created an atmosphere of suspicion and unease. I endeavoured to speak candidly, while remaining true to my humanist sensibilities.

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, MS arabe 5847, folio 1v. Illuminator: Yaḥyā ibn Maḥmūd al-Wāsiṭī. Baghdad, 634 AH / 1237 CE. On a Pluralist, Non-Eurocentric Modernity A Sentence That Carries the Argument There is one sentence that has come to carry the whole of my argument about modernity, and I want to put it down at the outset rather than build up to it. Our future is not their past. Our future is the intelligent use of our past and of anybody else’s past, the responsible and critical creation and invention in the present, and the intelligent prediction of what is to come. That is the formula. Everything else in this essay is commentary on it. I write the sentence in this compressed form on purpose, because the temptation in our public conversations is to surrender to a much shorter slogan: that to be modern is to follow Europe. The slogan is so well established that even those who reject it tend to argue against it on its own terms. They concede the geography of modernity even as they protest its content. They assume that someone has reached the destination and that the rest of us are still on the road, and they then quarrel about how quickly to walk. The first task of any honest reflection on a non-Eurocentric modernity is to refuse this picture entirely. There is no destination. There never was. What is called modernity in the European story is itself a particular history, with its own losses, its own injustices, and its own unresolved questions. To take it as the universal template is not to honour it; it is to flatten it. The intelligent thing is neither to imitate that history nor to pretend it never happened. The intelligent thing is to read it carefully, to learn what can be learned from it, to refuse what should be refused, and to set it alongside our own history with the same critical attention. How the Linear Story Was Imposed To understand why the slogan has had such a grip on us, we need to recall how it entered our intellectual life. It did not arrive as a gentle suggestion. It arrived together with the military, financial, industrial and scientific might of European colonial expansion. The encounter, for most Muslim societies and for much of the wider world, took place under conditions of subjugation. The first impressions were of overwhelming material superiority. Cities were bombarded; economies were rearranged; institutions were dismantled or made subordinate; languages were displaced from the offices of state. People who had thought of themselves as inheritors of a great civilisation found themselves addressed as backward children who needed to be brought up. In that situation, the natural human response was a wound to dignity, and the natural response to such a wound is to want to prove oneself. The reformist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries grew out of this. Its founders were brilliant and serious people. They took the measure of the imbalance and tried to do something about it. They wanted to show their interlocutors, and themselves, that they too could think, that they too could organise, that they too could legislate, that they too could be modern. But the manner in which they tried to demonstrate this had a hidden cost. It accepted, as the very ground of the demonstration, the framework that the conqueror had set. The questions to be answered, the criteria of progress, the markers of seriousness, the timeline along which one’s society was to be assessed: all of these were borrowed from the very civilisation whose dominance was the original wound. The result was a curious kind of mirror politics, in which the ambition was to do, in the twentieth or twenty-first century, what Europe had done in the eighteenth or nineteenth. Our future was to become their past. The arrow of history pointed in only one direction, and our task was to walk it as quickly as we could. Why the Linear Story Misleads The first problem with this picture is that it is empirically wrong. There is no single line called modernity along which all societies are travelling at different speeds. There are, instead, many entangled processes, technological, economic, political, religious, aesthetic, that have unfolded differently in different places and that continue to unfold. To call only the European version of these processes modern is to mistake one example for the genus. It is, ironically, a provincial mistake disguised as a universal one. The second problem is that the picture is ethically corrosive. If we accept that our future is their past, we accept by the same gesture that we are behind, that our traditions are obstacles, that our languages are quaint, that our forms of authority are at best transitional, and that the only respectable destination is the one already mapped by someone else. This is not a posture compatible with self-respect, and it is certainly not a posture from which one can contribute anything new to the world. It is a posture of permanent apology. The third problem is intellectual. The linear story disables the very faculty by which a civilisation renews itself, namely the patient, critical reading of its own resources. If those resources are by definition pre-modern, there is nothing to read; one’s only work is to clear them away. Whole generations have been raised on this assumption, and the result has been a strange amnesia in which our libraries are full of books that no one has been trained to engage. A Different Picture Against this picture, I want to set another. To be modern, in the sense that I find defensible, is not to occupy a place on a line. It is to inhabit one’s time intelligently. That has three components, and the order in which I name them matters. The first is the intelligent use of the past, both our own and anyone else’s. Use is the operative word. We are not asked to worship the past, nor to repeat it, nor to put it on a museum shelf and bow before it. We are asked to use it, which means to read it for what it can teach us about the questions we are facing now. Some of what we will find will still be alive and applicable; some will be dead and best laid to rest; some will be alive but only on condition that we revise it for new circumstances. Discrimination of this kind is itself a high intellectual virtue, and it is the opposite of nostalgia. It also extends across borders. The intelligent use of the past does not stop at the boundary of one’s own civilisation. It includes the European past, the Indian past, the Chinese past, the African past, the indigenous pasts of the Americas. To insist that we draw on our own history is not to refuse other histories. It is, on the contrary, to acquire the standing from which one can engage other histories without flinching. The second component is responsible and critical creation in the present. This is the moment that the linear story most reliably erases, because it cannot imagine that anything new could come from outside the path it has already mapped. But invention does not require permission. The Persian poets did not ask permission to invent the ghazal; the Arab grammarians did not ask permission to invent the science of naḥw; the Iranian filmmakers of the last half-century did not ask permission to make the cinema they have made. Where these inventions have flourished, they have done so by drawing on local resources while engaging the wider world, and by holding themselves to a high standard of craft. There is no reason we cannot do the same now in law, in education, in finance, in architecture, in technology. The question is not whether we are allowed to create; it is whether we are willing to do the work. The third component is the intelligent anticipation of the future. By this I do not mean futurology, which is mostly entertainment. I mean the disciplined imagination that reads present tendencies and asks where they are pointing, what they will demand of us, and what we ought to be preparing for. Climate disruption, demographic change, the next revolution in computation, the reorganisation of work, the migration of authority away from the territorial state: these are not science fiction. They are the conditions in which the next generation will live. To be modern in any non-trivial sense is to be already thinking about them, and to be thinking about them with our own concepts and our own commitments rather than borrowing the worry list of someone else’s commentariat. Pluralism Without Relativism Notice what happens when these three components are taken together. The picture they draw is not of a single arrow but of many traditions, each engaged in its own version of intelligent use, critical creation and disciplined anticipation. This is what writers on the subject have come to call multiple modernities, and it is the only honest description of the world we actually inhabit. It is also the only description that allows us to honour both the unity of human experience and the irreducibility of its plural expressions. It is important not to confuse this pluralism with relativism. To say that there are several modernities is not to say that anything goes, or that all arrangements are equally good, or that judgement has been suspended. It is to say that the standards by which we evaluate human flourishing, justice, knowledge, beauty, are themselves not the monopoly of any one civilisation, and that any serious conversation about them has to be conducted with humility on every side. Some inventions of the European modern period are durable contributions to the human inheritance and should be received as such. Some are local solutions whose universalisation has done more harm than good. The task is to tell the difference, and the only way to tell the difference is to do the patient work of comparison rather than reach for the slogan. The Self–Other Trap The linear story has a habit of producing self–other binaries that, once produced, are very hard to dismantle. East against West, tradition against modernity, faith against reason, authenticity against borrowing: each pair, on inspection, turns out to be a way of organising the question so that whichever side one chooses one has already lost. To be on the side of the East is to accept that one is not on the side of modernity. To be on the side of tradition is to accept that one is not on the side of progress. To be on the side of faith is to accept that one has surrendered the rights of intellect. The argument I am pressing here is that none of these binaries is real. They are the after-effects of a particular history, and they can be undone by the same instrument that built them, which is sustained intellectual work. To use one’s past intelligently is already to refuse the binary between tradition and modernity. To create critically in the present is already to refuse the binary between East and West. To prepare for the future with one’s own commitments intact is already to refuse the binary between authenticity and engagement. The synthesis of the two wisdoms, philosophical and revelatory, of which I have written elsewhere, is precisely a refusal of the binary between faith and reason. None of these refusals is a piece of theory. They are practices, sustained over time, by which a community demonstrates that it does not need anyone’s permission to be itself. What This Asks of Us What follows from this for those of us who write, teach, design institutions, raise children, or simply try to live well in our particular corners of the world? Three things, perhaps, are worth naming. First, we owe our past more attention than we have been giving it. Not the sentimental attention of identity politics, which uses the past as a costume, but the demanding attention of the student, who reads slowly, asks hard questions, and is prepared to be surprised by what he finds. The library is much larger than we have been told. It contains resources we have not begun to inventory. Second, we owe the present our courage. The most important inventions of the next decades will not be made by those who are waiting for permission. They will be made by those who have noticed a problem in their own setting, gathered the relevant tools from wherever the tools are to be found, and set to work. This requires a particular kind of confidence that is neither arrogance nor mimicry. It is the confidence that comes from knowing one’s resources and being willing to use them. Third, we owe the future our seriousness. The ease with which the linear story has been accepted is partly a symptom of a deeper unwillingness to think long. To prepare for the conditions of the next generation requires that we lift our heads from the cycle of headlines and ask the harder questions about what kind of human beings, what kind of communities, what kind of institutions we want to be. This is the work of generations, and it begins with declining the offer to be only consumers of someone else’s plans. It also requires institutions that can carry the work, that is, schools, universities, professional bodies, civic associations, networks of patronage for the arts, and the quieter spaces in which ideas are tested before they are launched. Such institutions are not built by accident. They are built by people who have decided, in advance, that the improvement of the quality of life of those around them is a responsibility worth shouldering and that no one is coming to do it for them. There is, in this commitment, an old and quiet dignity that no slogan can imitate. A Closing Note The entire argument can be compressed into the sentence with which we began. Modernity is not a place to which some have already arrived while others lag behind. It is not a terminus to be reached by walking in someone else’s footsteps. It is a practice, and the practice is threefold: the intelligent use of the past, ours and theirs; the responsible creation of new solutions to present problems; and the disciplined anticipation of what is coming. Each of these requires that we refuse the small story we have been told. The small story says we are late. The true story says we are exactly on time, provided we do the work. That work is not glamorous, and it does not announce itself with slogans. It is the slow accumulation of knowledge about our own tradition, the patient invention of new forms that answer to present needs, the building of institutions that can carry the work forward, and the raising of a generation confident enough to use what it inherits. There is, in this commitment, an old and quiet dignity that requires neither permission nor applause. It simply gets on with living intelligently in one’s time, and that is modernity enough. Our future is not their past. It cannot be. The clock does not run backwards, and the world has more than one centre. Our future is what we will make, by drawing wisely on our inheritance and on the inheritance of others, by creating with care in the present, and by preparing for what is coming with our eyes open. It is the work of intelligent people who know who they are. There is no shortcut to it, and there is no substitute. There is only the work. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Image: Delegates during the Islamabad talks on the US–Iran track, April 2026. Credit: Reuters.  A Dialogue with Ambassador Sada Cumber Ambassador Sada Cumber’s recent essay for the National Security Institute, “Dialogue to Truce: Pakistan’s Role in Reshaping the Regional Structure,” reads, at its best, as a quiet warning. He argues that what we are witnessing across West Asia is not stability but a pause — a breathing space purchased by pressure, not produced by structure. Ceasefires hold for a season; chokepoints remain latent; dialogue dissipates unless it accumulates into institutions. The core proposition — that durable outcomes require continuity, coordination and institutional anchoring, and that Pakistan is moving from facilitator to potential anchor — deserves to be read carefully by anyone who takes the region’s future seriously. I find myself in agreement with the spine of his argument. What I want to offer here, in the most deferential spirit, is a widening of the frame. First, a point of reinforcement. Sada is right that the present moment is defined by asymmetry: disruption is less costly to generate than stability is to sustain. That single sentence is, in effect, a theorem of the contemporary regional order. It explains why the Strait of Hormuz functions not as a closed route but as a latent pressure point; why external guarantees have thinned; why time horizons in Tehran and Washington cannot be synchronised by diplomacy alone. It also explains why Islamabad’s convening of the recent US–Iran engagement — not Muscat this time — signals something more than a change of venue. It signals a change in the geography of trust. That is a non-trivial shift, and Sada is right to name it. Where I would respectfully expand his analysis is on the question of who, precisely, generates the disruption that makes stability so expensive. Sada’s framing is systemic and elegant; it treats fragility as an emergent property of the region’s interdependence. I agree that interdependence without governance produces fragility. But interdependence does not decay on its own. It is actively destabilised by specific actors whose strategic interest lies precisely in preventing the region from consolidating. Any honest reading of the last two years — from the Saudi energy strikes to the Islamabad talks, from the covert logic of sabotage to the overt logic of air campaigns — points to a structural spoiler that cannot be folded neatly into the language of “external actors.” Israel, armed with an undeclared nuclear arsenal and shielded by the American veto, is the central asymmetry the region must learn to speak about in plain terms. No anchor state, however capable, can hold a system that is being actively pulled apart from within. Naming this is not a polemical indulgence; it is a condition of analytical seriousness. The second place where I would gently extend Sada’s argument concerns Pakistan itself. He writes of a transition from facilitation toward potential anchoring. I would go further and argue that the transition has already begun, and that it carries a contradiction Islamabad must now metabolise in public. The Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement with Riyadh, and the integration of Pakistani airpower into Saudi air defences, has given Pakistan the convening weight that makes its mediation credible. It has also, unavoidably, compromised the appearance of neutrality on which mediation is presumed to depend. Foreign Minister Dar’s visit to Tehran in March, with its explicit disclosure of SMDA obligations, was a first attempt at squaring this circle through strategic transparency. It is, to my mind, the most interesting diplomatic innovation of the year: a wager that honesty about one’s commitments is more stabilising than performative impartiality. If it holds, it may become a template for how medium powers mediate in a post-hegemonic order. This brings me to the deeper theoretical point. Sada distinguishes between dialogue that dissipates and dialogue that accumulates into structured institutions and practices. I would add a third category, and it is the one on which the region’s future most depends: dialogue that deters. The paradox of the current pause is that it is being held together, in part, by the very asymmetries Sada identifies. A nuclear-capable Pakistan inside Saudi defences raises, rather than lowers, the cost of Iranian miscalculation, and by the same token raises the cost of Saudi adventurism. Mutual deterrence is not an institution, but it can be the scaffolding on which institutions are built, provided it is explicitly linked to a framework of mutual constraint. A mutual cap-and-reduction understanding between Islamabad and Tehran — on enrichment, on stockpiles, on the doctrines governing their use — is, as I have argued elsewhere on Twin Wisdoms, the only credible long-term path. It is also the hardest. I close with a critical-rationalist caveat, in the spirit of the friendship that animates this exchange. Every framework offered for the region’s future — Sada’s, mine, anyone’s — must remain falsifiable. We should be suspicious of any account, however elegant, that immunises itself against refutation by absorbing every counter-example into its schema. The next twelve months will test whether Pakistan’s anchoring is real or rhetorical; whether the Islamabad channel accumulates or dissipates; whether the spoilers are contained or indulged. Sada has given us the right question. What remains, for the rest of us, is to refuse the comfort of a premature answer, and to keep the dialogue honest enough to survive the asymmetries it is trying to name. 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PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast The placard is simple, humane, and emotionally irresistible: “Be their voice.” At first glance, who could object? If people are censored, jailed, beaten, or killed, should they not be heard? Of course they should. But politics begins precisely where sentiment ends. The real question is not whether Iranians should be heard. The real question is this: heard by whom, for what end, and translated into what programme of action? This is where the slogan begins to darken. Too often, in the online activism of a segment of the Iranian diaspora, “be their voice” does not mean careful solidarity, disciplined witness, or intellectually honest advocacy. It means: amplify the suffering of Iranians until it becomes morally easier to justify sanctions, sabotage, siege, or military intervention. The slogan sounds compassionate, but its political afterlife is often brutal. I have been circling this problem in several earlier essays. In “The Depth Illusion” I argued that moral language is frequently used as philosophical scaffolding for war apologism. In “The Normalcy We Must Defend”  I showed why sanctions do not principally wound repressive elites; they wound the civilian fabric of society—the sick, the poor, the ordinary family trying to keep life going. And in “War Unseen, War Unleashed” I wrote about the peculiar spectacle of distance masquerading as courage: those with no skin in the game speaking as though other people’s ruins were a form of principle. The slogan sits at the intersection of all three. Let me be clear, because the fallacy arrives predictably: “So, you want people’s voice not to be heard?” No. Nothing could be further from the truth. I want voices to be heard without being ventriloquised. I want suffering to be witnessed without being converted into a permission slip for more suffering. I want the grief of Iranians to remain Iranian grief—not raw material for the fantasies of exilic heroism, foreign intervention, or civilisational theatre. The world already knows that the Islamic Republic is repressive. This is not hidden knowledge waiting for a hashtag to disclose it. The prisons are known. The executions are known. The violations of due process are known. Women’s struggles are known. Labour grievances are known. Ethnic and religious marginalisation are known. What, then, is really being added when the slogan is repeated with such fever? Very often, not knowledge, but pressure—pressure towards a conclusion already desired. And that conclusion is almost always sold dishonestly. It is rarely stated in full. Nobody wants to say openly: I want sanctions that will make medicine scarcer; I want instability that will make daily life harsher; I want foreign powers with their own strategic interests to decide that Iran is now a suitable site for managed destruction. So the cruelty is wrapped in the language of care. A poster says “Be their voice”, but the subtext is too often: help intensify the conditions under which ordinary people will break. Yet life inside Iran, however wounded, is not reducible to a theatre of total despair. People still bury their dead, celebrate their children, translate books, fall in love, quarrel, study, work, laugh, pray, and endure. This does not mean life is normal in the shallow sense, nor does it excuse repression. It means that a society is more than its torment, and that those who claim to speak for it must not desire its collapse as proof of their moral seriousness. If one wants a more rigorous test of this matter, one might begin not with a slogan, but with coherence. That is precisely why I created the Political Consciousness Toolkit: not as a test of loyalty, but as a test of symmetry, consistency, and moral seriousness. Can one oppose authoritarianism and foreign bombing at the same time? Yes. Must one? I would argue that any politics worthy of the name requires precisely that double refusal. To refuse the slogan in its current usage is therefore not an act of silence. It is an act of resistance—resistance to sentimental blackmail, to bad faith, and to the cheap moral glamour of speaking for others while prescribing the instruments of their further harm. Solidarity does not mean borrowing another people’s pain and spending it recklessly. It means refusing to make their pain serve the ambitions of empire, exile nostalgia, or dynastic fantasy. Iranians do not need ventriloquists. They need honesty. They need political literacy. They need allies who can distinguish between amplifying a voice and hijacking it, between witness and weaponisation, between conscience and performance. A slogan is never innocent when its consequences are not. So yes, hear the people of Iran. But hear them as human beings, not as ammunition. Hear them in their plurality, their fatigue, their endurance, and their right not to be “saved” into rubble. The task is not to become their voice. The task is harder, humbler, and far more moral: to stop drowning it out with the echo of our own desires. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast A pro-monarchy demonstrator in Glasgow holds a placard that includes a reference to SAVAK. The event, on February 28, 2026, was a rally celebrating US-Israeli strikes on Iran. Over the past year, the global perception of Iranians has shifted in a direction that neither passport indices nor the slogan-politics of a loud exilic faction can register. Under sanctions, bombardment and the machinery of media caricature, ordinary Iranians have conducted themselves with a composure that Europeans and North Americans have begun, quietly, to notice. This essay argues that the shift is real; that the myth of a lost universal esteem — that all Iranians were once revered and are now despised — must be named and refused; and that while a loud diaspora, still litigating 1979, cannot see the shift, a quieter and wiser diaspora has long been reading it correctly. A Portuguese friend, trained in anthropology, Faranaz Keshavjee, wrote to me recently that the forty-seven seconds of Tehran footage looped on her evening news did not square with the voice-over. The voice-over spoke of a horrific theocracy that must disappear; the footage showed women in Zara-adjacent outfits eating ice-cream, men in sunglasses, a bazaar going about its business. She asked, with the honesty of someone untrained to choose a side, whether she was reading her own screen correctly. She was. Her question could not have been posed by most of the louder Iranian exiles of my generation, because the apparatus through which they process Iran was sealed shut in the winter of 1979 and immunised, in the Popperian sense, against every subsequent refutation. My first submission is that something has shifted in how Iranians are encountered abroad, and the shift is not an artefact of self-regard. The evidence is modest, anecdotal and cumulative, and precisely for that reason social scientists ought to take it seriously. An Iranian passenger at a Frankfurt taxi rank is waved to the front of the queue by a driver following the news. A Lisbon greengrocer presses a second pomegranate into her customer’s bag and refuses payment. A Toronto professor tells her seminar that the most composed work she has received this term came from a student whose cousins were being bombed. None of this appears in any index. All of it circulates, person to person, in the ordinary transactions by which reputations are formed. The second submission is that this shift has been produced not by diaspora advocacy but by the conduct of Iranians inside the country — the very population a loud segment of the diaspora addresses as a silent object awaiting liberation. Under sanctions that have hollowed out the middle class, under a war economy imposed from without and an ideological economy imposed from within, Iranians have continued to run schools, stage concerts, publish poetry, conduct weddings and bury their dead with a dignity no foreign observer can entirely unsee. The women walking through Tehran with their hair uncovered are not staging a photo-op for a Washington think-tank; they are negotiating, piecemeal and at real risk, the terms of their own ordinary life — a form of moral seriousness legible even to audiences who cannot name a single Iranian poet. It is imperative to name a myth that has hardened into diaspora common sense: that all Iranians, before 1979, enjoyed a universal esteem that has since been forfeited, and that we now carry an unearned stigma. The myth is seductive because it contains a fragment of truth — the green Pahlavi passport did open certain counters at certain airports — and dangerous because the fragment has been inflated into a metaphysics. Pre-revolutionary Iranians abroad were, like every other migrant population, a mixed constituency whose standing varied by class, language, comportment and the prejudices of their hosts. Orientalist caricature did not begin in 1979; nor did European warmth towards Iranians end there. What changed was the arrival of a regime whose conduct supplied new material to old caricatures. To say that Iranians were once universally revered and are now universally suspect is to trade a complex sociological reality for a consoling fairy tale. Here a loud segment of the exilic diaspora misreads the score. The typical polemical post that circulates in Farsi these days — and such posts are abundant — rehearses a familiar choreography: a catalogue of real grievances, a rewinding of the tape to 1979, and the nomination of a single legitimate heir who alone can restore the train to its rails. The diagnosis of diaspora vanity is often sharp and in many respects just. The prescription, however, reproduces the very structure it condemns: a politics of restoration staged in Paris or Los Angeles, addressed to an Iran that no longer exists. The binary my Portuguese friend was cautioned against — the people want regime change / the people are content with theocracy — is the same binary the loud diaspora keeps reinscribing in monarchist, republican and leftist variants alike. But the diaspora is not monolithic, and to speak as though it were would reproduce the very error under examination. Alongside the loud faction there is a quieter diaspora that has been reading the situation correctly for some time — scholars, physicians, engineers, teachers and unshowy artists who carry Iran in their work rather than their slogans. They mentor students without auditioning for television, fund clinics and archives without branding them, translate without proselytising, and decline the invitation to convert grief into spectacle. They are less vocal and more resolute; less photogenic and more useful; less certain about the next slogan and more disciplined about the next decade. Much of the shift this essay traces has been prepared, invisibly, by their conduct. There is a structural reason for the louder faction’s blindness. Exile, as Said reminded us, is first a condition and only afterwards a vantage point; when the condition hardens into an identity, the vantage point narrows. A self-understanding predicated upon 1979 has a powerful incentive to keep the catastrophe freshly lit, because the alternative — conceding that Iranians inside the country are now generating their own reputations without exilic intermediation — is to concede that the forty-nine-year vigil may not have been the axis around which Iran was turning. The vigil has had its dignities. But dignity is not accuracy, and grief, however earned, is not a method. What, then, should be said to the interlocutor trying in good faith to read past her evening news? The answer is not a counter-slogan but an invitation to attend to the texture of ordinary Iranian life — the cousin’s wedding, the school run, the queue at the bakery — and to the parallel conduct of the quieter diaspora whose daily work has been slowly restoring what the louder faction imagines was permanently lost. A theory that cannot be refuted by any observation has become a creed; a politics that cannot be revised by the conduct of those in whose name it is conducted has become a performance. Iranians inside the country, together with the wiser part of the diaspora outside it, are conducting the actual refutation. The question is whether the rest of us will learn from them, or go on carrying, in Hafez’s phrase, a smiling lip over a bleeding heart — mistaking the bleeding for the argument. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Hazrati Alley in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, April 2011—captured just before the most stringent international sanctions were imposed. The image shows the bustling daily commerce and the civilian economic fabric whose protection is at the heart of the argument that follows. On Sanctions, the Temptation of a War Economy, and the Quiet Labour of Breaking the Cycle A reflection on a conversation between Hossein Hamdieh and Esfandyar Batmanghelidj in the Borj series. The sanctions doctrine rests on a falsified premise. For a century, economic coercion has been justified to Western publics as an alternative to military conflict. The empirical record shows the opposite: sustained economic pressure on industrialised states increases the probability of armed confrontation. This is not a marginal effect or a contested interpretation. It is the dominant pattern. The oil embargo on Japan precipitated Pearl Harbour. Maximum pressure on Iran, sustained from 2012 through 2025, has now been crowned by direct American military strikes. The theory fails its own test. What Esfandyar Batmanghelidj identifies, in his recent conversation with Hossein Hamdieh, is the structural logic beneath this failure—what he terms the cycle. Economic pressure generates domestic instability. Instability, at sufficient magnitude, becomes the justification for the military intervention that economic coercion was purportedly designed to avoid. This is not rhetorical flourish. It is pattern recognition. The question Batmanghelidj places before us is simultaneously intellectual and political: how does one interrupt a cycle when every institution—military, bureaucratic, ideological—has configured itself to perpetuate it? My purpose here is not summary but analysis. I take up Batmanghelidj’s diagnosis and extend it through three domains: the falsifiability problem in sanctions theory, the regional architecture required to break the cycle, and the structural temptation of the war economy. Each domain reveals hidden assumptions that, once made explicit, dissolve certain comforting binaries and clarify the actual decision space. The Sanctions Doctrine and the Problem of Self-Immunisation Premise one: economic coercion is presented as a substitute for armed conflict. Premise two: if this claim were empirically sound, we would observe a negative correlation between sanction intensity and subsequent military engagement. What we observe instead is a positive correlation. Nicholas Mulder’s The Economic Weapon documents this pattern across a century. More careful economists warned in the 1920s that accumulating pressure on large economies tends to make war more likely, not less. The prediction has been borne out repeatedly. A falsifiable theory, confronted with systematic disconfirmation, would be revised or abandoned. The sanctions doctrine has instead been immunised through auxiliary hypotheses: sanctions were insufficiently comprehensive; the target regime was unusually resilient; the next iteration will succeed. What cannot be entertained—because it would destabilise too many institutional commitments—is that the core premise is wrong. This is Popperian self-immunisation: the theoretical framework survives not through empirical adequacy but through the continuous addition of ad hoc protections. Batmanghelidj observes that the sanctions imposed under Obama in 2012 and rebranded as Trump’s maximum pressure in 2018 are substantially identical. This dissolves the partisan narrative by which American liberals reassure themselves that present cruelty is a Trumpian aberration rather than bipartisan structural logic. The cruelty is encoded in the system. Iran has been constructed, across decades and administrations, as a target rather than a negotiating partner. The Ideological Incoherence Hypothesis A second binary requires dismantling: the current American administration characterised as either civilisational crusader or transactional deal-maker. Batmanghelidj’s diagnosis is more precise and, I submit, correct: the obstacle is not excessive ideology but insufficient ideological coherence. Incoherence is the problem. This matters because a segment of Iranian opinion has convinced itself that Western antagonism is metaphysical—that an independent Iran is ontologically intolerable to the West. If true, diplomacy is theatre and fortress politics the only rational posture. But the historical record contradicts this. The United States has negotiated settlements with governments whose ideology it finds repugnant—Vietnam, contemporary Syria—when structural conditions align. To foreclose diplomacy on civilisational grounds is sophisticated fatalism, and fatalism is typically the rationalisation of abdicated agency. The task is harder and less dramatic: identify the political conditions under which agreement becomes possible, and cultivate them. Batmanghelidj’s suggestion that transformative diplomacy—a non-aggression framework, explicit mutual economic benefit, regional normalisation architecture—may be required rather than narrow technical fixes deserves examination. These are not utopian aspirations. They constitute the minimal vocabulary of any durable settlement. The Regional Horizon as Strategic Depth Thesis: the decisive plane of action has shifted from bilateral (Iran-US) to regional (Iran-Gulf). This is not a geographical observation but a structural one. The seven years of diplomatic groundwork towards normalisation with Riyadh, Doha, and Abu Dhabi was not sentiment. It was the construction of strategic depth through economic interdependence—dense transactional webs with co-geographical actors. Batmanghelidj’s analogy to postwar Europe is apt. Airbus is the institutional residue of a Franco-German decision to become co-owners of prosperity rather than perennial combatants over territory. The mechanism: create joint economic assets sufficiently valuable that their destruction becomes mutually ruinous. Why should Iran-Saudi Arabia, or Iran-Qatar, not follow this logic? The recent conflict has imposed costs on this project. Targeting Gulf infrastructure has depleted Iranian political capital in capitals where it was beginning to accumulate. But the project is deferred, not terminated. The critical variable is whether Iranian leadership resists the Hormuz temptation—the idea that a choke point, tolled or closed, can substitute for regional partnership. It cannot. A demonstrated deterrent is not equivalent to a structural economic position. Confusing the two is a category error with generational consequences. Hidden assumption made explicit: regional economic integration requires Iran to function as a normal state—predictable, treaty-abiding, oriented towards mutual gain—not as a revolutionary vanguard. This is not a moral judgement. It is a structural prerequisite. Revolutionary rhetoric is incompatible with the trust infrastructure required for joint economic projects. The Asymmetry of Societies Batmanghelidj notes an asymmetry that Western discourse systematically inverts. For all the rhetoric about an ideological Islamic Republic, Iranian society has not been mobilised into the expansionist, revanchist, paranoid politics observable in contemporary Israel. The dialogue between state and society in Iran is strained but extant. Demands are still made from below; power, however reluctantly, still responds. This is the empirical foundation for any claim to normalcy. The human being is the measure and axis of value—madār va miḥvar-i arzish mā ādamī ast. A society that mourns its dead as persons, not as units in a cosmic drama, that seeks functional roofs and competent schools, is a society whose normalcy warrants defence. Defending it is the political project. This is not sentimental. It is the criterion by which state legitimacy is assessed. The War Economy Threshold Batmanghelidj’s reference to Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction functions as a structural warning. Interwar Germany’s trajectory was not solely ideological derangement. It was the economic reorganisation of an industrial base under sustained external pressure, combined with unresolved resentment, until weapons production became more profitable than welfare production. The state ceases to serve society; society is conscripted into serving the state’s armament requirements. Iran has, to date, avoided this threshold. Its industrial economy remains predominantly civilian-oriented. But the capacity to tip is latent. Every month of attrition marginally increases the probability. The deepest defence of the nation is not state armament but protection of the civilian fabric upon which any legitimate state must rest. This is the Popperian criterion: what would falsify the claim that Iran is defending itself? Answer: the subordination of civil society to permanent mobilisation. Indigenous Economic Thinking as Exit Strategy Batmanghelidj’s final recommendation—Isabella Weber’s How China Escaped Shock Therapy—points to the necessary intellectual labour. The answer to imposed orthodoxy is not counter-orthodoxy but the patient excavation of indigenous economic frameworks capable of articulating a development path that is neither IMF template nor autarky. Iranian economic debate has oscillated between state dirigisme and market fundamentalism. Neither is sufficient. What is required is unglamorous, iterative, fallibilist work to construct a model fitted to Iran’s actual contingencies. The Cycle and Its Interruption The cycle Batmanghelidj identifies is the machinery that disperses collective agency—through sanction, war, and manufactured emergency that suspends ordinary reasoning. Breaking the cycle requires protecting the conditions under which a society can think, argue, build, correct, mourn, and begin again. This is not heroic. It is daily. And it is the measure of seriousness. I return to the image: we are droplets, and the river forms only when the space between us opens. The work is to defend that space against the forces—external and internal—that profit from its closure. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Photo: Getty Images / CNN How Curated Certainty Replaces Political Consciousness in the Digital Diaspora A message arrived recently on social media—the kind that has become ordinary in certain corners of the Iranian diaspora. It was a response to someone questioning an unverified claim about alleged government infiltration. The reply was swift and uncompromising: first, the accusation of being a “regime stooge,” then the counter-charge that anyone defending due process must themselves be “working for the government.” No evidence was offered. No space for disagreement was acknowledged. The logic was binary and absolute: if you are not amplifying our narrative with appropriate fury, you are complicit. I cite this exchange not because it is exceptional, but because it distills a pattern now endemic across diaspora spaces. This is a political consciousness shaped less by disciplined engagement with reality than by algorithmic curation, media priming, and the conversion of geographical distance into epistemic license. The platforms that organize this consciousness—Instagram stories, Telegram channels, Twitter threads engineered for virality—do not merely transmit information. They structure emotion, reward speed over scrutiny, and monetize the collapse of nuance into rage. What follows is an attempt to map three defining features of this mentality: the compression of moral complexity, the borrowing of certainty disguised as conviction, and the abandonment of institutional imagination. Understanding these patterns matters not because diaspora voices are irrelevant—they are often crucial—but because without self-correction, they risk becoming mirrors of the very authoritarianism they claim to oppose. Moral Compression and the Evacuation of Complexity The first signature is what might be called moral compression: the reduction of multi-dimensional political realities into a single emotional binary that tolerates no qualification. In the exchange described above, this manifests as instant diagnosis—anyone questioning a claim about government infiltration must be “one of them.” The logical architecture is familiar across thousands of similar encounters: if you hesitate before amplifying, you reveal yourself as suspect. If you ask for evidence, you expose complicity. If you defend procedural fairness, you betray the cause. This is not rhetorical excess. It is a cognitive mechanism performing political work. Compression prevents the questions that would slow the machinery of outrage: What exactly is being claimed? What evidence supports it? Who stands to benefit from this framing? What are the consequences of getting it wrong? These are not academic luxuries but basic epistemic hygiene for any movement claiming accountability and truth as values. Yet in the compressed universe of the algorithmic militia, such questions are not answered—they are treated as betrayals. The middle ground, where evidence can be weighed and complexity acknowledged without abandoning moral clarity, is systematically evacuated. What remains is a landscape of two positions: collaborator or patriot, regime stooge or freedom fighter. The consequences are predictable. Justice collapses into revenge. Accountability becomes indistinguishable from punishment. Coalition-building devolves into standing beside anyone who hates the same enemy with sufficient volume. The platforms reward this collapse because outrage spreads faster than analysis, because certainty generates more engagement than hesitation, because the algorithm does not ask whether a claim is true—only whether it makes people feel something strong enough to share. Borrowed Certainty and the Illusion of Independent Judgment The second signature is more paradoxical: fierce personal conviction built almost entirely on borrowed narratives. Many in the diaspora speak as though possessing direct, unmediated access to Iranian realities—as if distance sharpens rather than obscures vision. Yet the language, framing, and specific claims often trace back to a narrow media diet: partisan broadcasts, curated Instagram accounts, Telegram channels optimized for maximum outrage, Twitter threads designed for viral spread. This is epistemic dependency at scale, rendered invisible by emotional investment. The consciousness feels independent because it is performed in the first person, wrapped in personal commitment, spoken with passionate certainty. But the narrative infrastructure is prefabricated. Half-truths arrive pre-formatted for consumption: selective footage, decontextualized slogans, inflated claims, captions that tell viewers what to feel before they see. The consumer does not interrogate these inputs—they inhabit them. They do not ask what has been omitted, what evidence could challenge the narrative, who curates the feed. Instead, they ask which fragment can intensify the emotion they already carry. The result is not knowledge but a simulacrum of it: curated realism where everything already means what the audience has been primed to feel. Certain media outlets function not as news sources but as emotional architects, structuring feeling before transmitting information. Their editorial choices prioritize speed over verification, spectacle over substance, maximal accusation over measured analysis. In the diaspora context—where geographical distance creates epistemic vulnerability and longing makes people hungry for certainty—this architecture is especially potent. Viewers watch not to learn but to have convictions validated, rage dignified, exile morally elevated. What makes this dependency insidious is its invisibility. Because the borrowed narrative aligns with pre-existing wounds—anger at brutality, grief over lost futures, humiliation at national decline—it does not feel borrowed. It feels discovered, like truth finally being told. And because the same narrative echoes across multiple platforms, it acquires the appearance of self-evidence. Repetition is mistaken for corroboration. Virality becomes epistemology. A claim can circulate ten thousand times and remain false, but in this ecosystem, frequency substitutes for verification. The tragedy is not that diaspora communities seek information—it is that they mistake curation for discovery, amplification for courage, and emotional resonance for truth. A critical diaspora would pause before sharing. It would ask: what is being left out, who benefits from this framing, why does this claim feel so satisfying precisely when it becomes harder to verify? Without that discipline, discourse degenerates into factional mythmaking with better production values. Procedural Illiteracy and the Fantasy of Cathartic Dawn The third signature is what might be called procedural illiteracy: a striking inability—or refusal—to think politically beyond the emotional satisfaction of removal. One hears constantly the vocabulary of republic, freedom, democracy, secularism. But these words float free of institutional content. What kind of republic? Which constitutional safeguards? What legal framework for accountability? What protections for dissent when the revolutionary majority grows impatient? What mechanisms to prevent the next cycle of purges? On these questions, the discourse thins rapidly or falls silent. The future is imagined not as the difficult architecture of law, rights, and institutional restraint, but as an emotional afterglow—a cathartic dawn that will somehow organize itself once the hated object disappears. This is not politics. It is political theology without the honesty. The social media exchange mentioned earlier exemplifies this pattern. The accusation is instant, absolute, unencumbered by process. There is no question of evidence, no space for response, no conception that political disagreement might occur between people who share opposition to authoritarianism but differ on strategy, timing, or means. The move is pure: you are either with us or against us, and if against us, you deserve the label and everything it implies—moral exclusion, reputational destruction, and in extreme formulations, elimination. This is not incidental rhetoric but the logical endpoint of replacing procedural thinking with emotional identification. Any movement that cannot defend human dignity while angry will not reliably defend it when victorious. Any political culture treating disagreement as treason before the revolution will not suddenly discover pluralism after. The habit of postponing principle—”later we will build institutions, later we will worry about due process, later we will protect dissent”—is usually the beginning of abandoning it permanently. One of the most revealing phrases in these exchanges is the insistence that “now is not the time.” Not the time for criticism. Not the time for nuance. Not the time to object to dehumanizing language. Not the time to ask what justice means beyond punishment. This temporal blackmail is among the oldest devices of authoritarian politics. It licenses today what tomorrow will be called regrettable excess. It suspends the ethics of means on the promise that righteous ends have already been settled. But history suggests otherwise. Movements that defer accountability until after victory rarely rediscover it. Movements that cannot articulate the institutional shape of the future they claim to want rarely build it. The algorithmic militia does not prepare people for democratic citizenship—it trains them for permanent mobilization, where every question reduces to friend-enemy identification, every complexity flattens into a loyalty test, every call for restraint registers as collaboration. The Weight of Distance and the Obligation It Imposes None of this means that diaspora anger is illegitimate or ungrounded. Much of it emerges from grief, helplessness, and the unbearable experience of watching a country suffer through screens while living in safety. The wound is real. Distance does not erase moral standing. But it does impose obligations that curated outrage systematically violates. If anything, distance demands greater rigor, not less. Those who speak from safety bear fewer immediate risks, which means they carry greater responsibility to verify before amplifying, to resist the pleasures of borrowed certainty, to refuse the fantasy that others should pay the price for policies endorsed from abroad. Exile does not confer moral authority—it imposes epistemic humility. The further you are from consequence, the more careful your speech must become. The problem is not that diaspora communities feel strongly. It is that intensity has been mistaken for insight, volume for validity, circulation for verification. Pain does not become wiser by becoming louder. Grief does not translate into strategy by being broadcast. And rage, however intelligible, is not self-justifying simply because it is sincerely felt. What Replaces the Militia? The alternative is not neutrality or silence—it is epistemic adulthood. By that I mean the capacity to hold grief without converting it into method, to oppose tyranny without sanctifying revenge, to distinguish solidarity from surrender to the loudest voice in the feed. It means recovering disciplines that algorithmic culture punishes: hesitation before amplification, verification before sharing, proportion in judgment, willingness to revise when evidence demands. It means recognizing that a slogan is not a program, that fury is not analysis, that repetition is not proof, and that the human being remains the measure and axis of political value—even when platforms invite us to make exceptions. It means asking what kind of political culture is being built right now, in exile, in the comments sections and group chats and curated feeds. Because that culture is not preparation for a democratic future—it is the dress rehearsal. If the Iranian diaspora is to become politically generative rather than theatrically combustible, it must unlearn the pleasures of curated outrage. It must recover harder virtues: institutional imagination, moral consistency across contexts, courage to refuse emotional shortcuts even when the algorithm rewards them. Otherwise it will continue to mistake amplification for courage, borrowed certainty for knowledge, and hatred for seriousness. A democratic future cannot be built on that foundation. The blade, however righteous its rage, cannot construct what justice requires. And the simulacrum of knowledge, however emotionally satisfying, will never substitute for the patient, unglamorous work of building a politics worthy of the suffering it claims to honor. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Source: Originally published in The Ismaili UK, July 2015. | View at The Institute of Ismaili Studies Author: Dr Daryoush Mohammad Poor, Interim Head of the Constituency Studies Unit and Associate Professor at The Institute of Ismaili Studies. Abstract: This article explores the concept of authority without territory as embodied by the Ismaili Imamat. Shi’a Imami Ismaili Muslims recognize the authority of the Imams descended from the Prophet Muhammad’s household (ahl al-bayt), through Hazrat Bibi Fatimah and Hazrat Imam Ali. The doctrine of Imamat is central to the community’s identity, emphasizing the Imam’s role as the spiritual leader and interpreter of Islam in each era. The article examines how the Ismaili Imamat has adapted to modernity through institutional frameworks, notably the Ismaili Constitution, which codifies the community’s values and administrative structures, and the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), which operationalizes the Imamat’s mission to improve both spiritual and material well-being globally. Download PDF Key Themes The doctrine of Imamat and its centrality to Ismaili identity Authority rooted in divine designation vs. secular governance The Ismaili Constitution: blending traditional Shi’i principles with modern governance The dual focus of the Imamat: balancing spiritual guidance (din) with material development (dunya) Institutional adaptability through the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) Pluralism and modernity without Westernization The living tradition of allegiance to the Imam in the modern world Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Source: Illinois Geographer, Vol. 65 (Fall/Spring 2023, No. 1-2) Abstract: This article examines the history, geographical distribution, and doctrinal evolution of the Nizārī Ismāʿīlī community, tracing their succession through Ismāʿīl ibn Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and the establishment of the Fatimid Caliphate. The study explores key historical periods including the Alamūt era under Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ, the Mongol invasion, and the community’s subsequent dispersal and transformation. Download PDF Key Topics Covered Historical timeline: Fatimid Imam-Caliphs and Nizārī Imams of Alamūt The fortress period at Alamūt under Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ (1090-1256 CE) Doctrinal evolution: Taʿlīm, Tawḥīd, Qiyāmat proclamation Transition from Neo-Platonic cosmology to Sufi-influenced thought Global geographical distribution from Persia to South Asia Modern leadership under the Aga Khan References Daftary, F. (2007). The Ismāʿīlīs: Their History and Doctrines (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Shahrastānī, M. (1984). Muslim Sects and Divisions (A.K. Kazi & J.G. Flynn, Trans.). Kegan Paul International. Ṭūsī, N. al-D. (1950). The Rawḍatu’t-Taslīm (W. Ivanow, Trans.). Ismaili Society. Walker, P. E. (1996). Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī: Intellectual Missionary. I.B. Tauris. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Credit: Haidar Mohammed Ali / Anadolu via Reuters Connect [Note: The Reuters Connect page itself says the asset is provided by Anadolu Agency and that Reuters Connect “has not verified or endorsed the material.”] One of the lazier slogans in recent Iranian political discourse is the claim that Iran has been “occupied” because the Islamic Republic has relied on Afghan, Iraqi, Lebanese and other aligned forces beyond its borders, and at times appears to have drawn on some of these networks closer to home. The slogan is emotionally potent, especially in parts of the diaspora. It converts anger into clarity. It offers a simple culprit. But as political analysis it is weak. It confuses repression with occupation, transnational ideology with foreign rule, and auxiliary force with the replacement of a nation by outsiders. My first proposition is straightforward. Not every foreign presence amounts to occupation. Occupation, in political and legal terms, implies effective control by an external power over the territory and governing authority of another state. That is not what we are dealing with in Iran. However troubling the presence of transnational Shiʿi networks may be, Iran is not being governed by Kabul, Baghdad, Beirut or Najaf. It is governed by an Iranian state, through Iranian institutions, Iranian elites, Iranian security organs and Iranian collaborators. To say otherwise is not merely exaggerated; it is a categorical error. This distinction matters because it separates two different criticisms. One criticism says that the regime has built a regional security architecture and has used ideologically aligned groups for strategic depth. That criticism is broadly sustainable. The other says that Iran has ceased to be ruled by Iranians and has become an occupied country. That second claim does not follow. A state may be authoritarian, predatory and regionally entangled without ceasing to be its own state. To collapse these two claims into one is to replace analysis with slogan. My second proposition is that states routinely use outsiders, auxiliaries and proxies. This is not peculiar to the Islamic Republic. France has long treated the Foreign Legion as a legitimate arm of state force. Britain has relied on Gurkha regiments. The United States, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, has worked through contractors, tribal auxiliaries and partner militias. European and democratic states also externalise coercion when it suits their interests; they simply describe it in more respectable language. When others do it, it becomes alliance management, expeditionary doctrine or burden-sharing. When Iran does it, some suddenly discover a language of occupation. The hypocrisy is obvious. This does not excuse the Iranian case. It simply restores proportion. If the use of foreign-born or non-national fighters proves occupation, then one would have to describe a host of other states in the same way. Very few who use this slogan would accept that conclusion. The standard is therefore not analytical but polemical. It is applied selectively because it serves a psychological need: it allows one to imagine that the country was stolen only by foreigners, not also by one’s own institutions, factions and failures. My third proposition is that even the language of “mercenary” is often too blunt for what is happening. Groups such as the Fatemiyoun Brigade or elements linked to Hashd al-Shaabi are not simply hired hands in the narrow sense. They are usually tied to the regime through ideology, patronage, training, strategic dependency and a shared language of resistance. This makes the matter more serious, not less serious. But accuracy still matters. What we are seeing is not a foreign nation ruling Iran; it is an Iranian regime projecting power through a transnational ideological ecology, and at times drawing reassurance, manpower or symbolism from it. My fourth proposition is that the occupation myth rests on a poor form of nationalism. It assumes that the only “real” Iranians are those who think as we do, and that those who do not may be treated as alien bodies, imported agents or occupiers. Nothing could be further from the truth. A brutal judge, a corrupt cleric, a repressive officer or an opportunistic bureaucrat does not become non-Iranian merely because he is politically repugnant. The problem is not that such figures are foreign. The problem is that they are ours too: products of our own political history, institutions, fractures and unresolved struggles. This is precisely why the slogan is so seductive. It relieves us of a harder reckoning. It is easier to say the homeland has been occupied than to admit that a domestic authoritarian order, with local roots and local recruits, has endured for decades while also building regional ties of coercion and influence. The first story offers emotional release. The second demands political maturity. Yet only the second story can help us think clearly about change. There is, of course, a real experience underneath the exaggeration. People have heard non-Persian accents in moments of repression. They have seen the symbolism of foreign militias celebrated in Iranian political space. They know that the regime has invested heavily in organisations beyond Iran’s borders while large parts of Iranian society have been impoverished, silenced or brutalised. These observations should not be dismissed. But from a number of visible and painful instances one cannot infer a total condition of occupation. Good political judgement requires proportion, scale and evidence. The broader literature in political science and international relations is useful here precisely because it cools the temperature. States do not survive by purity. They survive through combinations of coercion, legitimacy, patronage, ideology and external leverage. They borrow methods from one another. They justify their own violence in universal terms and denounce the same conduct in their rivals. That pattern can be observed in empires, republics, democracies and authoritarian states alike. Iran is not unique in this respect. Its configuration is particular, but the underlying logic is not. My final proposition is practical. The occupation myth does political damage because it misdiagnoses the problem. If Iran is occupied, then the implied remedy is liberation by an external force. If, however, Iran is ruled by an entrenched domestic state that also works through regional clients and ideological allies, then the task is different. It is to weaken the machinery of coercion, split the ruling bloc, reduce the costs of collective action, build broader coalitions and think institutionally rather than mythically. That is a harder politics, but it is also a more honest one. We should therefore hold two truths together. First, transnational militias and aligned formations have intensified repression, fear and regional entanglement, and references to groups such as Fatemiyoun or Hashd al-Shaabi are not invented out of thin air. Second, Iran is not an occupied country in the serious sense of the term. To confuse these truths is to hand propaganda a victory over judgement. Anger is understandable. Slogans are easy. But if we want a freer Iran, we need a language that names the regime’s violence without surrendering reason, proportion and intellectual self-respect. Selected Works Engaged Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Bayat, Asef, Revolution without Revolutionaries. Keohane, Robert O., After Hegemony. Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power. Popper, Karl, The Open Society and Its Enemies; Conjectures and Refutations. Thomson, Janice E., Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns. Tilly, Charles, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992. Weber, Max, Politics as a Vocation. Waltz, Kenneth N., Theory of International Politics. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Source: PBS NewsHour / Reuters An Assessment of Strategic Contradictions and Diplomatic Opportunities The Dual-Role Paradox Pakistan’s deployment of 13,000 troops and fighter jets to Saudi Arabia on April 11, 2026—executed under the Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement (SMDA) signed in September 2025—has thrust Islamabad into the centre of the Iran conflict with a fundamental contradiction. Pakistan now simultaneously serves as a military guarantor of Saudi security and positions itself as a potential mediator between Riyadh and Tehran. This duality, while diplomatically precarious, reflects a strategic logic rooted in Pakistan’s unique regional position. Pakistan’s Mediating Capital Few states possess Pakistan’s combination of mediating assets. As a nuclear-armed Islamic republic with deep ties to both Saudi Arabia and Iran, Islamabad carries a legitimacy that Western brokers cannot replicate. Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar’s March 2026 visit to Tehran—where he candidly warned Iranian counterparts of Pakistan’s SMDA obligations—demonstrated a transparency that may enhance rather than undermine credibility. The collapse of US–Iran negotiations in Islamabad on April 11–13 underscores the vacuum Pakistan could fill. Notably, it is Islamabad—not Muscat—that hosted this round. In previous cycles, Oman served as the default mediator. That the geography of diplomacy has shifted signals recognition by all parties that Pakistan’s position—straddling both sides of the Gulf divide—gives it leverage Oman does not possess. Pakistan is now mediating not merely between Tehran and Washington, but between Tehran and Riyadh. What Is Really at Stake The question Pakistan faces is not merely whether it can maintain good relations with both Saudi Arabia and Iran simultaneously. That is the short-term challenge. The deeper calculus concerns the long-term equilibrium of power across West Asia. Israel’s conduct—from its operations in Gaza and Lebanon to strikes on Iranian nuclear sites and open threats of wider war—has established it as the region’s principal destabilising actor. Pakistan’s planners understand that this is not an isolated Iran–US dispute; it is a structural contest in which an unchecked Israel, armed with undeclared nuclear weapons and shielded by American vetoes, threatens any state that resists its regional primacy. Islamabad is therefore seeking to prevent the Saudi–Iranian rivalry from becoming a permanent fault line that Israel and its allies can exploit indefinitely. The SMDA Complication The deployment constrains mediating potential. The SMDA was activated by real threats following Iran’s strikes on Saudi energy infrastructure and US bases during the February–April conflict cycle. With Pakistani fighter jets integrated into Saudi air defence, Tehran cannot view Islamabad as disinterested. Pakistan’s $4.8 billion in external obligations, offset by $5 billion in Saudi–Qatari support, means strategic autonomy is materially circumscribed. Mediation requires perceived independence, and financial dependency erodes precisely that perception. Impact on Iranian Strategic Calculations For Tehran, the deployment alters the conflict calculus measurably. A nuclear-capable state’s conventional forces in the Saudi defence architecture raises escalation risks Iran must now factor into military planning. An attack on Saudi Arabia could draw a nuclear power into direct confrontation. The fragile ceasefire following the February 28–April 7 hostilities may be stabilised, counterintuitively, by this escalation of stakes. The Limits of This Round—and Why It Does Not Matter The likelihood that this round fails to produce a lasting settlement is not low. Structural spoilers—Israel’s preference for permanent Iranian isolation, Washington hawks, Tehran hardliners—remain formidable. But failure here does not mean failure in perpetuity. The Islamic Republic will not collapse under military pressure. Its institutional depth, mobilisation capacity, and regional strategic depth make regime-change a fantasy. The monarchist exile faction, rallied around a prince who collaborated with forces threatening war crimes against over 90 million Iranians, commands negligible domestic legitimacy. The notion that a population would embrace a figure associated with those who threatened to obliterate their country requires a suspension of political logic no serious analyst can endorse. Peace is therefore inevitable—because the alternatives are permanent war or the collapse of a state that refuses to collapse. The Path Forward: Stress-Testing Pakistan’s End-State Vision Three speculative end-state objectives emerge for Islamabad: a demilitarized region, the withdrawal of US forces from West Asia, and a denuclearised region with Pakistan and Iran as anchoring powers. Each deserves scrutiny. Demilitarisation faces the obstacle that Persian Gulf monarchies have built security around foreign military presence; removing it requires a replacement framework that does not yet exist. US withdrawal is plausible only if Washington concludes that the cost of regional hegemony exceeds the benefits—a calculation that shifts with every administration. Denuclearisation is the most ambitious: Pakistan itself is a nuclear state, and asking Iran to forgo nuclear ambitions while retaining its own arsenal creates an asymmetry Tehran would exploit. Yet the logic holds if the framework is mutual—a regional compact in which both states cap and eventually reduce arsenals in exchange for guaranteed sovereignty. This is generational work. What remains clear is that Pakistan will stay an active partner regardless of how the current round concludes. The strategic imperatives—geographic proximity, shared borders, sectarian bridge-building, and the existential threat of an unchecked Israel—guarantee Islamabad cannot disengage. Whether it possesses the institutional discipline to navigate this narrow corridor remains the critical variable. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Members of the Iranian diaspora in Perth, Australia, holding a solidarity rally on 10 January 2026 against the Islamic Republic | Source: Wikimedia Commons | Credit: Gnangarra Listen to this essay: I have watched the Iranian diaspora move deeper into an information war that rewards certainty over truth. In that war, social media does not merely transmit opinion; it manufactures moral weather. Anger is packaged as analysis, repetition as evidence, and algorithmic virality as legitimacy. The result is a predictable compression of political judgment: every event is forced into a binary script where one camp speaks for freedom and the other for barbarism. In that script, complexity is treated as betrayal. I often hear the claim that the Islamic Republic’s military spending proves total indifference to ordinary life because wartime infrastructure—sirens, shelters, civil defense systems—remains inadequate. The criticism sounds intuitively powerful, and parts of it are valid. But I reject the hidden premise that preparedness failures automatically identify the principal moral culprit in a conflict. This framing can displace responsibility from aggressor to target, treating civilian vulnerability as evidence against the victim before it is evidence against the attacker. It is a rhetorical move with a familiar history: structural suffering is blamed on those who endure it, not those who produce it. At the same time, I do not consider civil defense morally trivial. States owe populations practical protections regardless of who fired first. So my argument is not that preparedness is irrelevant; it is that preparedness cannot be the sole diagnostic of legitimacy. A government may be negligent in protection while external actors remain culpable for unlawful escalation. Reducing this layered reality to a single accusation—”if people die, the local state is the only enemy”—is analytically lazy and politically dangerous. I also see a related inflation in our discourse: the claim that the regime is not merely oppressive or incompetent, but the singular and absolute threat to all Iranian life, such that almost any external violence becomes morally tolerable if it weakens Tehran. This logic converts despair into permission. Once the domestic state is rebranded as an existential totality, legal categories blur: sanctions that devastate households become strategic necessities; assassinations become technical corrections; preemptive war is reframed as humanitarian surgery. The rhetorical endpoint is not liberation but moral deregulation. Geopolitically, I believe this discourse relies on selective memory. Iran’s post-1979 record includes repression, regional proxy warfare, and interventions that deserve robust criticism. Yet I cannot analyze the regional order without parallel scrutiny of U.S.-Israeli coercive strategy: covert sabotage, recurring strikes, maximal sanctions, and repeated pressure campaigns that weakened diplomatic off-ramps. The collapse of the JCPOA after U.S. withdrawal in 2018 did not simply end a treaty; it strengthened hardline security logics on all sides. When diplomacy is repeatedly undermined, militarists inherit the stage. Timing matters. Attacks launched during negotiation windows do not merely produce immediate casualties; they alter the argument structure of politics. They teach publics that compromise is naive, that institutions are decorative, and that force is the only reliable language. This does not exonerate Tehran’s authoritarian machinery. It shows, instead, how regime securitization and external militarization are mutually reinforcing systems. Each side harvests the violence of the other as domestic proof of its own necessity. I want to be equally clear about legal rhetoric, because legal rhetoric is often where political manipulation hides. Terms like “self-defense,” “deterrence,” and “preemption” are now used as moral shortcuts rather than legal tests. In my view, if imminence is undefined, evidence is withheld, and proportionality is post hoc storytelling, then legal language has been reduced to branding. We cannot build credible anti-authoritarian politics by borrowing the most elastic justifications of militarized statecraft. Precision is not a luxury here; it is the minimum ethical duty. I see diaspora media ecosystems intensify this cycle through three mechanisms. First, emotional monetization: trauma-rich narratives outperform careful reporting, so outrage becomes an economic model. Second, epistemic tribalism: users learn to trust identity proximity over verification, producing sealed interpretive communities. Third, performative absolutism: visibility is awarded to maximal claims, not defensible ones. In this environment, disagreement is recoded as collaboration, and policy questions collapse into loyalty tests. A fourth mechanism also deserves attention: moral outsourcing. Instead of testing claims against documents, timelines, and legal standards, we outsource certainty to charismatic accounts that mirror our pain. I understand why this happens; communities under prolonged injury seek emotional coherence before analytical coherence. But when political judgment is outsourced, accountability disappears. The loudest narrator becomes the temporary court of appeal, and facts become decorative props in a drama whose ending is already written. This produces a striking mirror effect. Opposition echo chambers accuse state media of propaganda while reproducing propaganda form: decontextualized footage, inflated casualty rhetoric, and strategic omission of inconvenient facts. Regime channels, for their part, weaponize every diaspora excess to discredit legitimate criticism, presenting dissent as foreign orchestration. Both narratives depend on the same cognitive technology—fear plus simplification—and both punish nuanced speech. The citizen becomes either a slogan or a suspect. The framework I advocate begins with symmetry in moral method, not symmetry in political power. I reject both apologetics for authoritarian repression and romanticism about coercive foreign policy. I ask the same questions of every actor: Who initiated force in this instance? What legal authority exists? What civilian costs are foreseeable? What diplomatic alternatives were available, and by whom were they blocked? Which claims are evidenced, and which are emotionally outsourced to collective grievance? Without this methodological discipline, analysis degenerates into factional mythmaking. For the diaspora, the central task is epistemic adulthood. To me, that means distinguishing opposition to the regime from consent to war, and anti-war critique from regime loyalty. It means refusing the intoxicating fantasy that bombardment can perform democratic pedagogy. It means acknowledging that a population can be simultaneously oppressed by domestic autocracy and endangered by external punishment regimes. Most of all, it means resisting the conversion of legitimate rage into a permanent marketplace of distortion. That epistemic adulthood has practical consequences. It asks us to cite better, pause longer, and speak with fewer theatrics when evidence is uncertain. It asks academics, journalists, and activists—including me—to separate interpretation from assertion and to mark the limits of what we know. It also asks institutions in exile to reward correction instead of punishing it. A political culture that cannot revise itself cannot democratize itself. Humility, in this sense, is not weakness; it is infrastructure. I believe the future of Iranian political imagination depends less on who shouts the loudest than on who restores standards of argument under pressure. If our public sphere remains hostage to algorithmic panic and geopolitical ventriloquism, diaspora politics will continue mistaking amplification for insight. But if analytical rigor, historical memory, and moral consistency are reintroduced into debate, a different possibility emerges: criticism that neither flatters power nor licenses catastrophe. In that narrower and harder space, truth becomes less theatrical, but far more useful. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Photographer: Parastoo Maleki – Unsplash A narrative essay drawn from a dialogue between Hossein Hamdieh and Daryoush Mohammad Poor The Polarised Mirror In the spring of 2026, Iran and the United States were engaged in careful, tentative diplomatic contacts—first talks in Islamabad, Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir travelling to Tehran, a fragile ceasefire still holding. That was the larger backdrop. In a quieter register, a different kind of conversation was taking place: scholars and young researchers working inside Iran—people who invite such exchanges at genuine personal risk—had arranged a dialogue with those of us in the diaspora, and they deserve full credit for kick-starting it. Hossein Hamdieh, speaking on behalf of this circle, put a question to me that I initially thought was straightforward but turned out to be far harder than expected: does Iran possess a common point of departure from which all its citizens can begin the journey toward development? Over the next half-hour I tried to answer it. What follows is my attempt to reconstruct that conversation and, in the process of writing it down, to sharpen arguments that were necessarily compressed in speech. The question itself was not new. Since at least the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, Iranian thinkers have wrestled with the problem of where “we” begin. I built on themes from a previous conversation on the “Copernican Revolution of the Iranian Mind”—drawing on Hamid Dabashi’s analysis of how that revolution diagnosed the shattering of the West as Iran’s fixed reference point—and turned the lens inward: what remains once the mirror of Western validation is broken? The answer is not a triumphant nativist identity but something more demanding: the irreducible fact of shared humanity. Whether this framing is adequate to the full scale of the problem is a question that can only be tested by pressing it as far as it will go—which is what this essay attempts. The Anatomy of the “White Camp” Hamdieh opened the conversation by sketching a portrait that many observers of Iranian diaspora politics would recognise immediately. He described a segment of Iranian society—both inside the country and abroad—that has constructed what he called a “white camp” mentality. This is the worldview encapsulated in the Pahlavi-era aphorism that Iran’s location in the Middle East is a “geographical mistake.” For those who inhabit this mental geography, Iran belongs not with its Arab, Afghan, or Central Asian neighbours but with the civilisational West. Their “whiteness” is less a biological claim than a status marker: it signifies membership in the club of modernity, a seat at the table of progress. Yet Hamdieh noted a corrosive irony at the heart of this self-image. The camp that claims kinship with modernity does not necessarily embrace modern values—freedom, human rights, feminist principles—except instrumentally, as a rhetorical weapon against the Islamic Republic. The “Aryan we” at the centre of this identity constructs an “other” that is Arab, Muslim, ethnically marginal, and expendable. This dynamic produces grotesque distortions: victims of violence in the southern port city of Minab can be dismissed as part of a “project,” their deaths unworthy of the communal grief reserved for “our own.” At its most extreme, this worldview can even welcome an external military attack on Iran, reasoning that “we”—the real Iran, the white Iran—are merely attacking the aberrant regime that has occupied our proper civilisational space. I recognised the portrait Hamdieh was drawing—it describes a syndrome visible in many diaspora communities. Rather than contesting it, I widened the frame. The polarisation Hamdieh identified is not an Iranian peculiarity. It is a structural feature of human societies under stress. The United States has its own version, made visible in the rise of Trumpism; Britain has its version, legible in the Brexit vote; Israel is living through yet another variant, as citizens who identify with the state find themselves increasingly uncomfortable in international company. To claim polarisation as uniquely Iranian would be as misleading as the exceptionalism it aims to critique. But there is a genuine tension here worth naming: by universalising the problem, one risks evading what is distinctive and urgent about the Iranian case. The more productive question is not “why are Iranians like this?” but rather: “under what conditions does any society intensify its bipolar space?” What economic pressures, what educational failures, what media distortions converge to push a population toward the extremes? The Obsolescence of Old Frameworks The intellectual frameworks that once organised our understanding of the world—the tradition-versus-modernity binary, the Euro-centric narrative of linear progress—have been dying since the start of the twenty-first century. The events of September 11, 2001 were not merely a security catastrophe; they inaugurated an era in which the West’s confident prescription of democracy-by-force collided with the intractable realities of sectarian demography, regional power, and civilisational depth. Consider the tragicomedy of Iraq. The Western coalition overthrew Saddam Hussein and introduced elections, only to discover that democratic majority rule in a Shia-majority country would produce a government sympathetic to Iran. “We handed the meat to the cat,” I said, borrowing a vivid rural idiom. The ensuing cascade—Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, Iran’s 2009 Green Movement—did not merely rearrange geopolitical furniture; it dismantled the very room in which the old conversations about modernity and tradition had taken place. The thoughtful European intellectual already understands that the singular, Euro-centric modernity is an exhausted discourse. Whether Iranians can internalise the same lesson without falling into the opposite trap of reactionary nativism remains an open and consequential question. This is the terrain on which the “white camp” mentality flourishes. When old frameworks collapse but new ones have not yet been built, people reach for the most accessible source of meaning: identity. And identity, unmoored from critical reflection, devolves rapidly into exceptionalism—the comforting fiction that our suffering is unique, our civilisation is sui generis, and the rules that govern other nations do not apply to us. The Only Honest Starting Point The position I advanced tries to sidestep both the nativist and the cosmopolitan camps in Iranian intellectual life. The common starting point is neither a glorious Aryan past nor an imported Western modernity. It is the bare, unglamorous fact of shared human need. “Even the person who says, ‘Come drop a bomb on my head so this misery ends,’” I observed, “what do they want at the end of the day? A roof that doesn’t leak. Food for their children. A decent school.” The originality of this claim should not be overstated—it is, in many ways, a restatement of ideas that development economists and human rights thinkers have articulated with greater rigour. But the specific application to the Iranian debate is worth pressing. The development indicators—education, shelter, healthcare, the right to happiness—are pre-ideological. They precede and undergird every argument about identity, religion, ethnicity, and political system. A woman in childbirth suffers the same regardless of her skin colour. A cancer patient’s agony does not discriminate between Shia and Sunni, Iranian and American. “Have you ever heard a white person say, ‘My cold is different from a black person’s cold’?” I asked. The question sounds almost absurdly simple—but the absurdly simple is precisely what gets lost in the fog of civilisational posturing. If this position has any force, it comes from refusing to privilege any culturalist starting point. It sidesteps the entire debate about whether Iran is “really” Eastern or Western, Muslim or secular, Aryan or Semitic, by asserting that none of these categories is the foundation on which a just society is built. The foundation is the human being and that human being’s non-negotiable need for dignity, safety, and flourishing. Everything else—every grand narrative of civilisational belonging—is a superstructure erected atop this base, and it must be judged by whether it serves or obstructs those elementary needs. This framing has an obvious limitation: it does not tell you what to do when those needs conflict with each other, or when reasonable people disagree about what dignity requires. That is where the hard work of politics begins—but it begins on the right foundation. Pluralism as Struggle, Not Nature If shared humanity is the starting point, pluralism is the discipline required to stay on the path. And here the conversation moved to genuinely difficult terrain: pluralism is not natural. Human beings are not born pluralists; they are born monists. The default setting of the human ego is to regard its own identity—white, black, Muslim, Shia, Kurdish, Tehrani—as a source of special privilege. “You must constantly struggle with yourself,” I said, “to train your own mind so that you slowly get to a place where you say: take it easy, you are just a person like all other people.” I include myself in this diagnosis. The impulse toward monism is not something any of us has overcome; it is something we contend with. This argument sits uneasily with an era that celebrates diversity as an intrinsic good. I was not dismissing diversity; I was warning against the assumption that tolerance is an automatic product of exposure. Left to its own devices, the ego will exploit difference—race, religion, ethnicity, language—as a ladder of hierarchy. Only education, in the broadest sense of the word, can interrupt this cycle. And by education I mean not merely schooling but the entire apparatus of cultural formation: family, media, public discourse, and—crucially—the daily practice of self-examination. I invoked the mystic Ayn al-Quzat Hamadani’s compulsive need to write, and the Persian poet Saye’s admonition never to believe one’s own flattery, as examples of traditions within Iranian culture that already contain the resources for this kind of critical self-reflection. The implications for Iran are stark. If pluralism must be taught, then the absence of pluralism in Iranian public life is not a failure of character but a failure of institutions. The educational system, the media landscape, the political structure—all have conspired, whether by design or by neglect, to reinforce the monist default. The “white camp” and its mirror image—the regime’s insistence on a monolithic Islamic identity—are two symptoms of the same disease: an untrained ego projecting its anxieties onto the body politic. Agency Within Structures There is a risk that everything said so far collapses into a structuralist determinism in which individuals are merely the puppets of historical forces. That conclusion must be resisted. Structures matter—the Islamic Republic is a structure, American hegemony is a structure, colonial history is a structure—but within every structure, individuals retain what I called “agency.” “Every person in a specific situation can act differently,” I said. The question “under what conditions does a society vote for Trump, or for Brexit, or produce the convulsions of Iran in 2009?” is not an invitation to fatalism but to forensic curiosity: what economic, cultural, and educational pressures converged to produce this particular outcome, and what might be done to alter the conditions next time? The tension between structure and agency is not a problem to be resolved in the abstract; it is a tension that must be held and worked through in each concrete case. This emphasis on both structure and agency should make it harder to simply condemn those Iranians who wave Israeli flags in the street to celebrate the bombing of their compatriots, or who shout for foreign intervention. These are not evil people. They are people trapped in what I called an “artificial situation,” an emergency mindset so total that it suspends normal moral reasoning. They have put their own humanity on hold because the crisis seems to demand it. The task of the intellectual is to ask what conditions produced their despair, and to work patiently toward changing those conditions. Hamdieh reinforced this point by drawing attention to the dangers of Iranian exceptionalism—the belief that what befell Syria or Afghanistan cannot happen to Iran because Iran possesses some intrinsic civilisational essence that renders it immune to historical forces. I agreed, and wanted to add something that matters. The long civilisational memory of Iran—its millennia of history, its vast literary and philosophical heritage—is a genuine asset, but it becomes a liability the moment it curdles into arrogance. “The fact that you have a civilisational history of four thousand years shouldn’t cause arrogance in you,” I said plainly. “If you know this, you’re on the right track. You can move forward.” The Entanglement of Cultures The fantasy of cultural purity kept coming up in the conversation. Responding to the slogan popular in certain nationalist circles—“We are Aryan, we do not worship Arabs”—I pointed out that the very concept of a “pure Arab” is an invention. There is no such thing. Lebanon’s Arabic-speaking population is not the same as Egypt’s, which is not the same as Syria’s. I recounted a conversation with a Syrian friend who described how some Syrians had attempted the identical manoeuvre: “We are not Arabs, we are Phoenicians.” The parallel was both comic and instructive—a reminder that the impulse to escape the burden of a stigmatised identity by retreating into an invented ancestral purity is a human universal, not an Iranian monopoly. The deeper point was about entanglement. Persian poetry cannot be separated from its Arabic antecedents. Islam flows through every fibre of Iranian culture, whether any given Iranian practises it or not. The name on your birth certificate—Ali, Hossein, Mohammad—is a testament to this entanglement, and changing it to John or Jason, as I wryly noted, does nothing to alter the cultural substratum that shaped your consciousness. A Syrian claiming Phoenician ancestry does not thereby escape the Arabic that structures his daily thought. None of this means Iranians must embrace Islam uncritically; it means that any honest reckoning with Iranian identity must begin by acknowledging the irreducibly composite nature of that identity. There is no pure Iranian culture waiting to be excavated beneath layers of Arab contamination. The project of purification—stripping away the Arab, the Islamic, the non-Aryan—is not a return to authenticity. It is a flight from it. Droplets Becoming a River Toward the end of the conversation, Hamdieh asked me a personal question: why do I write so prolifically? Part of the answer is compulsion—a kind of addiction, the same irresistible urge described by the medieval Persian mystic Ayn al-Quzat, who said that if he did not write, his body ached and his night never became day. But the larger reason was captured in these words: “We are not alone.” I described how I had recently begun writing in English, not for the Iranian diaspora—who largely ignored these pieces—but for my European and Western colleagues who knew Iran only through the distorting lens of CNN, the BBC, or the recycled reports of exile media. Some of these pieces found readers I had not expected. There was, it turned out, a “grey area” in Iranian reality that neither the regime’s propaganda nor the opposition’s counter-propaganda acknowledged: a vast, silent, thoughtful middle that had no name and no symbol, but that undeniably existed. I offered a metaphor that captures something of the idea: “We are like droplets that have fallen apart from each other. These droplets find each other through writing, through talking, through dialogue. They connect, they form a roaring river that, when the space is provided, will suddenly turn Iran upside down with astonishing speed.” The image combines humility with ambition—each individual is only a droplet, yet the cumulative force of connected droplets is a torrent capable of reshaping the landscape. It rests on what I called an “optimistic view of human beings”—the belief that people, despite their capacity for violence, corruption, and ignorance, contain within them a potential for good that only needs the right conditions to flourish. The human being, in the Qur’anic language I alluded to, is indeed capable of bloodshed and ignorance, but also of something luminous that justifies the divine gamble of creation. Optimism about human nature is itself a position that requires defence, not an axiom—but it is the position I hold, and this essay is part of that defence. The task is to keep the conversation alive, to keep writing even when no one seems to be reading, and not to fear the voices that shout, like the “call from the haunted mosque,”* that the effort is futile. The Reflexive Self Writing, for me, is less a form of expression than a form of self-correction. I drew an analogy between intellectual life and the practice of calligraphy or learning the setar. In all three, mastery is not a destination but a process—an infinite process. “You have to play in such a way that you think, until the Day of Judgment, your whole life is just about playing the instrument, nothing else,” I said. The same applies to the life of the mind: you must write as though doing calligraphy, or writing essats, were the only occupation left in the world. And because you will write badly (in art or in prose), often, and publicly, you will be corrected—and that correction is the point. “You become human right there,” I said of the moment a colleague points out a sentence that makes no sense. “Being reflexive means this. Critical thinking means this.” This principle extends to the scale of a nation. If the individual must examine themselves in the mirror every morning and ask whether they were a scoundrel or a decent person, so too must a society subject itself to relentless self-scrutiny. This is the authentic core of the practice of faith—the nightly accounting of the soul—but it requires no particular creed. To be a decent human being, one need not follow only one specific faith; one need only be true to one’s conscience. The Quran itself affirms this in Surah Al-Baqarah (2:62): “Indeed the faithful, the Jews, the Christians and the Sabaeans—those of them who have faith in Allah and the Last Day and act righteously—they shall have their reward from their Lord, and they will have no fear, nor will they grieve.” This is another way of returning to the common starting point of shared humanity, now understood not as an abstract principle but as a daily discipline. Toward the Unfinished Project If there is a thread running through these reflections, it is not a political programme but something prior to one: an attempt at an ethical infrastructure. I am not prescribing a constitution or a party platform. I am arguing that before any of those things can be meaningful, Iranians must agree on a few preliminary truths. First, that they are human beings before they are Iranians, and that their development needs—education, shelter, healthcare, dignity, joy—are the non-negotiable starting point. Second, that the diversity of Iran’s ethnic, religious, and linguistic landscape is not a defect to be homogenised but a reality to be negotiated through the hard, unnatural work of pluralism. Third, that the long civilisational memory of Iran is a resource, not a throne—a starting capital of wisdom that must be invested wisely, not displayed as proof of superiority. And fourth, that the way forward is not a single heroic act of revolution or liberation but the patient, unglamorous, daily labour of writing, talking, correcting, and being corrected. Each of these claims is contestable, and I advance them as propositions to be tested, not as axioms to be accepted. The geopolitical backdrop—the fragile Iran-US ceasefire, the shuttling of intermediaries, the shadow of war—gave this conversation a particular urgency. The concerns I was addressing operate on a different timescale altogether. I opened the conversation by greeting not only those listening at the time but those who might hear these words in years to come, “from beyond the centuries.” A single conversation is only one deposit in a much larger account. The droplets may be scattered today. The river may be decades away. But the act of seeking each other out—through a conversation recorded between London and wherever Hamdieh sat, through essays written for whoever happens to read them, through the stubborn refusal to stop putting pen to paper—is itself the beginning of something. Iran’s unfinished project is not a problem to be solved by the next regime or the next revolution. It is a conversation to be sustained across generations, carried forward by people who understand that they are neither the saviours nor the audience of history, but its participants—flawed, compulsive, and inexhaustibly human. The droplets are scattered, but they are not still. Across Tehran and London, across Los Angeles and Mashhad, in the grey areas that neither government media nor opposition broadcasts acknowledge, they are finding each other—through a conversation like this one, through an essay, through a sentence that someone in the next room reads and says, “This doesn’t make sense; fix it.” And in that small, unglamorous act of correction lies the seed of something larger: a nation that has learned to look in the mirror not to admire a mythic Aryan reflection but to ask, honestly and without flinching, “Was I a decent person today?” That question, asked often enough, by enough people, is how droplets become a river. —– These are the words of Ayn al-Quadat Hamadani: Do you not see that the hand and the pen stand accused of being the scribe, yet know nothing of the true intent? And the paper is charged with being that upon which and into which words are inscribed — yet alas, alas! Every scribe that is not the heart is ignorant, and every surface written upon that is not the heart is just the same. O noble soul! Think of these poems as mirrors. Surely you know that a mirror holds no image of its own, yet whoever gazes into it may behold their own face. Know, then, that a poem in itself carries no meaning — yet each person may see reflected in it whatever is the true coin of their time and the measure of their attainment. And should you say, “The meaning of a poem is what its author intended, and others who read other meanings into it are merely inventing,” this is as if one were to say that the image in the mirror is the face of the polisher who first made it shine. There is a subtle and profound truth here, but were I to hang upon its elaboration, I would stray from my purpose. * In Book III of Rumi’s Mathnawi, a mosque on the outskirts of Rayy is known to kill any guest who sleeps there. A traveler arrives who has already made peace with death, understanding the body as a cage from which the spirit longs to escape. He spends the night unharmed. The story suggests that what destroys us is not external circumstance but our own grip on survival—the very fear we cannot release. Here is the original video of the Persian version: Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast On Crossing Borders, Hearing Bombs, and the Stubborn Normality of a Nation at War Based on a first-hand wartime account from Iran by Kazeroun (@mkazeroun) on X “The evidence for a nation’s endurance is not found in its monuments but in the behaviour of its people when the monuments are burning.” The Decision to Go I travelled to Iran in the middle of a war. I returned almost exactly as a temporary ceasefire was announced. What follows is an attempt to set down what I saw, heard, and understood—written primarily for the Iranian diaspora in the West, with the frank admission that for those who remained inside the country throughout, there may be nothing here they do not already know. That asymmetry itself is part of the story. The decision to go was not impulsive, though it may appear so. Beyond private reasons, there was a conviction—one I hold with increasing firmness—that a portion of what constitutes Iranian identity is formed by the accumulation of shared experience. We are not merely the inheritors of a civilisational archive; we are also the sum of what we have endured together, in the same air, under the same sky. One of the deepest distortions afflicting the diaspora’s understanding of Iran is precisely the absence of such direct participation. To watch a war on a screen and to hear its percussion in your own chest are not the same act of knowing. I wanted to know. The Strangeness of Normality I entered through the Turkish border at Van, by train. I left weeks later overland into Armenia. The passenger crossings, on both ends, were eerily deserted. Cargo traffic, by contrast, moved with its usual indifferent rhythm—trucks laden with goods grinding across frontiers as though the concept of aerial bombardment were an abstraction that applied to other categories of existence. This was the first lesson, and perhaps the most enduring: the machinery of commerce does not pause for the machinery of destruction. It merely reroutes. The first thing that struck me upon entering Iran was how aggressively normal everything appeared. This was not the apocalyptic landscape that weeks of satellite footage and breathless diaspora commentary had led me to expect. Public services—transport, fuel distribution, food supply chains—were functioning at or near their ordinary capacity. In the smaller cities and villages, the war was an abstraction. People went about their lives. Occasionally, the roar of a fighter jet on its way to or from a larger target would intrude upon the quotidian, a momentary sonic reminder that the country was, in fact, under sustained military assault. Then the sound would pass, and the village would return to itself. This resilience is not stoicism in the romantic sense. It is not a performance of bravery for an audience. It is something more mundane and, for that reason, more extraordinary: the refusal of eighty-odd million people to permit their daily existence to be fully colonised by someone else’s war. The grocer opens his shop. The metro runs—free of charge during the conflict, though with longer intervals between trains. Children go to school where schools remain open. The war is real, but so is breakfast. Tehran: A City in Two Registers Tehran told a more complicated story. The capital operated at roughly twenty per cent of its normal commercial capacity—offices skeletal, businesses muted, the usual anarchic traffic replaced by an almost pastoral calm. By day, the city wore a mask of serenity. The air, mercifully, was clean—one of the few perverse gifts of reduced industrial activity. The streets were quieter than I had ever experienced them: Tehran without traffic is Tehran estranged from itself. The sounds of war punctuated the daytime hours intermittently. A fighter jet overhead. A distant detonation. If the explosion was not close, life continued without interruption. If you were in the metro or in a car, you might not register the bombing at all. Without checking the news, it was often impossible to know where a strike had landed. This peculiar informational fog—living inside a war whose specific coordinates required a smartphone to locate—produced a dissonance I had not anticipated. War, I had imagined, would be omnipresent. In practice, it was strangely intermittent, like a storm that announces itself in irregular thunder and then retreats behind a deceptive blue sky. By night, the city transformed. From sunset until well past midnight, the major squares—Ferdowsi, Tajrish, and others—filled with gatherings. Some were state-organised; others were more spontaneous. The Iranian flag was the centrepiece. Convoys of cars draped in flags and blaring martial music or religious hymns circulated through the streets. The anthem of the moment—a rousing number whose refrain translates roughly as “Strike, for you strike well”—became the sonic wallpaper of the nocturnal city. Security checkpoints multiplied after dark: armed vehicles, masked faces, the unmistakable choreography of a state asserting control over the visual and acoustic space of its capital. The Two Nations I attended several of these nightly gatherings as an observer. The dominant crowd was unmistakably Hezbollahi—the loyalist base of the Islamic Republic—with its familiar slogans, its religious cadences, its condemnation of traitors and its pledges of allegiance to the Supreme Leader. In some areas, such as Tajrish Square, the demographic composition was marginally broader, but the discursive space remained firmly monopolised. No dissonance was tolerated. The street, in those hours, belonged to one narrative and one narrative only. And yet, away from the squares, a different country breathed. I encountered many people who considered participation in these rallies a patriotic duty—and just as many who cursed them, though usually in whispers, behind closed doors, or in the privacy of a shared taxi. This, I believe, is the most important observation I can offer: unlike the war of 1980–1988, when the existential threat produced something closer to genuine national cohesion, this conflict has exposed a profound and perhaps irreconcilable duality within Iranian society. The surface is solidarity. Beneath it, two nations coexist in the same geography—speaking the same language, breathing the same air, and understanding almost nothing of each other’s interior lives. The noise of the rallies—sometimes persisting until one in the morning—was itself a source of friction. Residents of central Tehran, whatever their political sympathies, do not universally appreciate martial hymns at midnight. But this is a minor irritation against the larger canvas. The deeper fracture is ideological, generational, and existential. It will not be healed by a ceasefire. The Texture of Fear Between cities, security patrols were frequent—typically at the entry and exit points of towns. I was stopped several times. Most interactions were professional and courteous. Some were not. I will not detail the exceptions, except to say that the experience of being questioned by armed men in a country at war sharpens one’s awareness of the fragility of civility. When power is concentrated and fear is ambient, the space between politeness and menace narrows to a membrane. The attacks could come at any time, but during the days I spent in Tehran, the northeast of the city bore the heaviest burden. There was a rough pattern: one wave in the early evening, around seven or eight o’clock, and another in the small hours, between three and five in the morning. But patterns are treacherous things in war. They offer the illusion of predictability where none exists. The only honest thing to say is that at any moment, in any place, the sky could open. Close explosions were genuinely terrifying. I experienced two at proximity, and on both occasions the smell of cordite hung in the air afterwards—an acrid, chemical presence that no amount of descriptive language can adequately convey. It is a smell that rewrites your relationship with the atmosphere. The air you breathe is no longer neutral; it carries evidence. After a day or two, I found that I had begun to habituate. I could distinguish the sound of an incoming missile from the roar of a jet engine from the percussion of air defence systems. This adaptation is not courage. It is the body’s bureaucratic response to sustained threat—a biological filing system that categorises danger into degrees, the better to permit continued function. The people of Tehran have been living inside this filing system for weeks. Their composure is not indifference. It is survival organised into routine. The Information Architecture The day President Trump issued his infamous message—the one that spoke of erasing a civilisation—I was in Tehran. The effect was palpable. Fear intensified. The spectre of a nuclear strike, which had until then occupied the realm of the hypothetical, suddenly migrated into the domain of the plausible. And yet, even then, I witnessed no panic. No stampede. No irrational collective behaviour. People were afraid—visibly, quietly afraid—but they metabolised the fear without surrendering to it. There is a word for this in Persian that resists easy translation: a kind of dignified endurance that is neither passive acceptance nor active defiance, but something woven from both. Access to the global internet was severely restricted—expensive, unreliable, and for most people effectively impossible. The information environment was almost entirely channelled through domestic platforms, primarily curated messaging channels that reproduced the same narratives in an echo of near-perfect uniformity. Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp—the tools that had once served as the nervous system of Iranian civil discourse—played virtually no role. The most significant external news source was satellite television, which retained its stubborn relevance precisely because it could not be firewalled. The management of the war’s narrative was, I must concede, considerably more sophisticated than in previous conflicts. The propaganda apparatus had learned from its predecessors. The billboards and posters plastering the city were uniformly political-ideological in content, and the streets were saturated with AI-generated images of the new Supreme Leader—images whose synthetic quality was immediately apparent but whose sheer volume created a kind of visual fait accompli. When a face is everywhere, its artificiality ceases to matter. Presence substitutes for authenticity. The Northern Escape and the Road to the Border The cities of Mazandaran, along the Caspian coast, were swollen with population—internal refugees of a sort, though the word feels too heavy for people who had simply driven a few hours north to breathe. Businesses were functioning, petrol stations were crowded, and the traffic was heavier than in Tehran. The flight path of the jets that bombed the capital and its surroundings ran largely over the Caspian, likely via Azerbaijani airspace, and I heard the sound of fighter aircraft echoing through the Alborz Mountains several times—a surreal intrusion of industrial violence into one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth. I had a train ticket to Tabriz, intending to cross into Armenia from there. But when key bridges along the highway and railway were struck, plans changed with the abruptness that war imposes on all itineraries. On the advice of a friend—Erfan Khosravi, whose companionship through those days I record here with gratitude—I left Tehran earlier than planned. We drove together to Astaneh-ye Ashrafiyeh, then onward to Bandar-e Anzali, Astara, and Ardabil. We spent one night on the banks of the Aras River, that ancient border between worlds. The next morning, Erfan accompanied me to the frontier, and I crossed—becoming, as I described it to myself at the time, the friend who leaves halfway. It was approximately three in the afternoon. The passenger border was nearly empty. The only other travellers were a handful of Asian nationals—Indian, most likely—making their own quiet exit. The solitude of the crossing was its own commentary. A nation at war, and its borders almost deserted: not because people could not leave, but because the overwhelming majority had chosen, or been compelled by circumstance, to stay. What the War Revealed Several observations crystallised during those weeks, and I set them down here not as conclusions but as provisional readings of a situation that remains, in every sense, unfinished. First: the solidarity against the war was broader and deeper than I had expected. I did not encounter a single person—not one—who defended the war or wished it to continue. This is remarkable in a society as factionalised as Iran’s. But a crucial caveat attends this observation: in the hyper-securitised atmosphere of wartime Iran, where the smallest note of dissent is met with immediate and disproportionate force, silence must not be read as consent. The quiet half of society—the millions who neither rally nor shout—are not necessarily aligned with the state’s narrative. They are simply surviving within the narrow corridor that power has left them. Second: the Hezbollahi base was in a state of intense emotional and eschatological agitation. Some among them viewed the war through an explicitly apocalyptic lens—not as a geopolitical event but as a prelude to a cosmic reckoning. The nightly rituals of flag-waving and hymn-singing must be understood within this emotional register: not merely as political mobilisation but as collective catharsis, a liturgical performance enacted under the open sky of a besieged city. Third: confidence in eventual victory was surprisingly high, even among those critical of the government. But this confidence was shadowed by a more sober and material fear: the economic aftermath. The bombing of steel plants and petrochemical facilities—the vertebrae of Iran’s industrial economy—portended inflation, unemployment, and a contraction of living standards that would outlast any ceasefire by years, perhaps decades. People knew they would survive the war. They were far less certain they would survive the peace. Fourth: the notion of regime change through external pressure or popular uprising—still circulated with embarrassing confidence in certain diaspora salons—is, inside Iran, understood as a fantasy. Anyone who has spent even a week in wartime Tehran grasps that the overthrow of this government without civil war, massive bloodshed, and infrastructural devastation is not a serious proposition. It is a bedtime story told by exiles to exiles, and it deserves the analytical weight of one. Fifth: outside the Hezbollahi core, the new Supreme Leader commands virtually no recognition, no trust, and no respect. Even among regime loyalists, the precise architecture of leadership remains opaque. People have adapted to this ambiguity—accommodated it, as Iranians accommodate so much—but accommodation is not legitimacy. The centre of power is felt everywhere and understood nowhere. For now, society has made its peace with a leadership that is, in the deepest sense, absent. After the Crossing I left Iran carrying two things that do not pass through customs: a revised understanding of my country and an anger that has not yet found its proper form. The revised understanding is this: Iran is neither the triumphant fortress of regime propaganda nor the broken victim of diaspora lamentation. It is something far more complex and far more alive—a society fractured along every conceivable axis and yet held together by forces that resist easy naming. Call it habit. Call it stubbornness. Call it love, if the word does not embarrass you. Eighty million people do not endure sustained aerial bombardment because they approve of their government. They endure it because the country is theirs—theirs in a sense that no regime, however authoritarian, can fully expropriate. The anger is directed at those who made this war possible and at those who cheered it on from the safety of distance. At the architects of maximum pressure who imagined that bombs could produce democracy. At the exile politicians who traded their compatriots’ bodies for the fantasy of a restoration that history has already refused. At an international community whose conscience stirred not when Iranian children were pulled from rubble but when the price of oil twitched upward at European pumps. These failures of strategy, of empathy, and of elementary political imagination are the war’s true casualties—not the Iranian people, who have been wounded but not defeated, not silenced but not yet heard. Distinguishing between suffering and defeat is not an academic exercise. It is, for Iranians, a matter of existential clarity. A people may be bombed, impoverished, censored, surveilled, and lied to—and still retain the capacity for future reconstitution. Nations are not reducible to the damage done to them in a single cycle of violence. They carry memory. They carry contradiction. They carry, beneath the rubble and the propaganda and the exhaustion, the unarticulated premise of a tomorrow that does not yet have a name. I think of the clean Tehran air—a gift of reduced industry, of silenced factories, of a wartime economy running at a fraction of its capacity—and I think of it as an inadvertent metaphor. When the noise stops, when the traffic disappears, when the ordinary machinery of a dysfunctional normality is suspended, something else becomes visible: the city itself, the mountains behind it, the sky above it. Perhaps that is what war discloses, beneath all its horror. Not the fragility of a nation, but its obstinate, irreducible presence. The road from Tehran to the Aras is long, and I drove most of it in silence. At the river’s edge, the night before the crossing, the water moved with the indifference of something that has seen every empire come and go—Achaemenid, Parthian, Safavid, Qajar, Pahlavi, Islamic Republic—and expects to see the next. The Aras does not take sides. It merely continues. Perhaps that is the most Iranian thing of all: to continue, not because the future is assured, but because stopping was never really an option. April 2026 This essay is based on a first-hand account originally published as a Twitter/X thread by Kazeroun (@mkazeroun) on April 13, 2026. The observations, experiences, and reflections are his; the interpretation and prose are the author’s. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Introduction In my previous assessments of Reza Pahlavi’s political project, published on this blog during the 2026 US–Iran conflict, I employed polemical and emotionally charged language—characterizing Pahlavi as driven by a personal “vendetta with a flag” and deploying the postcolonial epithet “comprador intellectual” to describe his supporters. An independent methodological review of my work found that these critiques, while intellectually sophisticated in their theoretical apparatus, suffered from systematic source omissions, rhetorical overreach, and unfalsifiable framing, arguing that some aspects of my assessment are compromised unless they can be revisited rigorously. As a critical rationalist, my commitment is to constantly subject my own claims to rigorous falsification. This essay represents that process: I have critically assessed my own arguments, exposed them to refutation, and collected the evidence that either corroborates or challenges my initial positions. This is not a defense but a test—a deliberate attempt to see whether my core concerns about Pahlavi’s leadership can withstand methodologically rigorous scrutiny when stripped of polemical rhetoric. I remain open to any further criticism and refutation. This essay therefore sets aside rhetorical devices in favor of documented evidence, inline citations, and verifiable claims. My central argument is straightforward: Pahlavi’s leadership of the Iranian opposition poses measurable dangers to Iran’s future, not because of who he is, but because of what the evidence reveals—a chief strategist embedded in a neoconservative think tank aligned with foreign military interests, a social media support base substantially manufactured by Israeli intelligence operations, and a pattern of contradictory public statements that undermine his credibility as an independent leader. Each claim that follows is accompanied by its source. The Ghasseminejad Factor — Architect of a Foreign-Aligned Agenda Saeed Ghasseminejad occupies a unique and consequential position in Iranian opposition politics. He serves simultaneously as Senior Advisor on Iran and Financial Economics at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington-based neoconservative think tank, and as the chief architect of Reza Pahlavi’s political transition plan. Pahlavi himself confirmed this role, stating that Ghasseminejad “has been leading the process to select individuals for a transitional government” (Times of Israel, January 2026). As Project Director of the Iran Prosperity Project at the National Union for Democracy in Iran, Ghasseminejad prepared a 200-page blueprint for replacing the Tehran regime, encompassing a referendum on constitutional monarchy, elections for a constitutional assembly, and subsequent parliamentary elections (Israel Hayom, January 17, 2026). The FDD’s website documents Ghasseminejad’s institutional role. The organization was a prominent opponent of the JCPOA nuclear agreement, advised the Trump administration on Iran strategies, and has received funding from pro-Israel donors including Sheldon Adelson and Bernard Marcus. Iran sanctioned FDD and its CEO in 2019, viewing it as an instrument of hostile foreign policy. FDD publications have contemplated scenarios involving “the destruction of Iran’s conventional military capabilities and the killing of key Iranian leaders, including Khamenei and numerous military commanders” (FDD Long War Journal, 2026). This is the institutional home of Pahlavi’s chief strategist. Ghasseminejad’s own statements go further than his institution’s published analyses. On April 8, 2026, he tweeted: “If the US decides to put boots on the ground, the regime’s ground forces will collapse pretty quickly. What we saw in the rescue operation showed a ground force that is both incompetent and demoralized.” This constitutes an explicit endorsement of a US ground invasion of Iran by Pahlavi’s most senior advisor. On April 13, 2026, he welcomed a naval blockade: “Great to see that President Trump has asked the US Navy to impose a blockade. This should have happened long ago.” Perhaps most troublingly, Ghasseminejad has employed language that dismisses civilian casualties. On April 10, 2026, he wrote: “When they get killed, human rights organizations count them as minors and civilians. These ‘children’ have killed thousands of Iranians so far and they will kill more.” Placing “children” in scare quotes while dismissing human rights documentation represents a deeply problematic stance for someone designing a country’s democratic transition. He has also labeled Pakistan the “HQ of Sunni terrorism,” characterizing an entire nation of 230 million people with inflammatory rhetoric. The conflict of interest is structural: an employee of a think tank funded by pro-Israel donors and aligned with neoconservative US foreign policy priorities is simultaneously selecting personnel for a future Iranian government. As critic Jessica Emami argued in the Times of Israel, this dual role demands his resignation from the transition planning role. Israeli Influence Operations and Manufactured Consent Two major investigative reports published in 2025–2026 documented the extent of Israeli involvement in manufacturing support for Pahlavi’s political project. The first, published by Al Jazeera on January 15, 2026, analyzed the #FreeThePersianPeople hashtag campaign using Tweet Binder data analytics. The investigation found that 94 percent of 4,370 analyzed posts were retweets generated by a small network, while only approximately 170 accounts produced original content—yet the campaign reached over 18 million users. This massive disproportion between content sources and reach is the signature of astroturfing, not organic activism. The campaign’s narrative was pre-packaged: it reframed Iranians’ economic and social grievances into a geopolitical binary (“The People vs. The Regime,” “Freedom vs. Political Islam”) and promoted Pahlavi as the sole political alternative. Israeli government figures participated directly—Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir posted in Persian calling for “the fall of the dictator,” and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s tweets were widely circulated within the network. Al Jazeera concluded that the campaign was “not a spontaneous digital expression of internal Iranian anger” but “a politicized information operation constructed outside Iran and led by networks linked to Israel.” The second investigation, published by Haaretz on October 3, 2025, in collaboration with the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, provided even more granular evidence. Based on five sources with direct knowledge of the project, the investigation revealed that a large-scale digital influence campaign in Persian was operated out of Israel, funded by a private entity receiving government support. Native Persian speakers were recruited to operate hundreds of fake accounts on X and Instagram, posing as Iranian citizens. AI tools generated content including deepfake videos—one titled “Next Year in Free Tehran” depicted Netanyahu, Gila Gamliel, Pahlavi, and their spouses walking through Tehran’s streets. The most damning evidence concerns the Evin Prison strike of June 23, 2025. At approximately 11:15 AM, Israel struck Tehran’s Evin Prison. By 11:52 AM—before Iranian media had reported the attack—network accounts began posting about “explosions in the prison area,” designed to appear as eyewitness reports from nearby residents. A fabricated video of the explosion was distributed; the New York Times later confirmed it was not authentic footage. Citizen Lab concluded: “We believe that while it is technically possible, it is highly unlikely that any third party without advance knowledge of the IDF’s plans would have been able to prepare this content and post it in such a short window of time.” Additional disinformation included a fake BBC Persian news report about senior Iranian officials fleeing the country, which BBC Persian confirmed it never published. This was the apparatus that Pahlavi pointed journalists toward when he said, “Don’t take my word for it, search on social media… The answer is right before your eyes”—social media that was being systematically manipulated by Israeli intelligence operations. Contradictions in Pahlavi’s Public Positions A chronological examination of Pahlavi’s public statements reveals contradictions that extend beyond normal political evolution into territory that raises fundamental questions about credibility. The most consequential concerns foreign military intervention. In April 2024, Pahlavi declared military action against Iran a “red line” (NCRI report). By February 2026, he told ABC News that he supported a “targeted attack” on Iran’s nuclear facilities and repressive apparatus, characterizing this as “humanitarian intervention to protect more lives.” On Fox News on February 28, 2026, he described US–Israeli strikes as “aid” to help Iranians topple the regime. Yet just weeks earlier, on January 6, 2026, he told the Wall Street Journal: “I don’t think it’s a matter of any kind of outside intervention, either a military or a special ops kind, because I think the regime is collapsing” (Jerusalem Post). The monarchy question presents a parallel ambiguity. Pahlavi consistently states that the future form of Iran’s government must be decided by referendum (POLITICO). He has said, “I really don’t have any expectations because I think the most honorable label is no label… I am Reza Pahlavi” (Reddit, r/NewIran, April 2023). Yet he has never disavowed the possibility of monarchical restoration, his supporters chant royalist slogans at demonstrations, and the Israeli-operated social media campaign documented by Haaretz used the hashtag #KingRezaPahlavi. Meanwhile, his transition plan—authored by Ghasseminejad—pre-designates Pahlavi as head of the transitional government, with Ghasseminejad himself selecting its members. Critics, including a Times of Israel blogger, described the plan as creating “a vast power vacuum during the transition” while concentrating decision-making authority in the hands of an FDD employee. On foreign government relationships, Pahlavi’s 2023 Israel visit—facilitated by then-Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel, who referred to him as “the Iranian crown prince”—occurred against the backdrop of what Haaretz would later reveal as an Israeli intelligence operation to manufacture support for his political project. As Israeli analyst Raz Zimmt of the Institute for National Security Studies observed, most Iranians want change but “are dreaming about leading a normal life, not the restoration of the monarchy,” and Israel’s open alignment with Pahlavi “reinforces Ayatollah Khamenei’s narrative that Israel and the U.S. want to turn Iran back into a monarchy and client state.” Publicly observable developments also suggested a pattern of fraying alliances: Masih Alinejad, Hamed Esmaeilion, and Nazanin Boniadi each took distance from Pahlavi’s political line, while his remaining circle appeared increasingly reliant on a narrower group of hardline advisers. Why This Matters — The Danger to Iran’s Future The evidence presented in this essay does not rest on speculation or rhetorical framing. It draws on two major investigative reports (Al Jazeera, Haaretz/Citizen Lab), verified social media statements with URLs, Pahlavi’s own interviews with mainstream outlets, and documented analyses from his chief advisor’s institutional platform. The picture that emerges is of an opposition leader whose political infrastructure is compromised at multiple levels: his chief strategist serves a foreign think tank whose institutional interests may diverge from Iranian welfare; his social media support base has been substantially manufactured by a foreign intelligence operation; and his public positions shift in ways that suggest responsiveness to external patrons rather than internal constituency. For Iran’s future, the stakes are existential. A transition led by figures selected by an FDD employee, amplified by Israeli intelligence operations, and legitimized through manufactured social media consent would not constitute genuine self-determination. It would reproduce, under democratic branding, the very pattern of foreign-imposed governance that has defined Iran’s modern tragedy—from the 1953 coup to the present. The Iranian people deserve leadership whose independence is not a rhetorical claim but an observable fact, whose advisors serve Iranian interests rather than foreign institutional agendas, and whose popular support is organic rather than algorithmically fabricated. The methodological rigor of this assessment—every claim cited, every source verifiable—is itself the argument: when the evidence is allowed to speak without rhetorical embellishment, the case against Pahlavi’s leadership is stronger, not weaker, than the polemics suggested. References Investigative Journalism Al Jazeera. (2026, January 15). “Network linked to Israel pushes to shape external Iran protest narrative.” Al Jazeera article Megiddo, G. & Benjakob, O. (2025, October 3). “The Israeli Influence Operation Aiming to Install Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran.” Haaretz/TheMarker, joint investigation with Citizen Lab, University of Toronto. Haaretz article Citizen Lab, University of Toronto. (2025). “Prison Break” report on pro-Israel Persian-language influence campaign. Published in tandem with Haaretz investigation. Mainstream Media Interviews and Reports ABC News Australia. (2026, February 27). “Crown prince Reza Pahlavi on US military intervention in Iran.” ABC News article Fox News. (2026, February 28). “Reza Pahlavi calls US-Israel strikes aid to help topple Iran regime.” Fox News article The Jerusalem Post. (2026). “Iran’s exiled prince: ‘The real threat is the regime itself.’” Jerusalem Post article POLITICO Europe. (2025). “Reza Pahlavi: Iran’s exiled prince has a plan for regime change.” POLITICO article El País (English). (2026, April 6). “Iranians respond to US threats to send them back to the Stone Age.” El País article Iran International. (2026, February 14). “Pahlavi Urges West To Tighten Sanctions As Iran War Rages.” Iran International article Social Media Sources (X/Twitter) Ghasseminejad, S. [@SGhasseminejad]. (2026, April 8). “If the US decides to put boots on the ground…” View tweet Ghasseminejad, S. [@SGhasseminejad]. (2026, April 10). “When they get killed, human rights organizations…” View tweet Ghasseminejad, S. [@SGhasseminejad]. (2026, April 8). “As the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, HQ of Sunni terrorism…” View tweet Ghasseminejad, S. [@SGhasseminejad]. (2026, April 13). “Great to see that President Trump has asked the US Navy…” View tweet Ghasseminejad, S. [@SGhasseminejad]. (2026, April 10). “As long as the regime exists it will use Iran’s wealth…” View tweet Critical Analyses and Commentary NCRI. (2026). “Reza Pahlavi: Foreign Pawn, Regime’s Useful Tool Exposed by Iran War.” NCRI article Emami, J. (2026). “The agenda behind FDD employee Saeed Ghasseminejad’s ‘Iran Regime Change’ booklet.” Times of Israel Blogs. Times of Israel blog Atlantic Council. “The hidden friction with Reza Pahlavi and the Iranian opposition.” Atlantic Council article Malakut Blog. (2025, May 26). “نگون‌بختی سیاسی رضا پهلوی” (The Political Misfortune of Reza Pahlavi). Malakut blog post Foreign Policy in Focus. “The Pahlavi Mirage.” FPIF article Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Team page: Saeed Ghasseminejad. FDD team page ——– Image: Iranian protest scene — solidarity demonstration for democratic self-determination in Iran. Photo credit: Unsplash (free to use under Unsplash License). Source: unsplash.com/iran-protest Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast On Dutch Collaboration, Iranian Compradors, and the Price of Borrowed Salvation Still from Black Book (Zwartboek, 2006), dir. Paul Verhoeven. Rachel Stein, a Jewish resistance operative, navigates a world where collaborators and liberators wear indistinguishable faces. Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book (2006) opens a wound the Dutch spent sixty years bandaging. Set in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, it follows Rachel Stein—a Jewish woman who infiltrates the Gestapo for the resistance—only to be betrayed by the very patriots she served. When liberation arrives, the crowd does not distinguish between genuine collaborators and the falsely accused. Rachel is stripped, doused in excrement, forced to sing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Verhoeven’s point is surgical: the collaborator’s sin is not merely tactical betrayal—it is a spiritual migration into the oppressor’s universe, and its cost is paid not only by the traitor but by the entire society that must reckon with the contamination. Now imagine this: a British citizen, mid-Blitz, takes to the BBC to explain that the real threat to London is not the Luftwaffe but Churchill’s war cabinet. A Polish professor in 1940 argues from a New York lectern that the Wehrmacht is, on balance, a modernising force. The stomach turns. Yet this is precisely the posture of a recognisable character type in the Iranian diaspora—what I have described elsewhere as the comprador intellectual, borrowing Malcolm X’s sharper coinage: the house slave. When the homeland burns, this figure does not reach for a fire hose. They reach for the master’s microphone and say: “What’s the matter, boss—we sick?” The grammatical collapse from “they” to “we” marks the spiritual border crossing. The comprador’s primary instrument is a selective arithmetic of suffering. Confront them with 145 children killed in a school bombing, and the pivot is instantaneous: “But the regime hangs dissidents. The regime poisons rivers.” The deflection is not factually wrong—it is morally catastrophic. It implies that no colonised people may protest imperial violence until their own house is spotless—a logic that, applied consistently, would have justified every colonial occupation in history. As I noted in an earlier reflection on the emotional market of diaspora politics, this is suffering traded as currency—atrocities balanced on a ledger where foreign bombs always weigh less than domestic sins. The type reveals itself most nakedly in moments of candour. A one-percent chance of regime change through war, the argument goes, is worth the near-certainty of mass death. This is not strategy. It is theology—a sacrificial economy in which compatriots’ bodies are tithed to a foreign saviour. Verhoeven would recognise the structure: in Black Book, the Dutch resistance leader Hans Akkermans sells Jewish refugees to the Nazis while posing as their protector. The comprador intellectual performs the same operation at a higher altitude—selling not bodies but legitimacy, furnishing imperial violence with an “authentic native voice.” And yet. The human dimension cannot be amputated from the analysis. Many in the diaspora carry genuine scars: exile, dispossession, family severed by an authoritarian state. Their rage against the Islamic Republic is not theatre. The tragedy is that this legitimate grief has been instrumentalised—hijacked by a geopolitical machinery that cares nothing for Iranian lives. The comprador does not represent the diaspora’s pain; they monetise it. The distinction between criticising one’s government and providing air cover for its annihilation is not a fine academic line. It is the difference between the French Resistance seeking Allied arms to fight Nazism and a Vichy official handing Paris’s keys to the Wehrmacht while calling it liberation. As I have argued before, the regime’s imperfections do not grant anyone a licence to cheer for their own people’s destruction. Verhoeven’s film ends with Rachel in a kibbutz—alive, but unredeemed. The collaborators have been punished; the righteous have not been vindicated. The zwartboek—the black book—is the ledger no one wanted opened. The Iranian diaspora faces its own black book now. The old paradigm—anchored to an imaginary West that promised deliverance—is collapsing. Those who lent their faces and voices to the machinery of destruction will find, as the Dutch collaborators found, that the master does not protect the house slave once the house burns down. The question is not whether Iran endures. It has, for three millennia. The question is whether those who traded in their people’s suffering can live with what they purchased. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Photographer/Creator: Levi Meir Clancy / Source: Unsplash The loudest war drums in the diaspora are often beaten by people with no skin in the game at all. No mother in Tehran waiting through blackouts. No brother in Isfahan tracking sirens. No daughter in Shiraz sleeping under glass that could shatter at dawn. Yet they speak with theatrical certainty, as if missiles are aimed at their own roof. This is not courage. It is performance. What we are watching is shameful hypocrisy: political cosplay disguised as principle. Some commentators have long ago moved every intimate tie out of Iran, but still speak with feverish enthusiasm about escalation, retaliation, and cleansing violence. They borrow grief they do not carry. They convert distance into authority. They narrate catastrophe with the comfort of people who know their own family WhatsApp groups are quiet tonight. Call it what it is: nostalgia and romanticizing, not real pain. They are in love with an imagined homeland frozen in heroic memory, not with the living country that bleeds. They romanticize sacrifice because they will not be asked to make it. They rehearse hatred because they will not bury the dead. They pretend to stand inside the fire while speaking from climate-controlled safety. Alireza Abiz’s Facebook post names this hypocrisy with a clarity that slices through euphemism. He writes, War is decisive, it is the winner, it is the blade’s edge. That line is not poetic decoration; it is a warning that once war enters, it overrules everyone else’s script. Those who fantasize about controlled violence forget that violence has its own command chain. Abiz then grounds the warning in concrete reality: one strike does not politely stop where analysts draw circles on maps. He asks us to see how a port becomes a power station in the next round, how logistics collapse into energy collapse, and energy collapse into civilian punishment. This is the anatomy of escalation: infrastructure first, daily life second, political imagination last. And then comes his mocking reference to camel-riding bravado, aimed at those who confuse historical costume with contemporary strategy. He ridicules the macho pageantry of distant commentators who speak in epic tones while others count body bags. The point is brutal and simple: war is not a stage for identity theater. It is a machine that grinds ordinary people first and intellectual vanity second. Abiz is equally unsparing toward another class of voices: those who took money and wrote about sanctions as if strangling civilians were sophisticated policy. For years they sold collective punishment as realism. They published pain with footnotes. They translated hunger into leverage. Now that open war has widened the damage, they want to re-enter the conversation draped in moral language. He calls this posture pathetic, and the word fits because the smallness is moral before it is rhetorical. They helped normalize harm when harm could still be framed as pressure. Now they ask to be trusted as guardians of restraint. But reputations cannot be laundered with a softer tone. If you profited from cruelty in one register, you do not become humane by changing vocabulary in another. This is why the outrage at hypocrisy matters beyond personal disgust. Political memory is part of political accountability. A discourse that forgets who advocated what, and for whom, will keep recycling the same architects of disaster. The pathetic move is not merely being wrong; it is insisting on moral authority after financing, narrating, or legitimizing policies that made civilians disposable. So the necessary pivot is this: if we are against this cycle, what are we for? My answer starts with sequence. Until a permanent ceasefire exists, politics does not begin. Commentary begins. Branding begins. Tactical signaling begins. But politics, in the serious sense of negotiated, revisable, institution-bearing action, does not begin under active bombardment. Ceasefire-first is not naivete and not cowardice. It is procedural realism. You cannot build credible bargaining while people are running for shelters, while emergency rooms are triaging by generator light, while every actor calculates only the next forty-eight hours. War rewards speed, fear, and spectacle; politics requires duration, trust gradients, and repeat interaction across disagreement. That is why I reject the seductive lie that violence clears the ground for meaningful change. Violence clears people, not problems. It can topple structures, but it cannot by itself build legitimate replacements that outlast the adrenaline of victory narratives. A permanent ceasefire is the doorway, not the destination: the minimum condition under which hard political work can even be attempted. War compresses time into impact, reaction, funeral, retaliation. It shrinks the horizon of thought to survival and revenge. Under that compression, every institution becomes an emergency instrument, every message becomes propaganda, and every critic is pressured to choose camp over truth. Compression is useful for generals and demagogues; it is lethal for social repair. Reform expands time. It asks citizens and institutions to think in budgets, school years, court calendars, municipal plans, and constitutional horizons. It turns panic into procedure and rage into negotiable conflict. Reform is not the opposite of urgency; it is urgency disciplined by design. Where war demands immediate obedience, reform requires sustained accountability. In diaspora language, people often say sustainable development when they are actually describing reform. Fine. Keep the phrase if it helps build coalitions. But be honest about substance: sustainable development without legal reform, administrative capacity, and political rights is branding, not transformation. The durable future everyone claims to want has a political architecture, and that architecture must be built deliberately. My commitment is to long-term solutions that can survive beyond personalities, news cycles, and exile-era fantasies: institutions that function, rights that are enforceable, and a rule of law that binds both rulers and rivals. Anything less is temporary management of recurring crisis. Anything less leaves the country vulnerable to the next round of romanticized destruction from afar. Institutions mean courts that can check power, municipalities that can deliver services, and budgets that can be audited by the public. Rights mean speech that does not require permission, association that is not treated as conspiracy, and due process that is not conditional on political loyalty. Rule of law means predictable limits, not selective punishment dressed up as national necessity. This agenda is slower than revolution and less glamorous than war footage, which is precisely why it deserves trust. Slow work is how societies stop reliving the same catastrophe under new slogans. Long-term reform is not emotional retreat; it is strategic seriousness. It refuses to confuse catharsis with progress, and refuses to treat civilian suffering as a transitional cost. So yes: put the blade down. Not because injustice is acceptable, but because the blade cannot build what justice requires. End the war, secure the ceasefire, and then begin the real labor of political reconstruction. The day after the guns fall silent is not epilogue; it is chapter one of responsibility. When war ends, the performance must end with it. No more borrowed grief from safe distance, no more nostalgic fantasies marketed as destiny, no more moral laundering by yesterday’s sanction hawks. The task is sober and collective: build institutions, defend rights, enforce law, and keep doing it when cameras leave. That is how a country lives past war. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Credit: © ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Live News On the Comprador Character in the Iranian Diaspora and the Collapse of Borrowed Salvation A Character Type, Not a Person Every imperial project produces its own native chorus—voices from the colonised world who sing the coloniser’s hymn in an accent the metropole finds authentic and therefore useful. Hamid Dabashi, in Brown Skin, White Masks (2011), calls them comprador intellectuals: a structurally produced character type whose function is to provide ideological cover for the power dismantling her homeland. Malcolm X named the same figure with greater economy: the house slave who, when the master’s house catches fire, fights harder to extinguish the blaze than the master himself. “What’s the matter, boss, we sick?” The we is the tell—the grammatical signature of a consciousness that has relocated itself entirely into the normative universe of the master. On 8 April 2026, as Iran smouldered under five weeks of bombardment by the United States and Israel, Illinois Public Media’s The 21st Show offered a near-perfect specimen of this type. An associate professor of information systems at a Midwestern university—Iranian-born, long settled in America—declared: “I still maintain that the greatest threat to Iranian life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not this war or any foreign intervention. It’s the regime itself.” The phrasing is diagnostic: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—the sacred trinity of the American Declaration of Independence, deployed without irony while compatriots were being bombed by the nation that authored those words. The individual is incidental. The type is what demands scrutiny. The Selective Arithmetic of Suffering The comprador character’s most reliable instrument is what the historian Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh, speaking on the same programme, called the selective presentation of facts. When confronted with the destruction of a school in Minab that killed over 145 children, the comprador voice does not deny the atrocity. It changes the subject—pivoting to the regime’s executions, its poisoning of rivers, its engineering of poverty. Every horror from without is met with a horror from within, as though American missiles and Iranian state violence existed on a balance sheet in which the latter would always tip the scales. This is deflection elevated to a worldview. “I do not condone Mr President’s Stone Age comments,” the voice concedes, before adding: “but IRGC was already systematically driving us there.” The grammatical structure tells the story: the threat to annihilate a civilisation is a subordinate clause; the regime’s crimes are the main sentence. The bombed are made responsible for their own bombing. By this logic, no colonised people could object to colonisation so long as their own leaders were imperfect—a standard that would justify the bombardment of every nation on earth. The One-Percent Wager The type reveals itself most nakedly in moments of candour. On the programme, the following calculus was offered: if there is even a one-percent probability that this war could topple the Islamic Republic, one should take it—over “the guaranteed destruction that IRGC has been imposing on my country.” A one-percent chance of regime change is worth the near-certainty of mass death. This is not politics; it is theology—a sacrificial logic in which the faithful offer up their compatriots’ bodies for redemption by a foreign saviour who has explicitly promised to reduce the offering to rubble. Ibrahim Abu-Rabi’ called this condition aborted modernity: the machinery of Western modernity imported without the critical consciousness to operate it autonomously. The comprador type absorbs the vocabulary of American liberalism—freedom, democracy, human rights—but severs these concepts from any analysis of the power structures that determine who gets to enjoy them. Human rights become a weapon against Tehran but never against Washington. Democracy means regime change from without, not a people’s sovereignty over its own fate. Brown Skin, White Mask Dabashi’s taxonomy, drawing on Fanon, Said, Malcolm X, and Memmi, traces the pathology of the colonised subject who internalises the coloniser’s gaze so thoroughly that she sees her own people through it. Memmi’s diagnosis deserves to be quoted: The recently assimilated place themselves in a considerably superior position to the average coloniser. They push a colonial mentality to excess, display proud disdain for the colonised and continually show off their rank… Still too impressed by their privileges, they savour them and defend with fear and harshness; and when colonisation is imperilled, they provide it with its most dynamic defenders, its shock troops, and sometimes instigators. The specimen on display in this broadcast was a professor of information systems—a discipline as remote from the philosophy of sovereignty as one could imagine. This is precisely the point. The native informer’s authority derives not from expertise but from identity: she is from there, she is now here, and she is willing to say what the bombers need said. The empire does not need her knowledge. It needs her face. The Mirage of Whiteness Multiplied across the diaspora, the comprador character constitutes the terminal stage of a paradigm whose bankruptcy is now undeniable. Vali Nasr has diagnosed it: a significant segment of exiled Iranians has been consumed by the desire “to be white”—to claim kinship with the civilisational mainstream of the West, to distance itself from the Global South to which Iran structurally belongs. The aspiration manifests in specific alignments: the embrace of Zionism, support for American military adventurism, the revival of pre-Islamic Aryan mythology as a credential for respectability. But the order to which these figures pledge allegiance is itself in moral decomposition. We live in a post-Epstein era—an era in which Western liberal democracy has been exposed, from its intelligence agencies to its philanthropic networks, as harbouring predatory corruption at its core. To seek recognition from this order is not merely futile, as Dabashi argues via Dussel; it is self-negation in the service of a mirage. The imaginary whiteness collapses the moment the American president promises to bomb their homeland “back to the stone ages, where they belong.” No flag-waving, no alignment with the American right can purchase the ticket to civilisational belonging that was never on offer. Beyond the Binary Dabashi’s distinction between hokoomat (the state apparatus) and hakemiyat (sovereignty residing in the nation) offers the exit from the paralysing binary in which the comprador character remains trapped. One can be fiercely critical of the Islamic Republic and simultaneously proud of national resilience under bombardment. The comprador type cannot hold both ideas because its intellectual operating system does not permit it. To criticise the regime is to endorse its destruction from without; to oppose the war is to support the regime. This is the most corrosive legacy of the self-other dichotomy. Farzaneh exposed this on air with a single correction. When the comprador voice claimed ninety percent of Iranians supported the war, he responded: “The great majority of people inside Iran do not support bombs being dropped on their heads.” The statement is so obvious that its necessity reveals the depth of the delusion. The comprador has travelled so far from the field that she can no longer hear its voice—or, hearing it, dismisses it as regime propaganda. The Reckoning The Copernican Revolution of the Iranian mind, as Dabashi calls it, has begun. The old centre—the imaginary West that once organised every axis of self-understanding—no longer holds. The comprador character belongs to the exhausted paradigm: not its architect but its symptom, the terminal expression of a borrowed modernity that could not survive contact with the reality it served. The stone ages to which Trump promised to consign Iran are the stone ages of his own moral imagination—a landscape in which entire civilisations can be reduced to rubble and their people called animals without consequence. The real question is not whether Iran will survive. It already has. The question is whether those who cheered for their own negation will have the honesty to reckon with what they endorsed—and what they failed to think. And if you, the reader, recognise yourself in this character type—if you hear your own voice in its cadences, your own rationalisations in its logic, your own silence where condemnation of the bomber ought to have been—then the task before you is not defensive indignation. It is the far more difficult and more dignifying labour of rethinking, from the ground up, the entire edifice of assumptions upon which you have constructed your understanding of yourself and of the world. The hour is late, but the door is not yet closed. • • This essay draws on the transcript of The 21st Show (Illinois Public Media, 8 April 2026); Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks (Pluto Press, 2011); Hamid Dabashi, Iran Without Borders (Verso, 2016); Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi’, Contemporary Arab Thought (Pluto Press, 2004); and the public remarks of Vali Nasr on the Iranian diaspora’s aspiration to whiteness. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Alain ROLLAND © European Union 2023, Licensed under CC BY 4.0 Reza Pahlavi wants his throne back, and he is willing to see Iran broken to get it. For more than four decades, from the safety of American exile, the last scion of the Pahlavi dynasty has waged a campaign of dynastic restoration disguised as democratic liberation — courting Washington hawks, cheering on sanctions that gut Iranian livelihoods, and lending his name to military scenarios that would reduce the country his grandfather built to rubble. In recent months he has called for “humanitarian intervention” to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, declared that “it’s a war, and war has casualties” in response to domestic protests, and slammed UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer for welcoming a US–Iran ceasefire — accusing Britain of “endlessly appeasing” the Islamic Republic. Strip away the press conferences and the congressional testimonies, and what remains is not a political programme. It is a vendetta with a flag. To understand the nature of what Pahlavi is doing, one must first understand what his public statements actually amount to in the cold light of law. The answer depends entirely on where you stand — literally, on which soil, under which legal order. In the United States, where Pahlavi has lived since adolescence, his calls for regime change, his courtship of foreign powers, his encouragement of internal uprising — all of this is almost certainly protected political speech under the First Amendment. American constitutional doctrine draws a bright line between advocacy and incitement, and Pahlavi’s pronouncements, however reckless, remain comfortably on the protected side. No serious prosecutor would touch the case. The legal architecture of the republic that shelters him is, ironically, the very thing that permits him to call for the destruction of another. Cross the Atlantic to the United Kingdom, and the picture shifts. British law, particularly the broad and muscular language of the Terrorism Act 2006, could plausibly form the basis of a prosecution. The Act’s provisions on the encouragement and glorification of terrorism cast a wide net, and some of Pahlavi’s more inflammatory statements — those urging direct confrontation with the Iranian state, those that could be read as endorsing or facilitating violence — might fall within its reach. Such a case would not be straightforward; it would face a formidable challenge grounded in freedom of expression and the proper interpretive limits of the statute. But the fact that the question is even arguable tells us something important about the elastic relationship between political speech and criminal conduct. Now turn to Iran itself — either the Islamic Republic as it exists today, or the Imperial State as it existed before 1979. In both systems, the analysis is brutally simple. Pahlavi’s statements constitute clear and undeniable acts of treason and rebellion. The Islamic Republic would prosecute him for sedition and moharebeh — war against God — with the same mechanical certainty that his father’s regime would have prosecuted anyone calling for the overthrow of the Shah. In neither system does oppositional political speech enjoy meaningful legal protection. A prosecution would be initiated. A conviction would follow. The sentence would be death. The symmetry is instructive: the regime Pahlavi despises and the regime his family built would treat him with identical severity. This jurisdictional analysis is more than a legal curiosity. It illuminates a foundational truth about the relationship between law, speech, and power. The distinction between political dissent and criminal sedition is not fixed in nature. It is a product of a nation’s foundational legal principles — its commitments regarding freedom of expression, its definitions of national security, its tolerance for the uncomfortable and the destabilising. Pahlavi operates in the gap between these systems, exploiting the freedoms of one jurisdiction to wage war on another, accountable to none. But legality is not legitimacy, and protection is not vindication. The fact that Pahlavi can say what he says from the safety of a Potomac suburb does not mean that what he says serves the interests of the Iranian people. This is the crux of the matter, and it is here that the assessment must be unflinching. What Reza Pahlavi is engaged in is not national liberation. It is the politics of personal loss dressed in borrowed idealism. His animating impulse is not a considered programme for Iranian democracy, nor a sober reckoning with the complexities of Iranian society. It is partisan rage — a deep, abiding hatred for a regime that overthrew his father, dismantled his dynasty, and deprived him of the throne he was raised to occupy. Every press conference, every congressional testimony, every carefully staged appearance alongside hawkish American politicians, radiates this singular grievance. The Iranian people are not the subject of his project. They are its prop. Consider what Pahlavi actually advocates. He has repeatedly aligned himself with the most aggressive elements of American and Israeli foreign policy toward Iran. He has courted sanctions regimes that have devastated ordinary Iranians — collapsing the currency, gutting the healthcare system, impoverishing the middle class. He has signalled not merely openness but active enthusiasm for military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, framing the prospect of foreign bombing as a “humanitarian” gift to the Iranian people. When protests erupted inside the country, he did not counsel restraint or solidarity; he described state media buildings as “legitimate targets” and told demonstrators that war has casualties. And yet, in a characteristic display of incoherence, he has also insisted that “change in Iran is ultimately in the hands of the people” and that the regime is “collapsing” without outside help — a claim difficult to reconcile with his simultaneous lobbying for American bombs. He has done all of this while claiming to speak for the Iranian nation from a mansion in Maryland. This is not the behaviour of a patriot. It is the behaviour of a man so consumed by what was taken from him that he would see the country itself destroyed rather than governed by those who took it. He is prepared, by word and by strategic alignment, to dismantle the very infrastructure — physical, institutional, industrial — that his own grandfather built and his father expanded. The factories, the roads, the energy grid, the military apparatus, the administrative state — all of it expendable, so long as the hated mullahs fall with it. The comparison to his predecessors is devastating. Reza Shah, for all his autocratic brutality, was a builder. He dragged Iran into the twentieth century by force of will — modernising its military, secularising its legal code, constructing its first national railway, founding the University of Tehran. Mohammad Reza Shah, for all his repressive excess and ultimate political blindness, continued this project of national development. He invested oil revenues in infrastructure, industrialisation, and education on a scale Iran had never seen. One can criticise the Pahlavis harshly — and history does — without denying that they understood themselves as architects of a stronger Iran. Their grandson and son understands himself as something else entirely. He is not building. He is not even preserving. He is offering to collaborate in the demolition of a nation so that he might rule its ruins — or, more likely, so that he might enjoy the psychic satisfaction of seeing his family’s enemies crushed, even if Iran is crushed with them. The Iranian people are not blind to this. A page is turning in the political consciousness of the diaspora and of Iranians within the country itself. It was not long ago that protesters in the streets of Tehran and Isfahan chanted slogans honouring Reza Shah — invoking his memory as a rebuke to the clerical establishment, wishing his soul peace as a way of saying that Iran deserved a stronger, more modern state. That viral sentiment — “Reza Shah, rohat shad” — was not really about monarchism. It was about dignity, about national pride, about the memory of a time when Iran built things rather than merely endured. But increasingly, Reza Pahlavi is eroding even that borrowed capital. His alignment with forces openly hostile to Iranian sovereignty, his willingness to serve as a mascot for policies designed in Washington and Tel Aviv rather than in Tehran, his transparent instrumentalisation of Iranian suffering — all of this is exposing him not as the heir to a proud legacy but as a traitor to it. When a fragile ceasefire between the United States and Iran briefly opened a window for diplomacy, Pahlavi attacked Keir Starmer for welcoming it, demanding instead that Britain expel Iran’s ambassador and prosecute the IRGC — as though the destruction of every diplomatic channel were itself a form of liberation. He is not continuing what Reza Shah started. He is desecrating it. He is not honouring what his father tried, however imperfectly, to build. He is volunteering to help others tear it down. The question that now lingers — whispered in living rooms in Tehran, debated in cafes in Los Angeles, typed into encrypted messages by young Iranians who once chanted his grandfather’s name — is an uncomfortable one. It is not merely whether Reza Pahlavi is the right leader for Iran. That question was settled long ago; he is not. The deeper, more corrosive question is this: will the Iranian people, who once honoured Reza Shah’s memory as a symbol of national strength, begin to curse that same memory for having produced such progeny? It is a cruel irony. But history is not sentimental, and nations do not owe dynasties gratitude in perpetuity. If Reza Pahlavi continues down his current path — serving as the willing face of a project that would immiserate and destroy Iran in the name of liberating it — he will not merely fail to reclaim the throne. He will succeed in something far worse: retroactively poisoning the legacy of the very family whose name he trades on. The crown prince has no crown, no country, and, increasingly, no credibility. What he has is a grievance, a platform, and a dangerous willingness to mistake the destruction of Iran for its salvation. The Iranian people deserve better. They always have. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Hamid Dabashi on Sovereignty, Selfhood, and the End of Western Validation Based on a conversation between Hossein Hamdieh and Hamid Dabashi The Day After the Ceasefire On the Wednesday after the ceasefire was announced, Hossein Hamdieh sat in a repurposed factory near Azadi Square in Tehran—a building that had once housed industrial machinery and now served as a hub for young entrepreneurs and start-up founders. The irony was not lost on him. For weeks, the skies over the Iranian capital had rained ordnance. Inside, the instruments of a fragile future hummed on. Across the Atlantic, in New York, the Columbia University scholar Hamid Dabashi waited to join a video call that, only hours earlier, neither man was sure would be possible. When they finally connected, what unfolded was not a conventional interview. It was a reckoning—an attempt by two Iranian intellectuals to name what had just happened to them and to the nation they both claimed, one from within its borders, the other from a lifetime of exile. The backdrop was stark. For over thirty days, Iran had endured a sustained military campaign backed by two nuclear powers. The threat of an atomic strike was not theoretical; it was a lived, visceral terror. Hamdieh described scrolling through social media and finding, instead of news or analysis, an avalanche of farewells—messages written by ordinary people who believed they would not survive the night. The language of the American president compounded the dread: Iranians were called “animals” undeserving of electricity and infrastructure, “lunatics” to be wiped from the face of the earth, a “civilisation” to be bombed back to the Stone Age. This was not merely belligerent rhetoric. It was, Hamdieh insisted, a systematic programme of dehumanisation—a linguistic architecture designed to render an entire people shapeless, voiceless, and nameless. What cut deepest, Hamdieh confessed, was not the fear—though that was real enough, especially for a man with a small child at home—but the anger. The anger of invisibility. When he followed the international coverage, he found no Iranian faces, no Iranian voices, no Iranian stories. Others spoke for them, about them, over them. Iranians were reduced to numbers: casualty figures in a strategic calculus, collateral damage in someone else’s geopolitical algebra. Those who had lived among Europeans for years recalled bitterly that the continent’s conscience had stirred not when Iranian bodies were pulled from rubble, but when the price of petrol rose at European pumps. It was, as Dabashi had written in his book After Savagery, the condition of being rendered formless—of existing only as a shadow on someone else’s wall. And yet Iran held. The ceasefire came not because the nation broke, but because it did not. It is from this paradox—the survival of a people whom the most powerful military apparatus on earth had declared expendable—that Hamid Dabashi builds his central argument. What happened in those thirty-odd days, he contends, was not merely a military or political event. It was an epistemic revolution. The Epistemic Shift Dabashi reaches for the largest available metaphor. What Iran has undergone, he says, is nothing less than a “Copernican Revolution”—a phrase he uses with full awareness of its philosophical weight. Just as Copernicus displaced the Earth from the centre of the cosmos and forced humanity to reconsider its place in the universe, the crisis of recent weeks has displaced a set of deeply entrenched assumptions from the centre of the Iranian intellectual universe. The “paradigm shift,” in the sense that Thomas Kuhn gave the term, is total: Iranians can no longer look at the world, or at themselves, through the lenses they wore before the twenty-eighth of February. Dabashi likens this moment to the discovery of a new “verb” in the nation’s political and philosophical vocabulary. The old verbs—the ideological structures defined by the 1979 revolution, the binaries of reform and reaction—have been fully conjugated; their tenses are exhausted. This new verb has only just been unearthed. It will take a generation, perhaps longer, to spell out and conjugate its full meaning. The old paradigm, in Dabashi’s account, was defined by a chronic orientation towards the West. For generations, Iranian intellectuals, politicians, and ordinary citizens measured their worth, their modernity, and their civilisational standing against a Western yardstick. Whether they embraced the West or rejected it, the West remained the fixed point of reference—the sun around which the Iranian self-image orbited. This was true of the Pahlavi-era modernisers who sought to replicate European modernity wholesale; it was equally true, Dabashi argues, of the post-revolutionary Islamists who defined themselves in opposition to that same modernity. Both camps were prisoners of the same binary. What has now shattered is not one side of the binary but the binary itself. The evidence for this shattering, Dabashi suggests, is not to be found in policy documents or diplomatic communiqués. It is to be found in the behaviour of the people. During the crisis, all internal divisions—supporters and opponents of the Islamic Republic, reformists and hardliners, secularists and the devout—dissolved in the face of a shared existential threat. This was not orchestrated unity; it was spontaneous solidarity. The factional grammar that had defined Iranian politics for four decades—who is a reformist, who is a principlist, who is loyal and who disloyal—was suddenly revealed as irrelevant, a dialect spoken by elites that the nation itself had outgrown. Dabashi recalls the scene on the White Bridge of Ahvaz, his hometown, with an emotion that nearly overtakes him on camera. He had crossed that bridge four times a day as a schoolboy, attending Dr. Hesabi High School on the far bank of the Karun River, riding a balam beneath the bridge’s arches to the river islands on warm afternoons. Now, decades later and thousands of miles away, he watched footage of the same bridge crowded with people—from military personnel manning defence systems to the ordinary grocer walking across with quiet resolve—defiant, unbowed, together. It was, he says, one of the most moving images of his life. The bridge was not simply infrastructure; it was a metaphor made concrete. It connected two banks of a river, just as the crisis had connected the fractured halves of a national psyche. The Imaginary White Man in Our Minds The most provocative element of Dabashi’s argument is his direct critique of Edward Said, the Palestinian-American scholar whose 1978 book Orientalism remains the foundational text of postcolonial thought. Dabashi does not reject Said; he honours him and then moves beyond him. In Said’s mind, Dabashi argues, there always sat an imaginary white man—a spectral interlocutor to whom Said spent his entire life trying to prove that the Palestinians had been wronged. Until that imaginary figure was persuaded, it was as though no injustice had occurred. The framework was radical in its diagnosis, but it remained, in its very structure, dependent on Western acknowledgement. The colonised mind was still performing for the coloniser’s gaze. Hamdieh sharpens the point with a bitter observation: the tragic laboratory of Gaza has proven that sharing images of national pain and suffering to beg for the empathy of the “progressive” Western world is a fundamentally ineffective tactic. The bodies pile up; the empathy never arrives. Dabashi grounds this failure in a philosophical genealogy. Citing the Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel, he argues that within the metaphysical framework of European modernity, the non-Western subject simply does not exist as a fully realised human being. The European ego cogito—Descartes’s “I think”—was historically preceded by the ego conquiro: “I conquer.” Because the non-Western world was conquered, it was stripped of its subjectivity and metaphysical agency in the Western imagination. The white man does not refuse to see the Iranian; he is constitutionally incapable of seeing him. To seek his recognition is therefore not merely futile; it is a category error. Dabashi declares the performance over. The epistemic shift he describes is, at its core, a shift in audience. “That person is no longer in my mind,” he says. “Who am I talking to? I am talking to all the people who are like me—in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America.” The new interlocutor is not the Western academy, not the European liberal conscience, not the American policy establishment. It is the vast majority of humanity that shares a common experience of colonial dispossession and is engaged in a parallel project of self-recovery. He names Dussel and the Japanese thinker Kōjin Karatani as exemplary figures in this new constellation—thinkers who are articulating modernity from within their own traditions, not as supplicants at the gates of European reason. This is not, Dabashi is careful to emphasise, an anti-Western posture. It is a post-Western one. The distinction is crucial. Anti-Westernism is still a form of dependence; it defines itself by what it opposes. What Dabashi envisions is an Iran that has simply moved on—that has ceased to see itself in the mirror of the West and has begun to see itself in the mirror of the world. The shift is not from one master to another but from the very logic of mastery. The question is no longer “What does the West think of us?” but rather “What do we think of ourselves, and with whom shall we think it?” There is a liberating quality to this move, but also an enormous burden. For if the imaginary white man no longer adjudicates the validity of Iranian experience, then Iranians must adjudicate it for themselves. This is, in the end, what Dabashi means by the epistemic shift: not merely a change in political orientation but a transformation in the very ground on which knowledge is produced and evaluated. It is the difference between borrowing a map and learning to read the terrain. The Poverty of Borrowed Modernity This line of reasoning leads Dabashi to a sharp critique of an earlier generation of Iranian intellectuals, whom he accuses of promoting what he calls a “received modernity”—a modernity handed down from Europe as a gift that Iranians were supposedly not yet worthy of receiving. He singles out figures such as Dariush Ashuri as representative of a tendency to treat Western philosophical categories as universal truths and Persian intellectual traditions as parochial curiosities in need of translation. The problem, in Dabashi’s view, is not with modernity itself but with the assumption that modernity has only one address. He points to the rich indigenous resources of Persian thought—the long tradition of ‘orf (customary law) that has always existed alongside and in tension with Sharia, the philosophical sophistication of thinkers who wrote in Persian and Arabic centuries before the European Enlightenment, the absorptive genius of a civilisation that metabolised Greek philosophy, Zoroastrian cosmology, and Islamic jurisprudence into something entirely its own. Dabashi challenges the Orientalist label of “Islamic Philosophy,” a term he argues was invented by Western scholars to differentiate the East from Western philosophy. Iran’s philosophical tradition is not simply Islamic; it is heavily anchored in the Persian language and incorporates pre-Islamic Khosravani wisdom as well as Greek and Indian thought. Thinkers like Suhrawardi did not merely produce “Islamic philosophy”; they contributed to a vast, synthesised Persian philosophical continuum that predates, absorbs, and transcends any single religious tradition. Dabashi is equally impatient with the linguistic dimension of this dependency. He notes the tendency of intellectuals in the Arab and Iranian worlds to fabricate neologisms—like the Arabic ‘ilmānī for “secular”—in a futile effort to domesticate Western concepts. Persian, he observes, has wisely refused this game; Iranians simply say “secular” and move on. He also warns against the uncritical adoption of Western historical periodisation: concepts like the “Middle Ages” are uniquely tied to the timeline and experience of European history, and attempting to map them onto Persian history forces a civilisation with its own rhythms and ruptures into a foreign mould. Iran possesses its own rich discursive universe—blending philosophy, mysticism (irfan), politics, and religious law (Sharia)—which must be understood on its own terms. The task is not to import foreign vocabulary but to excavate and activate what is already there. If modernity is not a European patent but a universal human possibility, then every civilisation has its own pathway to it—and its own version of it. The Iranian experience is not a belated copy of the French Enlightenment; it is an independent experiment in how a society negotiates the competing demands of tradition, reason, faith, and power. The intellectuals who dismissed this experiment as derivative were, in Dabashi’s view, themselves the most derivative thinkers of all: they could not imagine a thought that had not first been thought in Paris or Berlin. Sovereignty Belongs to the Nation, Not the State At the political heart of Dabashi’s vision lies a careful distinction between hokoomat (the state, the apparatus of government) and hakemiyat (sovereignty, the ultimate authority of the people). Sovereignty, he argues, resides intrinsically in the nation. It is lent—temporarily, conditionally—to whatever government happens to hold power. The loan can be recalled. This formulation allows Dabashi to accomplish something that many Iranian intellectuals have found difficult: to defend the nation without defending the regime. One can be fiercely critical of the Islamic Republic’s domestic policies and simultaneously fiercely proud of the national resilience that the crisis revealed. These are not contradictory positions; they are expressions of the same underlying principle—that the country belongs to its people, not to its rulers. The soil of Iran, Dabashi insists, holds a sacred status for its people—a reverence that has persisted whether the nation was Zoroastrian, Manichaean, Mazdaki, Islamic, or Shiite. It is this deeper, civilisational loyalty—not allegiance to any particular government—that animated the collective defence. Dabashi is explicit about the misunderstanding he wishes to pre-empt. Criticism of the government must never be confused with disloyalty to the country. The conflation of the two—by the state, by the exiled opposition, by Western commentators eager to claim Iranian dissidents as fellow travellers—has been one of the most debilitating features of post-revolutionary discourse. If the epistemic shift means anything, it means the right to hold both truths at once: that the Islamic Republic has often governed badly, and that the Iranian nation has just demonstrated, under unimaginable pressure, a dignity that puts most of the world’s democracies to shame. This distinction also enables Dabashi to address, and dismiss, one of the most corrosive slogans to have circulated in recent years: “Neither Gaza, nor Lebanon—my life for Iran.” He regards this as a dangerously naïve form of isolationism that betrays a fundamental misreading of geopolitics. Iran’s national interest, he argues, is not a hermetically sealed category. It is embedded in a regional and global web of relationships, alliances, and strategic realities. A nation that retreats from its neighbourhood does not become safer; it becomes weaker and more vulnerable to precisely the kind of assault it has just survived. The point is not to sacrifice Iranian interests on the altar of solidarity, but to understand that solidarity and self-interest are, in a world shaped by imperial power, often the same thing. A Cosmopolitan Patriotism Perhaps the most striking feature of Dabashi’s position is its refusal to choose between patriotism and cosmopolitanism. He is, by his own description, proudly a “child of ’57”—a product of the 1979 revolution, an event he regards not as an aberration but as the origin point of a still-unfolding struggle for national self-determination. He reclaims the term deliberately, knowing that it is often used pejoratively. The revolution, for all its subsequent distortions, was an act of collective will—a refusal, by an entire people, to accept a future dictated from without. But Dabashi’s patriotism is not parochial. He envisions an Iran rooted in its own soil and history while simultaneously open to the world. He shares historical anecdotes to illustrate the enduring continuity of Iranian culture. He recalls how the Jameh Mosque of Isfahan was built directly over a Zoroastrian temple—layer upon layer of unbroken cultural synthesis, each era absorbing and transforming the one before it rather than erasing it. He also tells the story of Fakhrolmolk, the daughter of Naser al-Din Shah, who secretly transcribed the oral tales told to her father by the court storyteller, Nāghib al-Mulk, effectively creating the first modern Persian novel, Amir Arsalan-e Namdar. The anecdote serves a double purpose: it demonstrates the indigenous roots of Iranian modernity, and it reveals the role of a woman’s quiet subversion in preserving and transforming a cultural tradition. “We won’t let go of this,” Dabashi declares. External powers cannot simply bomb a civilisation into submission and expect it to vanish. Dabashi proudly embraces all facets of modern Iranian identity. The Iranian self, he argues, is an amalgamation of the religious, the leftist, and the nationalist—strands that are often presented as contradictory but that have, in practice, always been woven together. To deny any one of them is to deny the complexity of the nation’s actual history. The child of ’57 carries within him the Shia mourning of Ashura, the Marxist critique of capital, and the nationalist love of homeland; to amputate any limb is to cripple the whole body. He invokes Rumi’s parable of Moses and the shepherd to crystallise the point. In the story, a simple shepherd prays to God in homely, even blasphemous terms—offering to comb God’s hair and wash God’s clothes. Moses, scandalised, rebukes him. But God, in turn, rebukes Moses: “You have separated a lover from the Beloved.” Dabashi uses the parable as a metaphor for the old intellectual posture—the earnest, well-meaning effort to make Iranian thought presentable to Western sensibilities, to translate raw conviction into the acceptable vocabulary of the Western academy. That phase, he declares, is over. The shepherd no longer needs Moses’s permission to pray. This cosmopolitan patriotism is, in the end, the emotional and philosophical centre of Dabashi’s vision. It is a love of country that refuses to become chauvinism, and a love of the world that refuses to become rootlessness. It asks Iranians to hold two things in creative tension: the fierce particularity of their own experience—the taste of the water in the Karun, the cadences of Hafez, the memory of revolution—and the universal aspiration to build a world in which no people are rendered invisible, no civilisation dismissed as inferior, no language judged inadequate for the work of thought. If the crisis taught Iran anything, Dabashi suggests, it is that these two loyalties are not in competition. They are the same loyalty, seen from different angles. The Task Ahead Dabashi is under no illusion that the epistemic shift he describes is complete. He acknowledges that its full dimensions are not yet visible—that those who lived through the crisis, whether inside Iran or in the diaspora, are still too close to the event to map its contours with precision. The Copernican Revolution is underway, but the new astronomy has yet to be written. It may take years, perhaps a generation, before the full implications of what has occurred can be articulated with the clarity they deserve. What he does insist upon is the nature of the task. Iranian intellectuals—scholars, writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers—must now “conjugate the new verb” that the crisis has disclosed. They must articulate this transformed consciousness in language that is their own, for an audience that is their own. The project is not to explain Iran to the West, nor to defend Iran against the West, but to think Iran—and to think it in conversation with the rest of the world. This means engaging seriously with the philosophical traditions of other civilisations that have undergone similar convulsions, and building institutions—journals, publishing houses, translation projects, university programmes—that serve this new audience rather than the old one. The reference in his book Islam and the West: The Future of Two Illusions is pointed: both “Islam” and “the West” are mirages, reified categories that dissolve under scrutiny. The real world is more complex, more plural, and more interesting than any binary can capture. The task of the Iranian intellectual is to inhabit that complexity honestly—to resist the temptation of easy oppositions and to do the harder, slower work of building a vocabulary adequate to the new reality. He closes the conversation on a note of guarded hope. Iran, he says, must become aware of its own “cosmopolitan dimension”—must learn to see itself not in the distorting mirror of the West but in the clarifying mirror of the wider world. Notably, Dabashi rejects even the vocabulary of “Global North” and “Global South” as reductive and inherently colonial—categories that still organise the world around a Western axis. Instead, he calls for Iran to see itself simply in the “mirror of the world”: Asia, Africa, Latin America. These are not peripheral locations but the centres of a new intellectual geography. The people of these continents are not subalterns waiting to be spoken for; they are interlocutors, equals, companions in the shared project of building a world no longer organised around a single civilisational pole. The national pride that swelled during the crisis—the instinct to proclaim Iran the fourth great power—is understandable, even admirable. But Dabashi gently redirects it: the real achievement would be not to climb an existing hierarchy but to render the hierarchy itself obsolete. After the Bridge The image that lingers from this conversation is not an idea but a place: the White Bridge of Ahvaz, spanning the Karun River, crowded with people who have chosen, against every rational calculation, to stand. Dabashi crossed that bridge as a boy, and when he speaks of it now, his voice catches. It is a private memory made public, a personal geography transformed into a symbol of collective endurance. Every nation has such places—sites where private biography and public history intersect, where the personal and the political become indistinguishable. For Dabashi, the White Bridge is where the abstract arguments of this conversation acquire flesh and weight. There is something fitting about the fact that this conversation took place between two men separated by an ocean but joined by a language, a history, and a wound. Hamdieh spoke from the epicentre of the crisis, still vibrating with its aftershocks. Dabashi spoke from the distance of exile, a distance that sharpens certain things and blurs others. Between them, they enacted the very cosmopolitan patriotism that Dabashi advocates: a love of country that does not require proximity, and an intellectual seriousness that does not require permission. What Hamid Dabashi offers in this conversation is not a finished philosophy but an opening—a clearing in the intellectual landscape where new thinking might take root. He asks Iranians to do something at once simple and enormously difficult: to stop performing for an audience that was never really listening, and to begin the slow, painstaking work of speaking to—and for—themselves. It is a call not to arms but to thought—to the kind of sustained, rigorous, and courageous intellectual labour that alone can give lasting form to what a nation has endured and discovered. The books must be written, the arguments forged, the conversations had—not in translation, but in the original language of the experience itself. The Copernican Revolution of the Iranian mind has begun. The old centre—the imaginary West that once organised every axis of self-understanding—no longer holds. What remains is the vertiginous, exhilarating, and deeply human task of learning to navigate without it: to chart new constellations in an unfamiliar sky, guided not by the borrowed light of someone else’s stars, but by the hard-won luminance of one’s own. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Chah Kouran Caravanserai, a Qajar era brick building visible from the road while driving. This is a response to a comment by Kayvan Hosseini, a brilliant and intelligent journalist at BBC Persian, whose interventions are generally sharp, disciplined, and to the point. Precisely for that reason, his recent formulation merits serious engagement. In this instance, however, I find his conclusion too unrealistic. It compresses history, underestimates structural constraints, and implicitly searches for an easy and rapid political resolution to a problem that has never admitted such solutions. Iran’s crises were not born overnight, and they will not be resolved through the fantasy of sudden external correction. No serious reading of modern history justifies that expectation. Kayvan’s central claim is that the biggest loser of this war has been the Iranian people. At the level of moral sentiment, the statement is understandable: ordinary Iranians have indeed suffered grievously. They have endured bombing, economic deterioration, fear, displacement, and the further contraction of an already restricted political field. But analytically, the claim is too blunt. It mistakes suffering for strategic defeat. A people may be wounded, impoverished, and violated without thereby becoming the principal loser in the political sense. To say otherwise is to collapse a crucial distinction between being subjected to violence and being defeated by history. This distinction matters because the Iranian people were not the authors of this war’s strategy. They did not design the coercive frameworks, formulate the escalation ladders, or imagine that aerial pressure would somehow midwife democratic transition. They were the object upon which multiple projects converged: the project of an external military campaign, the project of regional power competition, and the project of exile political currents that continue to imagine that internal legitimacy can be substituted by foreign force. To call the people the “biggest loser” risks misplacing responsibility. The greater failures belong to those who possessed agency, articulated goals, and then failed to achieve them. If one applies even a minimally rigorous strategic standard, the larger losers are not the Iranian people but the actors whose stated or implied objectives have been most visibly frustrated. Trump is one such loser. His method combined theatrical maximalism with conceptual incoherence. Coercion was treated as a self-sufficient instrument, as though pressure alone could produce political order. Yet the result has been the opposite of what such a strategy would require: not stabilisation, not legitimacy, not regime collapse, but deeper militarisation, greater uncertainty, and broader reputational damage. When a powerful actor applies overwhelming force and still cannot secure his intended end state, failure must be named where it belongs. Reza Pahlavi is another and perhaps even clearer example. For years, his political relevance has depended on a premise that history has repeatedly discredited: that Iran can be delivered from above, that external intervention can compensate for the absence of rooted organisation, and that symbolic lineage can stand in for political labour. The war has once again exposed the bankruptcy of that view. Far from opening a path for his project, external pressure has strengthened the state’s securitising logic and made any opposition associated with foreign power more vulnerable to delegitimation. This is not a marginal setback. It is a structural refutation of the model itself. Here history is indispensable. Modern political transformations, especially in states marked by revolution, war, sanctions, and deep institutional entrenchment, do not unfold according to the timetable of exile desire or foreign impatience. There are no clean shortcuts through such history. The longing for a quick solution is understandable, particularly after years of repression and disappointment, but longing is not analysis. Again and again, external force has narrowed internal political space rather than opening it. Again and again, projects presented as accelerants of liberation have instead produced harder authoritarian outcomes. This is not an anomaly; it is a recurring pattern. Any analysis that underplays this pattern, however eloquent in other respects, risks becoming captive to wishful thinking. None of this means that the Iranian people have emerged unscathed, nor that the regime’s consolidation should be minimised. Quite the opposite: the public has paid a terrible price. But there is an important intellectual and moral difference between saying that a people has suffered profoundly and saying that it is the war’s greatest loser. The first statement recognises injury. The second risks implying passivity, as though society were merely the terminal point of forces acting upon it and nothing more. Yet nations are not reducible to the damage done to them in a single cycle of violence. They carry memory, endurance, contradiction, and the capacity for future political reconstitution. That is why I would frame the matter differently. The Iranian people are not the biggest loser of this war. They are its most wounded subject, but not its most consequential failure. The largest failures are those of strategy, judgement, and political imagination: the failure of coercive externalism, the failure of exile maximalism, and the failure of those who continue to believe that history can be bullied into yielding quick solutions. Iran’s tragedy is real. But tragedy should not be confused with finality, nor suffering with the loss of historical agency. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast AP Photo / via The Intercept On Reza Pahlavi, the Monarchist Fallacy, and the Corruption of Logic A ceasefire has come into effect between the United States, Israel, and Iran. For most rational observers, this is a moment of cautious relief—a pause in a war that has already claimed nearly two thousand lives and wounded tens of thousands more. But for one man and his devoted followers, the ceasefire is an inconvenience. At CPAC in Texas barely ten days ago, Reza Pahlavi urged America to “stay the course” in its bombardment of his own country. He wants the war to continue. Let that sink in. The Question That Answers Itself “What is the alternative to Reza Pahlavi?”—this is the monarchist camp’s favourite question, deployed as both shield and sword. It presupposes that Pahlavi is already the default leader of the Iranian opposition, and that anyone who disputes this must first produce a superior candidate. The question is designed to end debate, not to open it. But it collapses under the lightest scrutiny. Reza Pahlavi has no alternative—not because he is indispensable, but because he has made himself impossible to compete with in sheer ineptitude and moral vacancy. He is, as the Americans who once courted him now openly say, a “loser prince” and a “useful idiot.” A US intelligence assessment shown to President Trump concluded that Pahlavi possesses no meaningful network inside Iran. He has not set foot in the country in nearly fifty years. His every major political intervention—from the Woman, Life, Freedom movement to the current war—has ended in devastation for the very people he claims to represent. No one can rival this record of failure. In that sense alone, indeed, what is the alternative? The Slogan That Reveals Everything The monarchist camp has a slogan: “Marg bar seh fasad: Akhund, Chap-i va Mojahed” —“Death to the three corrupts: the Mullah, the Leftist, and the Mojahed.” This is not a throwaway chant. It is the philosophical skeleton of the entire movement. Examine what it does: it eliminates anyone with religious convictions from the political arena. It eliminates anyone with leftist tendencies. It eliminates the revolutionary organisations that participated in the 1979 uprising. In a single slogan, the monarchist camp has excommunicated every major ideological current in Iranian politics except itself. This is precisely the mechanism they claim to despise. For forty-seven years, the Islamic Republic’s Guardian Council has disqualified rival candidates to create the illusion of choice in elections. Pahlavi’s camp performs the identical operation—not through legal authority but through rhetorical extermination. They declare the field empty, then point to the emptiness as proof of Pahlavi’s uniqueness. It is a conjuring trick disguised as political logic. The Mirror Image of What They Oppose The monarchist worldview is binary to the point of caricature. They are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Everyone else is falsehood. The Islamic Republic divided the world into the axis of good and the axis of evil; the monarchists have simply reversed the labels while preserving the identical structure. When you define the world in black and white—when you insist that your camp alone represents virtue and that all others embody corruption—you have not created a democratic alternative. You have created a monarchy in waiting with the psychology of a theocracy. Political leadership is not inherited. It is not bestowed by lineage, nor is it validated by a nostalgic mythology about a grandfather’s modernisation programme. Leadership is earned through demonstrable competence, moral clarity, and the ability to unite—not to exclude. By every one of these measures, Reza Pahlavi fails. The Moral Catastrophe In recent months, as American and Israeli bombs fell on Iranian soil, 168 children were killed. Reza Pahlavi said nothing. Not a single word of mourning for his “own compatriots,” his “own fellow countrymen.” Instead, he appeared at CPAC, wrapped in the rhetoric of “Make Iran Great Again,” urging Trump not to negotiate but to press on with the bombardment. His supporters, in London, Washington, Toronto, Vancouver, Paris, Berlin, and Munich, took to the streets waving Israeli flags and dancing in celebration of the strikes. Twice in the past year, this camp has refused to condemn the violation of international law. They support military intervention because they have concluded—in their desperation—that no internal solution exists, that international institutions are impotent, and that therefore the law itself is redundant. This is not the posture of a liberation movement. It is the posture of native informants cheering on foreign bombardment of their own people. It is the recipe, as history has shown repeatedly, for civilisational disaster. The Corruption of Logic The monarchist argument ultimately reduces to this: “Anything is better than the Islamic Republic.” This is the sum total of their intellectual proposition. It is born not of reason but of hatred so all-consuming that it has devoured the capacity for basic moral judgement. If anything is better than the status quo, then a man who stays silent when children are murdered, who applauds foreign powers bombing his homeland, and who eliminates all ideological competitors through a slogan of death—that man, too, is acceptable. But logic is not selective. If the monarchists can say “anything but the Islamic Republic,” then by the same principle, anyone can say “anything but Reza Pahlavi.” The formula works in both directions. And when it does, the monarchist edifice collapses, because stripped of the “no alternative” claim, Pahlavi has nothing to offer—no organisation, no domestic support, no moral authority, no track record of competence, and no vision beyond performative allegiance to whichever foreign power will have him. A Principled Position The ceasefire—however fragile—is a moment of truth. It reveals who wanted peace and who wanted war. Reza Pahlavi wanted war. He urged it, promoted it, and celebrated it from the comfort of his Maryland suburban home. His followers wanted war. They marched for it in Western capitals while Iranian families buried their dead. The principled position is simple: no authoritarian voice—whether it wears a turban or a crown—has the right to tell a nation of ninety-three million people that it alone holds the truth and everyone else is evil. The fight against the Islamic Republic’s authoritarianism does not end at its borders; it must also confront the authoritarianism that presents itself as the cure. Reza Pahlavi is not the alternative to the Islamic Republic. He is its mirror image, dressed in a Western suit, speaking from a CPAC podium, asking a foreign army to do what he could never do himself. He has no alternative—because he has made himself uniquely, spectacularly unfit for the role he claims. And until his followers can see past their hatred long enough to recognise this, they will remain trapped in the very cycle of authoritarianism they believe they are fighting to end. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Photo by Jerry “Woody” / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0 The Iranian diaspora keeps sending its people to the barricades. The people at the barricades keep dying. The diaspora keeps forgetting. In Quebec, every licence plate bears three words: Je me souviens—I remember. Not celebration, but defiance against erasure. Quebec remembers conquest, linguistic suppression, systematic subordination. The motto declares that historical suffering, honestly remembered, becomes resistance—and forgetting is the final capitulation. The Iranian diaspora needs its own licence plate. Not because circumstances are identical, but because the pathology is: promised liberation, betrayal, catastrophe, then insistence that the next promise will be different. Quebec remembers because forgetting means consenting to the wound’s conditions. Iranians abroad, with striking regularity, choose to forget—and in that forgetting, consent to their own irrelevance and the suffering of those inside Iran who pay the price for diaspora credulity. The Mahshahr petrochemical complex—decades of industrial capacity, thousands of livelihoods—is now rubble. And in the aftermath, something remarkable: the monarchist camp that spent months cheerleading for devastating strikes, for making Iran “come to its senses,” began frantically deleting posts. One advisor compared Trump to Truman, reaching for historical analogy to justify economic nuclear warfare against an entire population. This is not a U-turn. This is scrambling for cover after realizing the blunder’s magnitude, offering the coward’s erasure—the deleted tweet, the revised talking point, the sudden discovery that perhaps cheering for your country’s immolation was poor optics. What must be said plainly: those who argued the Islamic Republic must “come to its senses”—euphemism for total, unconditional surrender—were not engaging in strategic thinking but in fantasy dressed as geopolitics. This depravity posits that a state will voluntarily dissolve itself under foreign military pressure, that a government will simply hand over power because bombs fall. It has never worked. It will never work. It is the logic of the colonial administrator demanding capitulation while calling it liberation—and those who peddle it are complicit in every drop of blood that follows. In January 2025, monarchist networks issued urgent calls: take to the streets, the international community stands ready. Thousands responded with incomprehensible bravery. What met them was not promised support but state repression’s full machinery—mass arrests, live ammunition, killings. The foreign assistance never materialized. Those who responded paid with their bodies, their freedom, their lives. The figures who issued the calls paid with nothing. This is the asymmetry defining diaspora politics: courage expended is always others’—those inside Iran responding to calls from exile’s safety. After Minab—168 schoolchildren killed in US-Israeli operations—the silence from prominent monarchist figures was striking. No condemnation. No grief. Yet when American soldiers faced danger, the same circles found voice with remarkable speed. The juxtaposition: 168 Iranian children dead, met with silence; American soldiers endangered, met with performative anguish. The calculation reveals a hierarchy where some lives receive mourning based not on intrinsic worth but on differential utility in pursuing foreign patronage. Minab’s children have every right to find this intolerable. When Mahsa Amini’s murder ignited the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, monarchist figures swiftly claimed leadership—appearing on Western media, framing the uprising as precursor to monarchist transition. The movement was brutally suppressed. Over 500 killed. The broad coalition the moment demanded was never built. Secular republicans, leftists, ethnic minorities, feminist organizers saw not leadership but appropriation. The figurehead model—positioning a single inherited figure as Iran’s inevitable democratic leader—has produced four decades of failure so consistent it demands explanation beyond bad luck. The burden of proof rests with those advocating continuation, not with those questioning it. The case must be made on evidence—organizational capacity, coalition breadth, demonstrated accountability—not on inherited symbolism or accusations of disloyalty for asking questions. What the Iranian opposition needs is not a better figurehead but democratic infrastructure: coalition platforms accommodating ideological diversity, institutional capacity with transparent decision-making, honest strategic assessment distinguishing what external powers say from what they’ll do, democratic culture where dissent isn’t treason, and distributed leadership across networks already doing the work—women’s rights organizations, labor unions, ethnic minority advocates. They lack media visibility but possess organizational substance. The question for the Iranian diaspora is whether it possesses courage to remember—not selectively, not sentimentally, but with ruthless honesty. To remember January 2025. To remember Mahshahr, April 2026. To remember Mahsa Amini. To remember Flight 752’s 176 murdered passengers. To remember the 1988 mass executions, November 2019’s massacre, every life the Islamic Republic has ground beneath its machinery. And now, to remember the deleted posts, the frantic backpedaling, the Trump-Truman analogies grasping for justification after industrial infrastructure lies in ruins. To remember who cheered while bombs fell, who remained silent when children died, who discovered moral discomfort only after realizing the optics were unfavorable. Memory cannot be partisan. It must encompass regime crimes and opposition failures—not because these are morally equivalent, but because selective remembrance is itself complicity. Quebec chose to remember because forgetting meant consenting to subjugation. The Iranian diaspora must choose to remember because forgetting—on any side, about any crime—means consenting to perpetuation of the very cycles that have cost so many lives. After Mahshahr, there is no more room for forgetting. The petrochemical ashes settle not just on industrial ruins but on every hollow promise, every deleted post, every moment of cowardice dressed as strategy. This is the reckoning that can no longer be postponed. Je me souviens. We remember. And this time, memory will not be negotiable. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Credit: Georgia Tech Internet Intelligence Lab – IODA (Internet Outage Detection and Analysis), Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis Iran’s internet shutdowns during the 2025-2026 conflict have been the longest on record—38 consecutive days of near-total digital darkness. The opposition narrative is predictable: this is pure authoritarianism, full stop. The regime’s counter-narrative is equally rehearsed: national security imperatives during war. Both are dangerously incomplete. Let’s dispense with the comfortable fictions. Yes, Iran faces genuine cyber threats. When Israel demonstrates the capability to detonate pagers remotely and the United States can sabotage North Korean missile launches through cyber operations, Tehran’s paranoia has a factual basis. Enemy drones are managed via commercial networks. Critical infrastructure is vulnerable to the kind of attacks Russia has perfected against Ukraine’s power grid. The opposition’s Instagram-friendly narrative that shutdowns serve no security function is facile—it ignores the documented realities of modern cyber warfare. But here’s what the regime won’t admit: shutdowns don’t work. Ukraine, facing the world’s most sophisticated cyber aggressor, kept its internet running. Estonia, after being blindsided by massive DDoS attacks in 2007, became a cybersecurity leader by staying online. Israel, targeted by Iranian-aligned hackers and Hamas cyber units simultaneously, maintained connectivity. The technical solution to cyber threats isn’t digital amputation—it’s network segmentation, air-gapping critical systems, and public-private defence partnerships. Iran’s approach is the digital equivalent of burning down your house to prevent burglary. The immediate cost is catastrophic: $35.7 million lost daily, online commerce collapsed by 80%, the Tehran Stock Exchange haemorrhaging value, mass unemployment in the tech sector. But the longer-term damage is civilizational. Iran is creating a generation of digitally isolated citizens while the rest of the world accelerates into an AI-driven future. When Iranian universities can’t access international research databases, when startups can’t integrate with global supply chains, when Iranian developers can’t contribute to open-source projects or collaborate internationally—this isn’t temporary disruption. It’s permanent relegation to technological irrelevance. The regime’s National Information Network strategy reveals the actual agenda: not security, but control. Building a domestic intranet severed from the global internet isn’t cyber defense—it’s digital North Korea. And like North Korea’s economic isolation, it guarantees long-term strategic weakness precisely when Iran claims to be defending national strength. The sensationalised opposition response—demanding immediate, unconditional internet freedom with no acknowledgment of legitimate security architecture—is equally bankrupt. Modern states do segment military networks from civilian infrastructure. They do implement targeted geographic restrictions during active combat. They do monitor for cyber threats. Pretending these measures are inherently authoritarian hands the regime a propaganda victory. The normative imperative is clear: Iran’s future—any future beyond permanent isolation and decline—requires internet connectivity. Not as a gift from the regime, not as a victory for protesters, but as a basic condition of participation in 21st-century civilisation. The immediate path forward demands targeted, temporary, legally-bounded restrictions where demonstrably necessary, coupled with massive investment in proper cyber defences. The long-term trajectory must be integration with the global internet, not retreat into a government-curated digital prison. The current path leads nowhere but obsolescence. A nation of 88 million, geographically positioned at the crossroads of Asia, possessing significant human capital and natural resources, is choosing digital self-immolation. The tragedy isn’t that Iran faces cyber threats—every nation does. The tragedy is that Tehran’s response guarantees the very strategic weakness it claims to be preventing, while the opposition’s simplistic counter-narrative fails to articulate a credible alternative security framework. Iran’s internet won’t be saved by hashtag activism or regime security theatre. It will be restored when enough people on all sides recognise that connectivity isn’t a luxury or a concession—it’s the prerequisite for national survival in a networked world. Every day of shutdown is another day of falling further behind a world that won’t wait. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast The severed B1 Bridge — the tallest in the Middle East — after US-Israeli airstrikes, April 2, 2026. (Photo: NBC News) Lapis Aetatem Complicitatis — The Complicity of Wishing a Nation into Rubble One of the enduring arguments of a segment of the Iranian diaspora in favour of the illegal invasion of Iran has always been a single question: what could be worse than what is already there? They peddled it for years — reciting the Islamic Republic’s executions, its repressions, its failures — as though listing the crimes of a government were the same as consenting to the annihilation of a country. It was never a serious analytical position. It was a permission structure dressed in the language of human rights. Now the bombs have answered their question. The B1 Bridge — the tallest in the Middle East, connecting Tehran to Karaj — struck twice, the second wave hitting as rescue workers reached the wounded. Eight dead. Ninety-five injured. Families celebrating Nature Day beneath it. The Pasteur Institute — founded in 1920, a cornerstone of Iran’s vaccine production and infectious disease defence — reduced to rubble and smoke under a clear blue sky. Pharmaceutical companies flattened. Hospitals inoperative. Over five thousand dead. One hundred thousand residential units damaged. Three hundred medical facilities destroyed. This is what is worse. And they cannot face it. Watch the contortions. The same voices that demanded regime change now cannot decide whether these infrastructures ever existed — what infrastructure? The regime only built weapons! — or whether they were legitimate military targets. The Pasteur Institute, a weapons facility? A bridge carrying holiday traffic, a supply route? This is the Gaza playbook applied to Iran: every hospital a command centre, every school a depot, every bridge a corridor. The logic is not merely flawed; it is the architecture of moral evasion. And here is the trap they built for themselves. When the American president announced he would bomb Iran back into the stone age, the diaspora’s cheerleaders were caught in a contradiction from which there is no exit. If Iran is already in the stone age — as they spent decades insisting — then what is being bombed? And if it is not — if there were bridges and institutes worth destroying — then the country they called a wasteland was a civilisation. One they helped sentence to destruction. Repetition does not transmute a lie into truth. What it reveals is the Lapis Aetatem Complicitatis — the stone-age complicity — of those who wished for the fire and now cannot bear to look at what it has burned. Five thousand dead. A century-old institute in ashes. The tallest bridge in the Middle East, severed. Those who called for this, enabled this, and now deny this, are not opponents of the Islamic Republic. They are accessories to the destruction of Iran. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Supporters of Iran’s last crown prince, now key opposition figure, Reza Pahlavi hold a banner reading “He is coming – Make Iran Great Again” and depicting a portrait of Reza Pahlavi during a march for Iran in Paris on March 7, 2026, amid the ongoing war in the Middle East. (Photo by Lou BENOIST / AFP via Getty Images) Not as a solution for Iran, but as a symptom of a deeper political failure Reza Pahlavi remains important in Iranian political life — but not for the reasons his supporters imagine. He is important not because he represents a serious path forward for Iran, and not because he has demonstrated the strategic capacity, political discipline, or intellectual clarity required of a transitional leader. He matters for a harsher reason: he is the name of a recurring Iranian temptation. That temptation is the search for deliverance through symbol rather than structure, through inheritance rather than legitimacy, through projection rather than programme. For a time, I did not see this clearly enough. In the early phases of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, I allowed myself to think that perhaps Reza Pahlavi could develop into something useful: not a monarch in waiting, but a limited transitional figure, someone capable of lending visibility to a democratic opening without attempting to own it. That possibility evaporated quickly. What became visible instead was not strategic patience but political vagueness; not principled restraint but chronic ambiguity; not leadership, but the repeated conversion of public attention into hollow expectation. This is why the question must be framed carefully. Is he important? Yes. Is he relevant in the sense of being genuinely equal to the historic tasks before Iran? Much less so. The distinction matters. Public importance and political relevance are not the same thing. A figure can be highly visible, heavily discussed, emotionally charged, and still be deeply inadequate to the moment. Indeed, one of the great confusions of exilic politics is the tendency to mistake recognisability for competence, surname for seriousness, and media circulation for moral authority. Reza Pahlavi endures because he names a vacancy. He occupies the psychological space created when a society, exhausted by tyranny and repeated betrayal, becomes susceptible to symbolic shortcuts. At such moments, names become vessels. People pour into them longing, rage, nostalgia, grief, and the desire for resolution. But a vessel is not yet a vision. And inherited visibility is not the same thing as earned political credibility. This is where much of the debate has gone wrong. His critics have sometimes dismissed him too lightly, as though he were merely noise. His admirers, by contrast, have persistently inflated him into an answer. Both mistakes obscure the deeper point. Reza Pahlavi is significant neither as mere distraction nor as viable saviour, but as a diagnostic case. He reveals how easily democratic aspiration can be captured by pre-democratic forms of imagination. That is why he should be examined critically. Not obsessively, and not theatrically, but seriously. A society that cannot accurately describe the figures it elevates will repeatedly misrecognise its own dangers. Naming is not a trivial act. Political clarity begins with the refusal to call things by names they have not earned. What, then, has Reza Pahlavi actually represented in practice? Above all, an ambiguity that has been politically costly. He has tried, for years, to benefit simultaneously from incompatible constituencies: those who want a constitutional monarch, those who want a republic, those who want merely a famous surname as temporary scaffolding, and those who treat him as dynastic destiny. This ambiguity has often been presented as tactical flexibility. In reality, it has functioned more like evasion. Where a transitional moment demands precision, he has too often offered elasticity. Where democratic seriousness demands institutional language, he has too often relied on symbolic surplus. The problem is not simply that he has failed to deliver. Many figures fail. The deeper problem is that he has helped sustain a style of politics in which charisma without accountability, inheritance without examination, and prominence without programme can continue to masquerade as national leadership. That style of politics does not prepare a people for democratic transition. It prepares them for another cycle of dependency. For that reason, the issue exceeds one man. Reza Pahlavi matters because phenomena like him matter. Whenever a wounded public begins to seek rescue in bloodline, myth, or spectacle, it is already drifting away from the habits democracy requires: judgement, scrutiny, institutional thinking, and the discipline of refusing easy substitutes for hard political work. The proper response, then, is neither hysteria nor indifference. It is diagnosis. He should be treated as a politically consequential symptom — not because he embodies Iran’s future, but because he reveals a persistent weakness in how too many still imagine it. And until that weakness is confronted, new versions of the same illusion will continue to arise, under different names, with different faces, and with the same costly promise that history can be escaped by handing oneself over to a symbol. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Image credit: Photo by Iranian Red Crescent / UPI A Witness Account from the Interior of a Nation at War By Ali Abdi, revised narrative by Daryoush Mohammad Poor “The truth is that the beginning of this path lies not outside us, but within us.” — Ali Abdi ◆ ◆ ◆ I. The Landscape of the First Days It is the first days of Farvardin, the opening of the Iranian new year, the season that ought to carry with it the promise of renewal, and I have come to Tehran to buy a book. What I find is apocalyptic. The streets are dark and lifeless. An overcast sky, thick with smoke, presses down upon a city that seems to have withdrawn into itself. The passersby I encounter are troubled and sorrowful, not panicked, but laden with a grief that has already settled into the body. A few bookshops around Enghelab Square remain open, holdouts of a cultural ecosystem that has survived revolution, war, and four decades of political turbulence, but may not survive this. There is a sharp smell of sulphur in the air. Someone points southward and says they have bombed somewhere in the southern districts. A thick black column of smoke has risen into the sky from the direction of Shahr-e Rey. On Keshavarz Boulevard, I encounter a scene: several men in black carrying Kalashnikov rifles, and a group of people handcuffed to the railings in front of a building, flashlights being shone into their eyes as they are interrogated in the open street. The atmosphere is heavy and terrifying. One of the armed men approaches me from behind and warns that if I do not walk faster, I too will be arrested. There is none of the usual liveliness of Laleh Park. The food stalls along the boulevard have vanished; neither the park market nor the kiosks are open; and in the darkness, there is no sign of Tehran’s famous cats. In Valiasr Square, however, I find something else: around a thousand people gathered, carrying Iranian flags. A giant television screen has been erected on one side of the square, and the voice of Mohsen Chavoshi fills the air with the hymn “Hasbi Allah.” A maddah chants in praise of the valour of the first and third Imams, and the crowd chants along with him. A man climbs onto the platform and speaks of a friend who had been stationed behind a missile launcher and whose two hands were amputated in the hospital. He speaks of another friend: “He was martyred last night. The son of that martyr was born just a few hours ago.” Most of those gathered in Valiasr Square are women. At least two of them are not wearing hijab. Here, in the midst of a nationalist gathering suffused with religious symbolism, under the watchful apparatus of a state that has made the compulsory hijab a cornerstone of its ideological identity, women are present, unveiled, mourning, resisting, bearing witness. For twenty-seven days, Iran has been under bombardment by the wicked forces of the world. For more than forty years, Benjamin Netanyahu had wanted to bomb Iran, and in his resignation letter the previous week, the head of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center wrote that the Israel lobby had dragged Trump into this war. The figures are staggering: one hundred thousand residential and commercial units damaged across Iran; three hundred medical and emergency facilities destroyed or rendered inoperative; five thousand Iranians dead; millions in Iran, Gaza, and Lebanon driven from their homes. And the environmental, psychological, and economic wounds of war remain to be fully felt. Netanyahu and Trump are the embodiment of human wickedness in the contemporary world: racist, deceitful, greedy, and complicit in the slaughter and suffering of children. Their ultimate aim is to weaken Iran under the banner of “fighting the regime.” Israel was opposed to a strong Iran even before the 1979 Revolution. For fifty years, regardless of which government has been in power, American sanctions have been imposed on the Iranian people. It was the U.S. president who tore up the JCPOA before the cameras, not Iran. ◆ ◆ ◆ II. The Wound Before the War Before the bombardment began, I was in Isfahan, speaking with a friend I had met through cycling around the city. He had been arrested on the eighteenth of Dey and had spent a month in Dastgerd Prison. What he told me was a story of institutional cruelty so meticulous in its indifference that it achieved a kind of administrative horror. Two of his cellmates were brothers in their twenties. The younger had asthma. Their mother went to the judge several times, pleading that her son needed medication. The judge refused. The younger brother grew weaker by the day, but the authorities paid no attention. Until, in the final week of his detention, in the crowded and stressful environment of the prison, he fell unconscious. The officials took him to the hospital. The next night, news came that the boy had died. My friend spoke of the grief that settled over Dastgerd Prison with that news. It descended and stayed. It had nowhere to go. I then visited a hospital in Isfahan for my father’s surgery. There I encountered another acquaintance who had come for his wife’s treatment. He told me about his sister and brother-in-law, who, on the nineteenth of Dey, were crossing the street when the brother-in-law was shot and killed before his sister’s eyes. For nine days, the authorities refused to release the body to the family. They offered two choices: pay a substantial sum to retrieve the corpse, or sign a document stating that the deceased had been a supporter of the government and was a martyr. In the end, under psychological pressure, the boy’s mother agreed to sign. The acquaintance told me that his sister still suffers from a speech impairment. The family was not only bereaved; it was coerced into narrating its bereavement in the regime’s language. The murdered son was transmuted into a “martyr,” a term that, in the Islamic Republic’s lexicon, denotes a defender of the state, not its victim. The mother’s signature was extracted as an act of narrative violence: the state seized control of the story of her son’s death and rewrote it as a story of loyal sacrifice. And the sister, who watched her brother-in-law fall in the street, has lost the capacity for speech. The body registers what language cannot contain. ◆ ◆ ◆ III. Against the Tyranny of Binaries The media, from Iran International to state television, generally construct binary narratives. They portray two groups of Iranians in opposition to one another so that a story of good versus evil can take shape, and each side comes to see the other as its enemy: pro-regime or anti-regime, pro-war or anti-war, religious or secular. These binaries are simplifications of a complex social reality. Most of Iran’s population belongs to neither end of these spectrums. A free Iranian stands against oppression. It makes no difference whether the oppressor is foreign or domestic, whether oppression is carried out in the name of religion or in the name of human rights. A free Iranian stands against discrimination. It makes no difference whether discrimination comes from a racist European or a prison officer, whether it is the product of colonialism or despotism. A mother whose soldier son has been killed behind a missile launcher, and a mother whose son was killed on the nineteenth of Dey, experience a similar suffering in their humanity. A soldier who has lost both hands behind an air-defence system, and a protesting farmer in Isfahan who lost his eyes to pellet shots, are equally deserving of empathy and care. Families who spent the moment of the New Year at the martyrs’ cemetery share common experiences with the families of those killed in the Ukrainian plane crash. Kian Pirfalak and the schoolgirls of Minab are equally worthy of attention and mourning. Our collective well-being depends on bringing these ordinary people closer together. The Iranian phoenix rises from their coming together. To come closer together, we need to become familiar with each other’s lived experiences. This requires listening. Listening is an act of selflessness. And selflessness does not emerge from anger and resentment. If Iranian society is to pass through this crisis without falling victim to endless violence between people, there is no path but connection with those other ordinary people, that is, stepping out of one’s own epistemic cave, leaving behind self-made tribes, and walking toward those who hold a different worldview, yet share with us in being human, being Iranian, and being Muslim. The truth is that the beginning of this path lies not outside us, but within us. ◆ ◆ ◆ IV. The Universal Gesture In these days of war, when Red Crescent workers pull someone from beneath the rubble, they do not ask about that person’s political or religious beliefs. Their service is universal, without favour, without discrimination, effective, and directed toward the preservation of all Iranian lives. They are among the best practical examples of how to break the prevailing binaries. The rescue worker does not ask whether the body beneath the rubble belongs to a supporter of the state or an opponent of it. In that refusal, that stubborn refusal to sort the wounded into categories of deserving and undeserving, lies the possibility of a different Iran. Not an Iran liberated by bombs or by the fantasies of exiles who will never bury the dead their strategies produce, but an Iran reconstituted from below, by those who remained, who listened, who extended their hand without first checking the credentials of the one who needed it. ◆ ◆ ◆ Endnotes [1] Farvardin: The first month of the Solar Hijri (Iranian) calendar, beginning at the vernal equinox (typically 20-21 March). The Iranian New Year, Nawruz, falls on this date. [2] Enghelab Square: Formerly Shah Square, renamed after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Located in central Tehran near the University of Tehran, it is the city’s primary cultural and intellectual hub. [3] Shahr-e Rey: One of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited settlements, identified with ancient Rhages. Today a densely populated, largely working-class district in the southern Tehran metropolitan area. [4] Keshavarz Boulevard: A major east-west artery in central Tehran, connecting Enghelab Square to Valiasr Square and bordering Laleh Park. [5] Laleh Park: One of Tehran’s largest public parks, situated along Keshavarz Boulevard. [6] Valiasr Square: A major intersection in central Tehran where Keshavarz Boulevard meets Valiasr Street. [7] Mohsen Chavoshi: One of Iran’s most popular singers and songwriters. [8] “Hasbi Allah”: An Arabic-Qur’anic phrase meaning “God is sufficient for me” (Qur’an 9:129). [9] Maddah: A practitioner of maddahi, the traditional Shi’i art of devotional vocal performance. [10] Dey: The eighteenth and nineteenth of Dey (roughly early January) refer to a period of widespread popular protest and violent state crackdown that preceded the outbreak of war. [11] Dastgerd Prison: A major detention facility in Isfahan province. [12] JCPOA: The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a 2015 multilateral agreement in which Iran accepted constraints on its nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief. The United States unilaterally withdrew in May 2018. [13] Isfahan: A city in central Iran renowned for its Safavid-era architecture. The Persian proverb “Esfahan nesf-e jahan” (“Isfahan is half the world”) testifies to its historical stature. [14] Iran International: A London-based Persian-language satellite television network. [15] Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752: A passenger aircraft shot down by Iranian air defences shortly after take-off from Tehran on 8 January 2020, killing all 176 on board. [16] Kian Pirfalak: A nine-year-old boy killed during the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in Iran. [17] Schoolgirls of Minab: Over one hundred schoolgirls killed on 28 February 2026 in U.S. airstrikes on Minab, a city in Hormozgan province in southern Iran. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Image credit: Source: Unsplash On Disillusionment and the Refusal to Close the Door This piece is the product of my reflections on a voice message from a friend, a friend undergoing cancer treatment. But it captures something of what we are all going through—a particular species of exhaustion that transcends any single struggle, any single nation. What began as a meditation on one person’s pain became a window into a broader crisis of hope, one that many of us, in different ways and different contexts, are navigating. I have concluded with some observations that I hope might offer, if not answers, then at least a refusal to accept the inevitability of despair. * * * There exists among segments of Iranian society a particular species of exhaustion that has no name in the conventional vocabulary of political science. It is not apathy—apathy suggests the absence of feeling, and these people feel everything with a clarity that borders on the unbearable. It is not cynicism, which retains at least the residual energy of contempt. What we are witnessing is something closer to a completed mourning: the full and final burial of a hope that, in retrospect, appears to have been a delusion all along. The voice that speaks this truth does so with the formal courtesies of a culture that insists on dignity even in collapse. Medical treatment is ongoing. The body is under siege, and so is the nation, and it is no longer clear which affliction runs deeper. The message begins with apologies—for not writing, for speaking at all, for the presumptuousness of unburdening a heart to someone held in respect. Persian politeness has its own grammar of pain, and this one is impeccable even as it fractures. “We are living in a bubble,” comes the assessment, and the metaphor lands with devastating precision. Those who speak of democracy, of human rights, of abolishing the death penalty—they have constructed for themselves a fragile sphere of idealism that floats untethered above the machinery of the region. They speak a language the Middle East does not recognize, advocate for values it does not honor, dream of futures it will not permit. And the worst part, the part that corrodes from within, is the knowledge of this. The accounting has been done. The geopolitical landscape surveyed—the Taliban and ISIS and Hezbollah on one side, Saudi Arabia and Israel on the other, and in Iran itself, the Islamic Republic facing off against monarchist opposition—and a conclusion reached so bleak it leaves no room for evasion: they are all savages. Every single one. The word used—vohush, beasts—is not casual. In Persian, it carries the full weight of moral condemnation, the stripping away of humanity from those who have forfeited it through their actions. And it is applied without discrimination. The regime that has imprisoned, tortured, and executed its own people for decades? Savages. The opposition that dreams of restoration, that speaks in the grammar of bloodlines and divine right? Savages. The regional powers, the global actors, the entire grotesque theater of Middle Eastern politics? Monsters, every one. And where, in this landscape, do people like this belong? Nowhere. That is the answer, delivered with the calm of someone who has tested every alternative and found them all foreclosed. “We don’t have people in the middle of this”—meaning human beings in the fullest sense, people who understand, who are calm, who possess the capacity for reason and restraint. The entire political spectrum has been evacuated of the humane, and what remains is a Hobbesian wasteland where the only actors are predators and the only logic is domination. “I had deleted my Instagram,” comes the confession, and then: “I only came back to look for a dog.” These details, seemingly trivial, carry an entire political autobiography. The platform where Iran’s struggles are performed, where outrage is monetized, where every atrocity becomes content and every tragedy an opportunity for brand-building—walking away from it entirely. And returning only to search for a dog. Not to organize, not to amplify, not to bear witness. To find a companion. The scaling down of ambition from the fate of a nation to the comfort of a loyal animal is not retreat; it is the recognition of what remains possible when everything else has been revealed as fantasy. “These savages are meant for each other,” comes the conclusion, and the sentence has the finality of a door closing. Not slammed in anger—closed with the quiet certitude of someone who has seen what lies on the other side and knows there is nothing there worth the effort of keeping it open. Let them destroy one another. Let the Islamic Republic and its opponents, let the regional powers and their proxies, let the entire blood-soaked infrastructure of Middle Eastern politics cannibalize itself. The accounting is complete. The ledger is closed. But here we must stop. Here we must resist. Because this is precisely the moment where everything is at stake. The door is closing, but it has not yet closed. And the difference between the two—between the door closing and the door closed—is the difference between a society that can still heal and one that has surrendered to its worst possibilities. This is not a call to dismiss the exhaustion, to pretend the disillusionment is not real, or to offer cheap consolation about silver linings and brighter tomorrows. The pain is legitimate. The assessment of the political landscape is, in many respects, accurate. The monsters are real, and they do occupy nearly every visible position of power. But the conclusion—that people who refuse to become beasts themselves must therefore accept their own irrelevance—is the one inference we cannot allow to stand unchallenged. Because it is precisely this conclusion that the savages depend upon. It is the final victory they require: not merely to dominate the landscape of power, but to evacuate it entirely of those who might imagine something different. When the humane declare themselves irrelevant and withdraw, they do not simply step aside from a game they were never winning. They vacate the only space from which transformation has ever emerged. Every meaningful change in human history has come not from those who accepted the logic of the prevailing brutality, but from those who refused it even when refusal seemed pointless. The end of apartheid in South Africa, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the long march toward civil rights in America—none of these followed from the logic of the existing power structures. They came from people who insisted, against all evidence, that another world was possible, and who kept that insistence alive through decades when it appeared delusional. The demand to maintain hope in a landscape of monsters is not naive. It is the most difficult work there is. It requires living with a split consciousness: seeing clearly the horror of what is, while refusing to grant it the status of what must always be. It requires absorbing the evidence of brutality without letting it metastasize into a philosophy of inevitability. It requires, above all, the discipline to distinguish between the tactical withdrawal necessary for survival and the existential surrender that forfeits the future. The voice that speaks of living in a bubble, of being too delicate for this region’s cesspool, of savages meant for each other—this voice is not wrong about the diagnosis. But if it closes the door, if it concludes that the only rational response is complete disengagement, then the monsters will have won not by defeating their opponents but by convincing them that opposition itself is impossible. So yes, delete Instagram. Search for a dog. Protect whatever fragments of sanity and peace remain available. Survival is not betrayal. But do not—cannot—must not declare the entire project of a humane politics dead. Because the moment that declaration is made, it becomes true. The bubble may be fragile, the idealism may float untethered, the pro-democracy advocates may indeed be out of touch with the machinery of the region. But they are also the only people who remember that the machinery is not natural law. It was built by human decisions, and it can be unmade by them. The door is closing. The exhaustion is real. The disillusionment is earned. But history will not forgive us if we let it close completely. Change comes not from those who accept the world as it is, but from those who refuse to, even when refusal is the hardest thing they will ever do. Especially then. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Image credit: Majid Asgaripour / WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS Why an Immediate Ceasefire Is the Only Viable Option The most plausible trajectory of the US-Israel war with Iran is not rapid victory but a grinding stalemate with growing escalation risks. Early expectations in Washington assumed that superior air power, intelligence coordination, and technological dominance would quickly break Iranian resistance. Instead, the conflict is moving in the opposite direction: costs are rising, objectives are blurring, and neither Washington nor Jerusalem can point to clear progress. The war is entering the classic danger zone where military superiority fails to translate into political success. It is precisely this widening gap between force and outcome that makes an immediate ceasefire not merely desirable but strategically imperative. A central question is whether Russia and China have begun providing Iran with tactical, technical, or intelligence assistance short of direct military entry. There is no definitive public proof, but wars of this kind rarely remain confined to the visible battlefield. If Iranian forces are displaying greater resilience after three weeks—absorbing strikes more effectively, improving targeting, sustaining better survivability—it is reasonable to ask whether outside support is helping Tehran adapt in real time. Such assistance need not involve troops. Satellite intelligence, cyber support, electronic warfare expertise, missile guidance improvements, and drone technology transfers could all enhance Iran’s staying power. Every day without a ceasefire is a day in which this adaptive capacity compounds. This possibility reshapes the logic of the war. If Iran is no longer fighting in isolation, US and Israeli planners confront not merely a regional adversary but an indirectly networked one. Time allows learning, adaptation, and external assistance to accumulate. What began as a campaign to restore deterrence risks becoming an attritional contest that undermines deterrence instead. A ceasefire now would freeze the conflict before this dynamic becomes irreversible; continued escalation only deepens the trap. The domestic political implications reinforce the urgency. At last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas, fractures within the president’s own coalition were laid bare. Trump himself was absent—reportedly consumed by the war—and the vacuum produced a revealing split. Erik Prince warned that a ground incursion could produce “imagery of burning American warships” within weeks. Matt Gaetz cautioned it “will make our country poorer and less safe.” Younger attendees voiced fears of a draft, rising prices, and another forever war—precisely the quagmire Trump had campaigned against. That an eighteen-year-old Republican voter at CPAC can articulate the strategic dead end more clearly than most administration officials underscores how thin the domestic mandate for escalation truly is. A ceasefire would not only halt the military bleeding; it would arrest a political crisis threatening to fracture the governing coalition before the midterms. Perhaps the most revealing spectacle at CPAC was the heavy presence of supporters of Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s former crown prince, who addressed the convention to rapturous applause. Pahlavi’s fantasy of restoration—a monarchist exile cheered by septuagenarian nostalgists waving pre-revolutionary flags—is detached from realities inside Iran today. He commands no meaningful constituency within the country, and his appearance at an American partisan rally only reinforces his irrelevance to any serious diplomatic process. The path to de-escalation runs through negotiation with the actors who hold power, not through applause lines at a convention center in Grapevine, Texas. For Russia and China, indirect support to Iran represents a low-cost strategy to tie down American power and encourage a more multipolar regional order without triggering great-power confrontation. For the United States, a deteriorating war risks weakening public support, driving up energy prices, and exposing the gap between military action and a coherent end-state. For Israel, continued exchanges without decisive results deepen the very insecurity the campaign was meant to resolve. The costs of continuation now exceed any plausible gains from persisting. So let the argument be stated plainly. This war has no achievable end-state that justifies its mounting costs—in lives, in treasure, in strategic credibility, in the fraying of a domestic coalition that was already brittle. Every week without a ceasefire is a week gifted to Tehran’s strategy of attrition and a week subtracted from Washington’s diminishing leverage. The time to stop is not after the next strike, not after the next escalation, not after one more attempt to restore a deterrence that is already crumbling. The time to stop is now. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast UN Secretary-General António Guterres receives the Ataturk International Peace Prize from President Erdogan of Türkiye in Ankara. Responding to Critics with Analysis, Not Ideology The critics demand evidence, baselines, cost accounting, enforcement mechanisms. Fair enough. Here are the direct answers that prove the ceasefire argument stands on analysis, not wishful thinking. What would invalidate this position? Documented collapse of 25% of Iranian command architecture. Confirmed destruction of 40% of missile production facilities. Verifiable IRGC leadership defections. Iranian proxy forces showing 50% operational degradation. Intelligence intercepts of regime capitulation discussions. Bank runs and bread riots in major Iranian cities. None of this has materialized. Iranian strikes continue at comparable sophistication. Tehran’s political control remains stable. The proxy network functions. No significant defections. Instead, there are indications of external resupply improving Iranian capabilities. Three weeks in, the trajectory points toward stalemate, not collapse. That’s not ideology—that’s reading evidence without wishful thinking. Now the full cost ledger. Continuation imposes three to five billion dollars monthly, aircraft and personnel losses, munitions depletion that can’t be quickly replaced. Oil volatility adds ten to fifteen dollars per barrel—thirty to forty-five cents per gallon at American pumps. The CPAC fractures are real: Erik Prince warning of burning warships, Matt Gaetz saying this will make America poorer and less safe, eighteen-year-old Republican voters articulating the strategic dead-end more clearly than administration officials. Each week creates 15 to 20% probability of catastrophic miscalculation: Strait of Hormuz closure, direct Russian or Chinese involvement, nuclear acceleration. Ceasefire costs? Regional actors might interpret de-escalation as exhaustion. Tehran consolidates current capabilities. Israeli politics face strain. Iranian hardliners claim vindication. Here’s the asymmetry: continuation costs are immediate, cumulative, and escalatory. Ceasefire costs are primarily perceptual and manageable through strong diplomatic framing and retained military options. If three weeks haven’t significantly degraded Iranian capabilities—and evidence suggests they haven’t—then stopping now concedes little that operational reality hasn’t already conceded. The question is whether to acknowledge that reality now or after another month of mounting costs. Viable ceasefire terms exist. Seventy-two hour cessation. Mutual return to pre-conflict postures, no deployments within 200 kilometers of contact zones. Iran directs proxies to halt operations; Israel ceases strikes on proxy infrastructure. Iran returns to JCPOA monitoring—IAEA inspectors, cameras at Natanz and Fordow. Verification through satellite monitoring with US, Russia, China sharing early-warning data, drawing on Cold War confidence-building measures. IAEA weekly inspections. Oman and Qatar monitoring teams. Enforcement through graduated response: minor violations trigger UN emergency sessions; major breaches restore military options with snap-back provisions. Russia, China, US serve as guarantors. Sanctions relief tied to compliance, automatic reimposition for violations. This architecture worked in Camp David, INF Treaty, and Dayton—imperfect but vastly superior to undefined continuation. The three-week timeline matters because the relevant comparison isn’t Desert Storm or Kosovo against inferior opponents. It’s Vietnam showing futility within six months of 1965 escalation, Soviet-Afghanistan within a year, post-invasion Iraq within four months. Three weeks is sufficient to identify trend-lines. Iranian capabilities aren’t degrading week-over-week. Initial strikes didn’t produce strategic surprise—Iran absorbed them and maintained operations. Washington still hasn’t articulated measurable end-states beyond vague deterrence restoration. The domestic coalition is fraying, not strengthening. If decision-makers envisioned six or twelve-month campaigns, they should have said so and built political support. They didn’t, which means either the plan was rapid victory that hasn’t materialized, or there was no plan. Neither justifies continuation without fundamental reassessment. Iranian response to ceasefire offers provides intelligence value regardless of outcome. If Tehran accepts, it signals rational calculation that pause serves their interests—consolidation, demonstration of resilience, or genuine cost pressures. All suggest mutual exhaustion, which produces sustainable ceasefires. If Iran rejects reasonable terms, that forces Washington and Jerusalem to confront whether they can sustain operations long enough to change Tehran’s calculus. Either way, the offer clarifies strategic reality currently obscured by operational drift. The strongest objections deserve direct answers. “Ceasefire rewards aggression” assumes unprovoked Iranian attack, oversimplifying escalation dynamics. More fundamentally: if operations don’t degrade Iranian capabilities significantly, continuation rewards no one—it wastes resources. Deterrence was demonstrated. Diminishing returns have set in. “We need more time—victory is achievable” requires proponents to show operational plans and secure political support. Without credible plans and realistic timelines, “give it more time” isn’t strategy—it’s hope masquerading as analysis. “Intelligence shows Iranian weakness” deserves skepticism given track records: Iraq WMD, Afghanistan government resilience, Russian military competence. Three weeks should have revealed weakness publicly. Absence of visible progress raises reasonable doubts. “Regional allies demand continuation” confuses allied preferences with American interests. Israel faces existential threats; Gulf states want permanent Iranian degradation. But US interests include avoiding forever wars, preserving readiness for China competition, and preventing oil shocks. Allied preferences are one input, not the sole determinant. The deterrence collapse scenario is overstated. Deterrence was demonstrated through three weeks of operations showing capability and willingness. Continued operations without clear objectives may undermine deterrence more than structured ceasefire by suggesting strategic confusion. Regional actors assess interests, not symbolism—they accommodated Iran after Afghanistan withdrawal, not after rational de-escalation following demonstrated force. Opportunity costs are stark. Continuation diverts assets from Indo-Pacific competition with China. Munitions depletion weakens deterrence against China and Russia. Rising oil prices benefit adversaries. Prolonged conflict alienates European allies and lets China position as peacemaker. These are concrete, immediate costs. Ceasefire costs are perceptual and manageable. History provides clear guidance. Korea 1953 worked: military exhaustion, great-power guarantors, clear lines, both sides claiming victory. Egypt-Israel 1974 succeeded through US mediation and verification. Iran-Iraq 1988 came after mutual exhaustion made continuation unbearable. Bosnia 1995 worked after NATO demonstrated force, combined with credible enforcement. Failed ceasefires—Syria 2016, Yemen 2022—collapsed because guarantors lacked neutrality, no genuine verification existed, and parties believed military victory remained achievable. The distinguishing pattern: success requires mutual exhaustion, great-power guarantors, verification mechanisms, political cover for all sides, and realism that total victory is unachievable. Current conditions match the success pattern. Costs accumulate for all parties. Great-power involvement is possible. Technology enables verification. Framing allows victory claims. No side achieved decisive advantage. These conditions produced Korea 1953, not Syria 2016. The ceasefire argument withstands scrutiny because it rests on rigorous analysis, not ideology. It provides falsifiable standards, accounts for costs on both sides while showing continuation costs are larger, offers implementable terms with historical precedent, engages opposing arguments directly, interprets deterrence realistically, and learns from which ceasefires succeeded. This is strategic assessment comparing imperfect alternatives honestly. Continuation costs are immediate, cumulative, escalatory. Ceasefire costs are perceptual and manageable. The trajectory points toward deeper entanglement without corresponding gains. The window for structured de-escalation closes as external actors deepen involvement and domestic coalitions fracture. Every additional week benefits Iran strategically by allowing adaptation, external assistance, and American political exhaustion to compound. The demonstration of force occurred. Credibility is established. The question now is whether leaders can distinguish between demonstrating resolve and persisting in operations showing diminishing returns. History will judge whether leaders recognized when continuation costs exceeded plausible gains and had the strategic discipline to stop before the trap closed entirely. The time to stop is now—while structured ceasefire with verification and enforcement remains achievable, before the conflict metastasizes into something no one controls. That’s not defeatism. It’s realism. And in strategy, realism is not optional. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Image credit: Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash A Diagnostic Framework for Identifying Logical Fallacies in the Rhetoric of Humanitarian Intervention For S. S. and M. M. who steered the direction of this essay into a more constructive one. Introduction There is a genre of argumentation—increasingly prominent in debates over military intervention—that demands sustained critical scrutiny. It presents itself as philosophy: formally precise, elegantly structured, and burdened with the apparent rigour of analytic ethics. Yet beneath the technical scaffolding lies one of the most effective forms of war apologism available to educated discourse. Its danger resides not in crude warmongering but in the construction of elaborate permission structures that make the embrace of military violence appear to be the reluctant conclusion of careful moral reasoning. This essay identifies the recurring fallacies in such arguments and stress-tests them against the very traditions their advocates implicitly invoke: the classical just war framework stretching from Augustine and Aquinas through Walzer, and the modern doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Far from vindicating the genre, these canonical frameworks expose its intellectual bankruptcy with devastating precision. Fallacy One: The Misapplied Thought Experiment The most common structural move in this genre is the appropriation of a canonical thought experiment—typically the trolley problem—to model the ethics of military intervention. In the modified version, pulling the lever does not kill a determinate person but merely redistributes probability across branching outcomes. The advocate concludes that deontological prohibitions against killing do not straightforwardly apply, since no innocent is killed with certainty—only subjected to recalculated risk. The move is intellectually seductive. It is also a category error of the first order. Thought experiments isolate moral intuitions under conditions of perfect information and controlled variables. War is the precise negation of those conditions: an uncontrolled cascade of destruction with unknowable consequences, driven by geopolitical interests bearing no resemblance to a disinterested moral agent contemplating a lever. The trolley problem has no aggressor, no colonial history, no named dead—no children in school uniforms pulverised beyond recovery. The apparatus anonymises the violence it purports to deliberate about, transforming concrete atrocity into the abstraction of an optimisation puzzle. Just war theory demolishes this move. Augustine insisted that war must be waged by legitimate authority motivated by the restoration of peace—not by abstract lever-pullers in a philosophical vacuum. Aquinas codified the requirement of right intention: war is justified only when directed toward a just peace, not toward the satisfaction of a theoretical model or even worse in the case under discussion, toward the fulfilment of the objectives of a naked and unashamed neo-colonial strategy. Walzer argued that the moral reality of war is constituted by the lived experience of combatants and civilians—precisely the reality the trolley abstraction suppresses. The jus ad bellum tradition demands engagement with who fights, why, and to what end. A thought experiment that strips away these constitutive features does not simplify the moral question. It abolishes it. The error deepens when such arguments simultaneously concede that the actors who would execute the intervention are implicated in war crimes. Legitimate authority, the first criterion of jus ad bellum, is not a technicality. It is the tradition’s recognition that moral permissions to kill cannot be issued to those who have demonstrated contempt for the constraints on killing. To expect moral conduct on the part of convicted war criminals in a war waged by them and declare their engagement in the conflict liberatory is like to expect a satisfactory outcome of the intervention of a group of rapists who declare themselves the rescuers of poor wives from their loveless marriages. Fallacy Two: The Empirical Void The second hallmark these ‘philosophical’ efforts to justify foreign intervention is the systematic erasure of history. The reformulated thought experiment assumes that intervention might succeed, might redistribute risk favourably, might dismantle oppressive structures. The entire modern record obliterates every one of these assumptions. Intervention after intervention has delivered catastrophic outcomes: mass civilian death, sectarian civil war, state collapse, refugee crises, and extremist movements far more brutal than the regimes they replaced. When this record is absent from the analysis, the omission is not incidental—it is load-bearing. The modified thought experiment works only if one assumes a meaningful probability of success. History assigns that probability a value approaching zero. The R2P doctrine reinforces this point. Adopted at the 2005 UN World Summit, R2P established that military intervention is a measure of last resort, permissible only when a state manifestly fails to protect its population from mass atrocity crimes, and only when there is a reasonable prospect of success. That final criterion is not decorative. It is the doctrine’s built-in empirical checkpoint—its insistence that good intentions do not constitute justification when the foreseeable consequence is greater suffering. The genre under examination treats the probability of success as a variable to be optimistically estimated rather than a threshold to be empirically demonstrated. Walzer himself recognised that the presumption against war can only be overridden by evidence, not by models. A favoured analogy within this genre compares intervention to surgery. But what if every surgery of this type, performed by these surgeons, has killed the patient? At what point does the philosopher stop adjusting probability distributions and confront the corpses? Fallacy Three: The Erased Subject A third structural deficiency is the construction of a false binary: on one side, purist critics demanding moral consistency; on the other, ordinary people desperate for change. This framing erases the most morally significant category—those inside the affected country who have paid for their opposition in flesh and imprisonment, and who are pleading for the intervention to stop. The R2P framework, for all its limitations, at least acknowledges the centrality of the affected population. Its emphasis on prevention, capacity-building, and non-military measures before any resort to force reflects an understanding that people living under oppression are agents, not objects of rescue. The genre under examination inverts this priority: it treats the affected population as a variable in a probability function rather than as the sovereign moral authority over their own liberation. This erasure exposes a deep tension in the humanitarian intervention debate between sovereignty and human rights. Advocates invoke human rights to override sovereignty, but in doing so substitute their own judgment for that of the people whose rights they claim to defend. When the call for war originates from those who will never fight it, never flee it, and never bury its victims, the asymmetry is so total that the formal apparatus functions not as analysis but as anaesthesia. Fallacy Four: Complicity as Signal Management A revealing move involves applying decision theory to political solidarity. Confronted with the moral implications of standing alongside symbols of ongoing atrocity, the advocate constructs a utilitarian model in which expected utility of social cohesion outweighs the moral cost of association. This reduces mass atrocity to a signal management problem. The jus in bello tradition offers a sharp rebuke. The principle of discrimination requires moral agents to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate associations. The principle of proportionality demands that no action be taken whose collateral moral damage exceeds its legitimate purpose. When a theorist calculates that coalition membership outweighs the moral cost of association with ongoing atrocity, they have violated both principles—refusing to discriminate between acceptable and unacceptable alliances, and assigning disproportionate weight to political convenience. Complicity is not measured by causal efficacy. It is measured by what one is willing to stand beside. Fallacy Five: The Inoculation Against Accountability The most strategically consequential move is the preemptive disarmament of critics. The advocate argues that pressing people for moral consistency activates tribal identity and degrades moral judgment. The practical effect is to delegitimise, in advance, any observation that the positions defended are incoherent. This inverts the relationship between consistency and morality. The just war tradition is, at its core, a consistency framework—a set of criteria that must all be satisfied simultaneously. Augustine’s insistence on right intention, Aquinas’s requirement of proportionality, the modern R2P doctrine’s demand for last resort and reasonable prospect of success—all are consistency demands. To oppose a regime’s killing of innocents while endorsing the killing of innocents by foreign powers is not nuance—it is contradiction. The jus post bellum tradition extends this further: those who initiate war bear responsibility for the justice of the peace that follows. When this genre immunises itself against consistency demands, it is dismantling the only mechanism by which moral discourse retains its integrity. Fallacy Six: Ignoring the Unwanted Consequences The arguments presented by advocates of humanitarian intervention, despite their apparent elaborateness, focus only on the choices facing an undecided and confused moral agent in the here and now. They fail to develop the implications of their proposed course of action to its full logical consequences. Even assuming the success of the proposed intervention, the most likely scenario in a country composed of numerous ethnic and religious groups, each with its own agenda and with little prospect of compromise in the absence of a genuinely unifying leader or central authority, is the disintegration and secession of a historical entity that has, for millennia, been a force for good on the global stage. Conclusion: When Philosophy Becomes Ventriloquism A deeper problem runs beneath all the fallacies catalogued here: the substitution of the theorist’s preferences for the voices of those who bear the costs. This genre speaks about suffering while constructing apparatus that justifies policies certain to deepen it. When measured against canonical traditions, not a single argumentative pattern in this genre survives. The thought experiments fail jus ad bellum requirements of legitimate authority and right intention. The empirical void violates R2P’s demand for reasonable prospect of success. The erasure of affected voices contradicts R2P’s commitment to the sovereignty of the vulnerable. The signal management of complicity offends jus in bello principles of discrimination and proportionality. And the inoculation against accountability dismantles the consistency framework that gives just war theory its moral force. When a framework produces conclusions that the entire empirical record contradicts, that those who will bear the consequences are begging the theorist to abandon, and that can only be enacted by actors the theorist has identified as criminals—the problem is not in the world. It is in the framework. The victims of military intervention deserve better than to be reduced to anonymous figures on a track, their fates subjected to probability distributions by theorists who will never hear the missiles. That is not moral philosophy. It is philosophical anaesthesia. And the patient it numbs is not the one on the table—it is the conscience of the one holding the lever. 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PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Image credit: Center for Human Rights in Iran On the Destruction of Humanities in Iran — First by the Republic, Now by Those Who Claim to Oppose It One of the defining legacies of Ali Khamenei — the second supreme leader of the Islamic Republic — was his obsessive, decades-long campaign against the humanities and social sciences. Much of this is recorded in the social history of post-revolutionary Iran, particularly in the turbulent years following Ayatollah Khomeini’s death. The details are extensive and documented elsewhere. What matters here is the structural consequence: scholars of the humanities and social sciences came under incessant fire the moment Khamenei branded their disciplines a ‘cultural ambush’ — a verdict he never revised, never softened, never reconsidered. For Khamenei, these intellectuals were not merely inconvenient. They were existential threats — symbols, in his framing, of collusion with the West. Some were targeted in orchestrated smear campaigns broadcast on national television. Others became victims of serial murders originating from within the security apparatus itself. Massive resources were devoted to suppressing anything in the social sciences or humanities that diverged, even slightly, from the political orthodoxy he embodied. Independent thought was not tolerated. It was hunted. Consider this carefully. One of the principal figures at the forefront of this campaign was Mehdi Nasiri. Nasiri is now a vocal proponent of monarchist ideas. The same species of radicalism he prosecuted under Khamenei’s patronage has been transported wholesale — mutated in form but identical in function — into the monarchist ideological apparatus. The very mistrust Khamenei harboured toward intellectuals and the liberal arts has been reinvigorated, with remarkable fidelity, under the monarchist camp’s sustained campaign against the life of the mind. Scholars and intellectuals who deviate even marginally from their absolutist line are branded as the ‘radical left.’ The machinery of suspicion has simply changed operators. Khamenei’s cultural invasion has found a new voice among his sworn enemies. This is not coincidence. It is inheritance. I was reflecting on these five decades of systematic erosion when I encountered a post by Hussein Hamdieh — a social scientist who remains in Tehran, writing under the shadow of war. What he has written reads less like commentary and more like an elegy for the humanities themselves. Hamdieh opens with a warning that went unheeded: that a fragmented, atomised society would inevitably become vulnerable to foreign predation. This fragmentation, he argues, was not accidental. It was engineered. The state did not want thinkers — it wanted theorists-for-hire, willing to dress pre-approved conclusions in academic clothing. Sociology, political science, and the broader social sciences were treated not as disciplines but as threats. Graduates were systematically silenced, scattered, and economically broken. Without institutional support or public platforms, many became ride-share drivers and minimum-wage labourers — their intellectual capital wasted by design, their voices neutralised before they could be raised. Those who refused silence were imprisoned. Hamdieh invokes Saeed Madani — a prominent sociologist and genuine patriot — as emblematic: jailed precisely because he spoke truth to power, because the state could not tolerate anyone saying, ‘you are going the wrong way.’ Universities were castrated. Where coercion enters through the front door, knowledge leaves through the back. Ideological conformity tests, faculty purges, the closure of critical journals — these did not merely suppress dissent. They killed the very capacity for social self-understanding. Iranian society was left without the intellectual infrastructure to diagnose its own condition. In place of rigorous thinkers, the state elevated the ignorant and the servile — giving platforms to crude ideologues who commanded authority not through knowledge but through loyalty. Books were burned. Science was fought. The public sphere was hollowed out until nothing remained but echo and obedience. Now, Hamdieh writes, Iran stands before its darkest adversaries, its territorial integrity imperilled. The state that dismantled its own intellectual immune system has no one left to explain the crisis — no trusted voice, no shared analytical framework, no reservoir of social knowledge. His diagnosis is unsparing: the Islamic Republic did not merely neglect the humanities. It destroyed them to preserve its own dogma. The consequence is a society rendered blind and defenceless at the hour of its greatest peril. His closing words — ‘You did wrong. You did wrong.’ — are not a lament. They are a verdict. I have written elsewhere how Khamenei’s paranoid hostility toward independent media led — with the grim predictability of historical irony — to the creation of its most effective antithesis: outlets like Iran International, born outside Iran’s borders precisely because nothing truthful could survive within them. The state that strangled domestic journalism did not eliminate the demand for information. It outsourced it to actors whose agendas were shaped by entirely different masters. The same pattern now reproduces itself. The animosity toward the humanities that Khamenei institutionalised has found its structural counterpart in the monarchist camp. The targets have shifted; the grammar of contempt is identical. Where Khamenei saw Western cultural infiltration, the monarchists see leftist subversion. Where the Islamic Republic purged faculties, the monarchist commentariat conducts its purges on social media — branding every scholar who refuses to genuflect before their absolutism as an enemy of the nation. The vocabulary has changed. The architecture of intellectual suppression has not. This convergence is not a quirk of political psychology. It is a structural feature of authoritarian thinking — regardless of the flag it flies. The theocrat and the monarchist, for all their mutual hatred, share a foundational conviction: that independent critical inquiry is dangerous, that the humanities are a threat to be managed rather than a resource to be cultivated, and that loyalty must always take precedence over truth. Do we learn from history, or are we condemned to watch its ugliest chapters rewritten by new hands, in new ink, on the same bloodstained page?Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Image credit: Chris Randall / New Haven Independent — Anti-war demonstrators rally in downtown New Haven, March 1, 2026. Hacking War with the Only Weapon We Have Left For S. S. who planted the seed of this essay in my mind. The Ominous Timing of War It is ominous—and it should unsettle every thinking person—that both times Iran came under invasion, Iran and the United States were in the midst of diplomatic negotiations. The Omani mediator Badr al-Busaidi had expressed optimism just one day before the war broke out, noting tangible progress toward an agreement. Diplomacy was moving. Then it was murdered. In both instances, the norms of negotiation were dishonoured by the invading party. Israel was never a direct participant—it was the wildcard, the runaway train, the power that instigated this unprovoked war. Contrary to the rhetoric deployed by Israeli officials—and, disturbingly, by a vocal segment of the Iranian diaspora—that this was a pre-emptive strike, there was nothing pre-emptive about it. It was pre-meditated disregard for international law, unsurprising to anyone who has examined the staggering record of UN resolutions against Israel. Even if the US government harboured genuine intention toward peace, the Israeli war machinery hacked this fragile diplomacy. The last time such diplomacy worked was the JCPOA, signed by all parties. Israel was deeply wounded by that agreement. To them, any deal that does not lead to war is a bad deal. As one well-known Iranian diaspora activist declared with chilling candour: “Peace is boring.” They feed on war. The Ledger of Impunity Consider the numbers—not as abstractions, but as the accumulated weight of a world that has chosen complicity over conscience. Over the past seventy years, the United Nations has passed a staggering number of resolutions against Israel: at least 173 in the General Assembly between 2015 and 2024 alone, 112 in the Human Rights Council since 2006, and 131 in the Security Council between 1967 and 1989. A conservative estimate places at least 112 to 150 of these as directly related to human rights violations, illegal occupation, and breaches of international humanitarian law. The cumulative total across all UN bodies exceeds 400 resolutions. Now set that figure against Iran’s record. Between 1979 and 2026, the total number of UN resolutions against Iran stands at 39—sixteen from the Security Council, sixteen from the General Assembly, and seven from the Human Rights Council. Of these, only 23 pertain directly to human rights. The disparity is not marginal. It is volcanic. Over 400 resolutions against one state; 39 against the other. Which is the rogue state? I leave the question open-ended—but the numbers do not. They scream into a silence the world has chosen to maintain. What makes humanity’s conscience so numb is precisely the ignoring of these facts—facts that speak for themselves, if only we would let them. Minab: The Silence That Indicts Today, 27 March 2026, the United Nations Human Rights Council convened an urgent debate on the aerial strike that destroyed the Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls’ Elementary School in Minab, Iran, on 28 February—the very first day of the war. At least 175 people were killed, over 100 of them schoolchildren. Girls aged seven to twelve. The school was struck multiple times by precision munitions. Fifty children’s bodies were never recovered—pulverised. A mother named Mohaddeseh Fallahat addressed the Council via video link: “No mother is prepared to hear the words: your child is not coming back.” UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk demanded justice. Human Rights Watch called for the strike to be investigated as a war crime. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education noted that if journalists and civil society groups could establish the school’s civilian status through open-source data, the US military—with its vastly superior intelligence apparatus—had no excuse for failing to do the same. And where is the Iranian diaspora? Where are those who claim to be the voice of Iran? They are silent—not because they lack information, but because the indictment falls upon their presumed saviours. The Minab school does not fit their narrative. The dead children cannot be instrumentalised to justify more bombing. So the children are erased—not by the missile alone, but by the refusal to see them. The diaspora that counts the regime’s victims twice cannot bring itself to count these children even once. This is not indifference. It is moral bankruptcy. Make Love, Not War—The Forgotten Hack The true originator of “Make love, not war” remains contested. The earliest uses surfaced in Berkeley in early 1965—signs reported by the Daily Californian in February, bumper stickers noted by the Oakland Tribune in March. Gershon Legman claimed he coined it during a 1963 lecture; Penelope and Franklin Rosemont insisted they created it at their Chicago bookshop; Diane Newell Meyer said it simply “popped into her head” at an April 1965 rally. No single claim holds. The phrase emerged organically from the anti-Vietnam War counterculture, various people independently crystallising an era’s yearning for peace over destruction. That phrase was itself a hack—an intervention in the circuitry of war, a disruption of the logic that frames violence as inevitable. It did not stop Vietnam. But it shifted something in the conscience of a generation. It planted a seed that outlived the war it protested. This is what hacking war means: not the naive belief that words stop missiles, but the insistence that the moral architecture of a society cannot be surrendered to those who profit from its collapse. Hacking War: A Plea from the Burning Building So let us hack this war. But what do we have at our disposal? For people like me—and like Hasan Aghamiri, the man inside Iran with an eight-year prison sentence who spent seven million tomans on a VPN to tell the world that 168 schoolchildren had been killed, that a five-year-old girl in Tehran had been rendered mute by trauma—all we have is our pen. Our intellectual might is the only weapon we possess. We do not have war machines or propaganda machines. We do not engage in smear campaigns or dehumanising tactics. All we have is the integrity we must abide by, the conscience we must keep sensitive and alert. As I have written in these war diaries—from “Trading in Pain” to “The Burning Building and the Monitoring Room”—the fracture between Iranians inside and outside is not a political disagreement but a collision between two lived realities. The insider stands in the burning building; the outsider watches from the monitoring room. When the outsider prescribes more fire as the cure, the asymmetry becomes obscene. The regime once told Iranians sanctions were a blessing. Now, parts of the diaspora say war is a blessing. Both are lies paid for in blood—just not theirs. How do we hack this war? Humanistically. It sounds utopian—perhaps unrealistic. But this is how unexpected change happens. In the midst of absolute despair, something can penetrate the wall of hostility, as long as we keep our humanity resilient and alive. The children of Minab cannot wait for our conferences. But they deserve that those who claim to speak for their future do not advocate for their destruction. That is the lowest bar imaginable. And the fact that so many cannot clear it is the true measure of our moral crisis. This is our hack. The pen. The conscience. The refusal to let hatred author our story. It is all we have. It must be enough.Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Image credit: picture alliance / ZUMAPRESS.com | V. Valcic. Source: Qantara.de (Deutsche Welle) The Slogan That Should Alarm Everyone There is a slogan circulating with increasing confidence among a visible segment of the Iranian monarchist diaspora — chanted at rallies, printed on banners, amplified across social media with the fervour of a creed: “We are Aryans, not Arabs.” It is not a whisper. It is a declaration. And it should be heard — clearly, and with alarm — not only by Iranians but by every Arab government, every Muslim-majority society, and every observer of the global far right’s metastasising reach. The slogan is not incidental. It is foundational. It tells you, with remarkable economy, exactly what kind of political order its proponents envision: one built not on pluralism or democratic accountability, but on racial hierarchy and the explicit repudiation of the region in which Iran has existed — geographically, culturally, linguistically — for millennia. To call oneself Aryan in this register is not an innocent nod to ancient history. It is a deliberate alignment with the most toxic strands of racial nationalism the twentieth century produced — and that the twenty-first is reproducing with gathering speed. Arab states may look at this movement and see an Iranian internal affair. They would be making a catastrophic miscalculation. The racism that powers this ideology does not stop at a border. To these ideologues, “Arab” is not a nationality — it is an epithet, fused with “Muslim,” and both are fused with everything they consider inferior and civilisationally alien. The bitterness between Arab capitals and the Islamic Republic may be deep, but what is rising on the horizon should concern them far more: a movement whose founding mythology requires their dehumanisation. The Global Architecture of Hatred This is not a local aberration. It is the Iranian variant of a global phenomenon — the resurgence of ultra-far-right movements that share, across borders and languages, a remarkably consistent grammar of exclusion. The Aryanist monarchists in Los Angeles and London speak the same dialect of civilisational supremacy as white nationalists in Charlottesville and neo-fascist movements across Europe. The vocabulary differs; the structure is identical. There is always a glorious, racially pure past that was corrupted. There is always a contaminating Other — Arab, Muslim, immigrant — whose presence explains the fall from grace. And there is always the promise that purity, once restored, will restore greatness. The racism does not confine itself to Arabs. Afghans have been targeted with escalating venom — dehumanising rhetoric framing them as subhuman and disposable. Tajiks have recently entered the crosshairs. The circle of contempt expands, as it always does in such movements, because the logic of purity is insatiable. Once you define your civilisation by what it excludes, there is no stopping point. Today it is Arabs. Tomorrow it is Afghans. The day after, it is any Iranian who does not conform to the prescribed racial fantasy. The Weaponisation of “Left” and the Death of Dialogue There is another term that travels in the company of this ideology, and it deserves equal scrutiny: “left.” In the hands of these movements, “left” has been emptied of all political content and refilled as a vessel of pure contempt. It does not describe a political tradition or a philosophical orientation. It is an abusive shorthand that demarcates anyone who opposes their programme. When they call someone “radical left,” think twice. The target may have no association with any left movement whatsoever — a centrist, a liberal, a conservative who believes in basic decency, or simply someone who objects to racism. In their lexicon, opposition to hatred is itself a radical act. This weaponisation of language is not incidental to the project; it is the project. It renders critical engagement impossible. It creates a binary universe in which every voice is sorted into glorification or vilification — and in which reasoned disagreement does not exist. It is the rhetorical signature of authoritarianism dressed as liberation, and it should be recognised for what it is: not a political argument, but the annihilation of the conditions under which political argument is possible. Worse Than What It Promises to Replace Here is the warning that must be stated without equivocation. Whatever the Islamic Republic’s crimes — and they are vast, documented, and damning — the political order that these Aryanist movements envision is not its correction. It is its mutation into something potentially more dangerous: an ethno-nationalist state built on racial supremacy, allied with global far-right currents, and animated by a contempt for the region’s peoples that would make coexistence — diplomatic, economic, cultural — structurally impossible. The Islamic Republic, for all its brutality, operates within a framework that at least theoretically affirms solidarity with Muslim-majority nations. What replaces it, if these movements prevail, would affirm nothing of the sort. It would define itself against its neighbours, not among them. Arab governments that see in the Islamic Republic’s potential collapse an opportunity to settle old scores must ask a harder question: what rises from the rubble? If what rises is a regime animated by Aryanist ideology, steeped in anti-Arab racism, and integrated into the global far-right network, then the strategic calculation changes entirely. This is not a space for settling scores. It is the breeding ground for intolerance that will not stop at Iran’s borders — because it was never only about Iran. Keep your eyes open. These terms, these flags, these slogans — they need to be identified and understood viscerally. “We are Aryans, not Arabs” is not a cultural statement. It is a political programme — a declaration of civilisational war against the Arab and Muslim world, wrapped in the language of national liberation. It is repeating itself with stark clarity before our eyes: not as a distant echo of the twentieth century’s darkest chapter, but as its revival, armed with social media, diaspora networks, and the dangerous illusion that racial purity has ever, in the history of nations, produced anything other than catastrophe.Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Calligraphy: Daryoush Mohammad Poor It is now pretty established that the most dominant voice on the social media belongs to an increasingly visible faction of the supports of monarchy restoration. They most prominent quality is vulgarity in language, speech, behaviour and actions. These are all abundantly recored in voice and video. The major line of defence among the monarchist camp has been to pin all of these on infiltrators of the Islamic Republic, which does not hold much water given the significant role of the official advisors and aides of this camp. I have argued before that this is only a part – probably a small but most vocal part – of Iranian society. There is a grey area most people do not see. The segments of society in those grey areas need to find one another. They are like drops that once they join, the will form a raging river of ideas and solidarity in contradistinction with the exlusivist voices characterised by vulgarity. There is another point to be observed from a civilisational perspective. Since the 1905 Constitutional Revolution in Iran to put limits on temporal power of monarchy – and every political ruler in effect – Iran has come a steady but slow way forward. Yet, some issues remain nagging and persisten. The malaise of aggressive language and mentality of eliminating the other has remained potent not just in Iran but globally. What we see today could very well be a sort of katharsis for the Iranian society. The society is throwing up all the indigestable food it has taken in over centuries. Imagine a drunk person who is throwing up on the side walk. They mess themselves up but there will be a relief coming afterwards. The Iranian society is going through moments not too dissimlar to this allegory. It is throwing up those nasty habits in full display before the eyes of the entire world. People – sane people – in the western world watch with bewilderment how one can seek freedom for Iran under the banner of Israel but this is precisely why this is happening: to get rid of that mental issue with loving one enemy for the sake of hating another one more. The ultimate result is not getting ride of one enemy but doing deeper down the vortex of hatred and resentment. If this is not a katharsis then, an it is a much more deeply rooted shift – which has precedents in human history – then not just Iranians but the entire world needs to be seriously concerned. It is the future of the next generations of human beings which is at stake here.Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Something broke in Iran after 2009 — not in the corridors of power, where repression merely recalibrated, but in the interior of a society that had maintained a fragile compact with the state. The Green Movement did not fail because it was crushed. It failed because the crushing proved, beyond evasion, that the Islamic Republic regarded its own population not as a constituency but as a threat. What died that summer was the last residue of the belief that this order could be reformed from within. What replaced it was something colder: mutual estrangement. The state stopped pretending to serve the people; the people stopped pretending to believe it. That fracture has since metastasised into something far more dangerous than the political opposition typically admits: a wholesale renegotiation of Iranian identity itself, conducted not through deliberation but through collective rage, historical romanticism, and cultural purging. A growing segment of Iranian society — inside and in the diaspora — is not merely rejecting the Islamic Republic as a political system. It is rejecting Islam as a constituent element of Iranian civilisation, attempting to amputate fourteen centuries of cultural, linguistic, and spiritual inheritance. The symptoms are legible. The Quran quietly removed from the Haft Seen table at Nowruz — replaced by the Shahnameh, or by nothing at all. The word javidnam, evoking ancient Persian heroism, adopted as a conscious repudiation of shahid, with its Arabic etymology and its capture by the theocratic state. Wedding ceremonies stripped of Islamic juridical formulas, reconstructed — sometimes authentically, sometimes fancifully — from Zoroastrian tradition. Each act is simultaneously an assertion and an erasure: a reaching backward that requires a cutting away. Reza Zia-Ebrahimi identified this as “dislocative nationalism” — an ideology that extracts Iran from its actual context, reimagining it as a displaced Aryan civilisation temporarily contaminated by Arab-Islamic conquest. In this framework, fourteen centuries are not evolution but interruption — a parenthesis to be closed. It is seductive because it offers what the moment craves: a clean origin story, unburdened by the ambiguities of a civilisation that has always been, in Hamid Dabashi’s formulation, a site of contest between the nomocentric, the logocentric, and the homocentric — between law, reason, and human-centred ethics. I understand the rage. I share it. Living under or in the shadow of a regime that has brutalised its people in the name of God produces a visceral revulsion toward anything the regime claims to own. The instinct to tear away from it — all of it — is not irrational. It is human. But here is what must be said plainly: the trajectory many Iranians have chosen is not liberation. It is self-mutilation dressed as defiance. To flatten the magnificent, contradictory inheritance of Iranian civilisation into a binary — Persian good, Islamic bad — is not to recover an identity. It is to fabricate one. The Shahnameh, now elevated to nationalist scripture, was composed by Ferdowsi — a devout Shi’i Muslim who wrote not against Islam but within it, producing a work that is simultaneously pre-Islamic celebration and Islamic Persian achievement. To brandish it as a weapon against Islam is to misread the very text you claim to venerate. Hafez’s ghazals are saturated with Quranic allusion and Sufi metaphysics. You cannot have Hafez without Islam any more than you can have Dante without Christianity. The attempt is not scholarship. It is taxidermy — preservation of form from which the animating substance has been ripped out. And this brings me to what I find not just intellectually lazy but genuinely dangerous — a point the current discourse refuses to confront. There is a species of intellectual cowardice operating here, masquerading as sophistication. Iranians who rightly despise the Islamic Republic have, in staggering numbers, taken the path of least resistance: conflating the regime with the entirety of Islamic heritage. This is not critical thinking. It is the abandonment of critical thinking. It is the same totalising logic the mullahs use — just inverted. The theocrats say Islam is the state; the neo-nationalists say Islam is the enemy. Both are catastrophically wrong, and both serve the same function: they spare you the harder, messier work of actually reckoning with your own civilisation. Let me put my own stakes on the table. My identity — as an Iranian, as someone shaped by Islamic intellectual tradition, as someone who rejects theocracy absolutely — is not a contradiction. It is the inheritance of a civilisation that held these tensions together for a millennium. I refuse the obscene false choice being peddled in living rooms and Twitter threads and diaspora conferences: that to be modern, secular, and democratic, I must disown fourteen centuries of who I am. I refuse the equally grotesque insinuation that opposing the Islamic Republic requires me to genuflect toward Israel, or to adopt the cultural postures of people who could not locate Persepolis on a map. It is degrading. It is intellectually bankrupt. And it is beneath us. What Iran needs — what Iranians owe themselves — is not the archaeology of a lost golden age. It is the courage of a third path: neither the theocratic stranglehold that has bled the country for forty-seven years, nor the rootless secularism that would strip us of depth in pursuit of a hollow modernity. The task is harder than either camp admits. It means building a political and cultural framework that is democratic without being amnesiac, secular without being spiritually barren, modern without being derivative. It means recognising that Iranian civilisation was shaped by Zoroastrian depth and Islamic brilliance, by Persian poetry and Arabic philosophy, by Turkic dynamism and Kurdish resilience — and that the erasure of any element does not purify the national identity but impoverishes it. If Iranian identity is defined as essentially pre-Islamic and Persian, what becomes of the Azeris, the Kurds, the Baloch, the Arabs of Khuzestan? What becomes of devout Muslims who despise the Islamic Republic but for whom Islam is not imposition but lived faith? The dislocative nationalist framework offers them nothing, because it has defined them as remnants of contamination. What Zia-Ebrahimi calls the “curriculum of whiteness” — the desire to align Iranian identity with European civilisational narratives and distance it from the Islamicate world — is not liberation. It is a path toward ethnic chauvinism that calls itself progress. The fracture between state and people in Iran demands resolution. But that resolution cannot be built on mythology — not Islamic purity, not Persian purity, not any purity at all. Iranian civilisation, in all its glorious, contradictory, syncretic complexity, has always been what purists of every stripe cannot tolerate: a meeting place. It must be rebuilt as one — or it will not be rebuilt at all. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast A Nawruz Reflection on War, Hypocrisy, and the Promise of Renewal Before I begin, allow me to share a simple thought—one expressed beautifully by the poet Pablo Neruda: you may cut all the flowers, but you cannot stop the spring from coming (“Podrán cortar todas las flores, pero no podrán detener la primavera”). In the Persian tradition, we echo the same truth: no matter how harsh the autumn, no matter how unforgiving the winter, the rose will return and blossom. It is inevitable. It is woven into the very rhythm of existence. And so, as we stand on the threshold of Nawruz—the renewal of the year—I offer you all my warmest greetings. Nawruz is not merely a cultural observance tied to a single people or place; it is a cosmic reminder. It speaks to the turning of the earth itself, to cycles of renewal that belong to all of humanity. Even in a world marked by turbulence and uncertainty, the promise of renewal persists. Spring comes. But this year, spring arrives to a world that has set itself on fire. What we are witnessing in the case of Iran is not a new trend in the undermining of international law. This dangerous, reckless, and aggressive approach began after the 7th of October attacks in Israel and has since spilled over the entire region. Whatever the reasons—or excuses—for restraint in reaction to the aftermath of 7th October were, humanity is reaching a point of no return. What continues in the US-Israeli invasion of Iran is the normalisation of terror: assassinating diplomats and heads of state was precisely the kind of act that the other side was supposed to fight or resist. When the self-declared guardian of the international order practises the very methods it attributes to its enemies, we are no longer in the realm of geopolitical hypocrisy. We are in the realm of civilisational collapse. It is not sufficient merely to point out that this war—the US-Israeli invasion—is illegal and in violation of all the norms of the international community. We need to gaze humanity in the eye and remind ourselves that we are spiralling into a downward vortex of devastation and debasement. This war commenced with the assassination of senior political and military leaders of Iran. It does not matter what one’s political ideology is: this act—which comes in a long series of earlier illegal actions—is precisely what this self-declared ‘just war’ was meant to avoid, to prevent, to combat. One side accuses the other of destabilisation and the spread of terror, and yet it commits precisely the same horrifying crime. What is even more shocking is that the side depicted as the guilty one did not actually start this war. The war was not ‘pre-emptive’—it was nothing other than the thuggish and roguish behaviour of two states in open defiance of international law. In short, international law and the international community have been reduced to an almost entirely obsolete, redundant, and meaningless body of institutions with no power to halt anything, nor to commence any diplomatic solution to the current crisis. The great sociologist Norbert Elias spent a lifetime studying what he called ‘the civilizing process’—the slow, centuries-long transformation by which societies moved from the unrestrained exercise of violence towards regulated conduct, internal pacification, and the monopolisation of force within the framework of the state. Elias warned, with the quiet precision of someone who had lost both parents to the machinery of the Holocaust, that this process was neither inevitable nor irreversible. “Strong regressive movements are certainly not inconceivable,” he wrote. “The conditions of life in World War I automatically enforced a breakdown of some of the taboos of peacetime civilization.” What we are witnessing today—the normalisation of assassination, the aerial bombardment of civilian infrastructure, the wholesale destruction of a nation’s capacity to sustain life—is not merely a regressive movement. It is a full-scale decivilising process unfolding in real time, conducted by the very states that claim to be civilisation’s custodians. Elias made another observation that is devastating in its relevance to the present moment. He noted that as Western nations consolidated their power, they “came to see themselves as bearers of an existing or finished civilization to others, as standard-bearers of expanding civilization.” The consciousness of their own superiority, he wrote, “from now on serves at least those nations which have become colonial conquerors, and therefore a kind of upper class to large sections of the non-European world, as a justification of their rule.” This sentence, written in the shadow of the Second World War, describes with uncanny precision the operating logic of the current catastrophe. The United States and Israel do not merely wage war—they wage war in the name of civilisation, in the name of order, in the name of values they systematically violate with every missile that strikes a school, a hospital, a residential neighbourhood. The civilising mission has become the decivilising instrument. What appeared like a slip of the tongue by the German Chancellor during the twelve-day invasion of Iran fully depicts the mood of European states: someone else is doing the dirty work that Europeans feel too embarrassed to face in their own mirror of past and present. Europe’s silence was not neutrality—it was complicity dressed in diplomatic restraint. It took the European states unconscionable time to break their silence against the impunity of the Israeli war machine. And when they finally spoke, the words arrived too late and too softly to matter. The fiasco could only be ended with a purportedly much larger display of American bombing power—a ‘resolution’ that resolved nothing except the demonstration that violence remains the final arbiter of international affairs. The catastrophe did not end there. The resumption of violence was entirely predictable, but its eruption in the middle of yet another negotiation was perhaps less so—not for everyone, except the assassinated former Supreme Leader of Iran, who seemed to have been ironically vindicated in his prediction. Here lies one of the bitterest ironies of this crisis: the very leader whose removal was meant to create the conditions for ‘peace’ had warned that the conditions for war were being manufactured. His assassination did not end the cycle of violence—it consecrated it. The European posture throughout this catastrophe deserves pointed censure. Holbach, writing in 1774—a passage Elias chose to highlight—declared that “there is nothing that places more obstacles in the way of public happiness, of the progress of human reason, of the entire civilization of men than the continual wars into which thoughtless princes are drawn at every moment.” Two hundred and fifty years later, the thoughtless princes have merely changed their titles. They sit in chancelleries and foreign ministries, speaking the language of human rights while facilitating human destruction. The European states, whose twentieth-century history is written in the blood of two world wars, colonial extraction, and the Holocaust, have learned precisely the wrong lesson from their own past. They have not learned that the logic of ‘civilising’ violence is always a lie. They have learned only to outsource it. This is what makes the doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’ the most dangerous oxymoron of our age. Every intervention justified in humanitarian terms has produced humanitarian catastrophe. Iraq, Libya, Syria—these are not aberrations. They are the pattern. And Iran is now being fed into the same machinery, with the same rhetoric and the same catastrophic disregard for those who will actually pay the price. The intervention promised liberation; it delivered devastation. It promised order; it produced chaos. It promised civilisation; it enacted its collapse. But what is really at stake? The Middle East? Global economy? Energy prices? The declining power of the American hegemon? The rise of China and Russia in the backdrop? All of these are credible frameworks within which to analyse the current crisis, alongside the unexpected survival—thus far—of the current regime in Iran. But the deeper issue is civilisation and culture themselves. We are no longer talking about the clash of civilisations. We are witnessing the collapse of civilisation at the hands of those who masquerade as benevolent liberators but have, in very real terms, become embodiments of plain and naked barbarity. Elias understood this danger with extraordinary clarity. He wrote that “the ‘civilization’ which we are accustomed to regard as a possession that comes to us apparently ready-made, without our asking how we actually came to possess it, is a process or part of a process in which we are ourselves involved.” Civilisation is not a trophy one places on a shelf. It is not the property of any single nation or alliance. It is a process—fragile, reversible, dependent at every moment on the willingness of human beings to constrain their most destructive impulses. When that willingness collapses—when the restraints that centuries of painful progress have imposed on the exercise of raw power are discarded in favour of assassination, aerial bombardment, and the wholesale destruction of civilian life—civilisation does not merely stall. It reverses. And Mirabeau’s insight, which Elias preserved for us, becomes prophecy rather than history: the cycle “from barbarism to decadence through civilization” can reverse itself, and the machine can run down if no alert and principled hand winds it back up. I write this on the day of Nawruz—the day the earth itself reminds us that renewal is built into the structure of reality. But renewal is not automatic for human civilisation in the way it is for the turning of the seasons. The earth will turn. The equinox will arrive. The flowers will break through the soil whether or not we deserve them. Human civilisation enjoys no such guarantee. It requires cultivation—a word that shares its root with culture, and with the very idea of tending something fragile into existence. The civilising process, as Elias demonstrated, took centuries of slow, painful, often unconscious transformation. Its reversal can take weeks. We have seen those weeks. We are living in them. And yet. I return to where I began—to Neruda, and to the Persian tradition that breathes through Nawruz. The promise of spring is not a guarantee that the gardeners will be worthy of the garden. It is a reminder that the garden persists despite the gardeners. That the capacity for renewal is written into the fabric of existence itself, waiting—always waiting—for human beings to rise to the occasion of their own better nature. This is not naivety. It is the deepest realism available to us. Every civilisation that has endured has done so not because it avoided catastrophe but because, in the aftermath, enough people chose to rebuild rather than to destroy, to tend rather than to burn, to remember rather than to repeat. The Persian poetic tradition—from Rumi’s insistence that “spring is the resurrection brining life back” and even in death we find life and promote it, to Hafez’s radical trust in the turning of fortune—has always understood this. The plea I make today is not political in the narrow sense. It is civilisational. It is a plea for the return to the most elementary recognition that international law is not an optional courtesy extended by the powerful to the weak—it is the architecture of coexistence without which we are all reduced to the law of the jungle. It is a plea for Europeans to look in their own mirror and recognise that the violence they facilitate today will define their legacy tomorrow. It is a plea for those who speak of liberation to ask whether the liberated have a voice in the terms of their own freedom—or whether, as in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, they are merely rubble upon which someone else’s geopolitical architecture is constructed. And it is a plea, above all, for civilisation itself—not as a badge of Western superiority, not as a weapon of cultural imperialism, but as the slow, fragile, precious achievement of human beings learning, over centuries, to resolve their conflicts without annihilating each other. That achievement is burning. Those who lit the fire call themselves its protectors. Spring will come. It always does. The question is whether, when it arrives, we will have left anything standing worthy of its light. Nawruz Mubarak. May the new year find us worthy of renewal. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast This essay is a response to The Economist article, “Why Ali Khamenei May Have Welcomed the Nature of His Death,” published on 3 March 2026. This analysis of Khamenei’s death as a masterwork of martyrdom theatre is seductive in its neatness, but it is precisely this neatness that should give us pause. The article constructs a compelling arc — brittle regime, orchestrated sacrifice, ideological resurrection — yet in doing so it commits the error that has plagued Western analysis of Iran for decades: it mistakes a curated narrative for the whole picture. The reality on the ground is far more fractured. What we possess today are two streams of information, neither reliable in isolation. On one side, regime loyalists peddle triumphalism; on the other, a diaspora opposition — increasingly dominated by what scholars describe as neo-fascist exclusivism, openly aligned with Israel and Reza Pahlavi — paints the country as an irredeemable hellhole. Between these poles lies what one might call the grey Iran: over ninety million people about whose opinions we have virtually no data. The internet blackout which is rightly noted does not merely make public opinion “hard to gauge”; it renders the evidentiary basis for sweeping claims about ideological revival essentially speculative. To assert that “the faithful have never been so energised” is to confuse the visible with the representative. Several realities deserve more careful treatment. First, the disillusionment with Islam inside Iran is not peripheral but tectonic — driven by decades of faith weaponised as political instrument. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement did not import its emancipation from Washington or Tel Aviv; Iranian women effectively dismantled compulsory hijab through sustained agency. This is precisely the kind of indigenous achievement that bombs and sanctions cannot produce — and that the framework of external power dynamics entirely obscures. Second, the framing of the IRGC’s consolidation as a post-Khamenei hardliner takeover understates its structural permanence. The Revolutionary Guard is not a faction awaiting its moment; it is an economic octopus controlling imports, exports, and illicit networks — a mafia state within a state. Its Iran–Iraq war veterans possess institutional stamina measured in decades. The killing of Ali Larijani — a pragmatist diplomat who prepared the ground for the nuclear deal — eliminated not a placeman but the last credible interlocutor for negotiated settlement. That this assassination occurred during active diplomatic negotiations, for the second time in a year, vindicates the thesis Khamenei spent his career advancing: that the West negotiates in bad faith. The article does not reckon with this inconvenient symmetry. Third, the closing gesture toward a “post-regime Iran” seeking “reconciliation with the West” is dangerously blithe. The precedents of Libya, Iraq, and Syria — invoked only as foils for Khamenei’s exit — should instead serve as warnings. A fragmented Iran would not yield liberal democracy; it would produce humanitarian catastrophe, regional destabilisation from the Gulf to Central Asia, and a vacuum that neither China nor Russia — already supplying jamming technology and surveillance expertise — would permit to be filled on Western terms. What I propose is not a reversal of this thesis but a recalibration. The Economist would better serve its readers by interrogating the epistemological poverty at the heart of current Iran analysis — the chasm between curated information and the disparate, ungathered truths of a society under bombardment and blackout. Rather than adjudicating whether martyrdom has “worked,” the more urgent question is: whose account of Iranian sentiment are we privileging, and why? The grey segment — neither regime zealots nor diaspora ideologues — holds the key to any durable settlement, yet remains systematically unheard. Journalism worthy of your tradition would seek those voices rather than amplify the loudest ones on either side. The stakes are not merely analytical. Every narrative reducing Iran to a binary of regime resilience versus collapse narrows the diplomatic imagination precisely when it must expand. Iran’s people are trapped between a state they distrust and an external assault that promises liberation but delivers destruction. They deserve reporting that honours that complexity. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast The Raging Exile: On the Behavioural Pathology of Victim-Perpetrators A necessary preface. This essay targets no race, no ethnicity, no nation, no faith. It identifies a behavioural pattern — observable, documentable, recurring — displayed by a specific segment of political actors in their language, conduct, and digital presence. What follows is a taxonomy of behaviour, not an indictment of identity. There exists a figure in displaced communities for whom I propose the designation Homo Exsul Furens — the raging exile. Not the exile who grieves. Not the exile who labours quietly to preserve what displacement has fractured. But the exile who has transmuted loss into license: license to attack, to defame, to conduct campaigns of character assassination — and then, when confronted, to retreat behind the shield of victimhood with a speed that would shame a chameleon. The operational logic is simple. Step one: deploy ad hominem attacks of extraordinary venom — smear campaigns, toxic profiling, social media mob orchestration, whispered defamation designed to isolate and destroy. Step two: when called to account, perform the pivot. Become the victim. Invoke exile. Invoke suffering. Invoke the credential of displacement as though it were diplomatic immunity against moral scrutiny. Step three: repeat. I have set aside the conciliatory register. Deliberately. Tolerance before the intolerant, diplomacy offered to those who weaponise exclusion while performing victimhood, patience granted to those whose every engagement drips ad hominem venom — this is not virtue. It is intellectual and moral irresponsibility. The pattern is documented in comment sections, social media threads, and coordinated campaigns descending upon anyone who questions the prevailing narrative. Keane warned against those who demand violence while evading scrutiny. Anderson mapped how distance intensifies passion while stripping it of moral weight. What neither captured is this hybrid: the individual simultaneously aggressor and self-declared victim, who wields cruelty as weapon and suffering as shield, perfecting the art of making their own viciousness vanish behind the genuine anguish of exile. Let the limits be clear. The diaspora is vast and heterogeneous. This essay does not touch the silent majority who live displacement with dignity. It addresses those — and only those — who have turned discourse into a theatre of destruction: who brand every dissenter a traitor, every questioner a regime agent, every call for restraint a betrayal. The victim-perpetrator is the most dangerous actor in any displaced community because they have made accountability impossible. To criticise them is to “attack the exile.” To document their behaviour is to “silence the oppressed.” They have rigged the grammar so that their aggression is invisible and their victimhood alone remains. I refuse this grammar. Displacement confers suffering — not impunity. The ad hominem campaigns, the character assassinations, the ruthless exclusion of dissent — these are the actions of petty authoritarians who have found, in the freedoms of their adopted countries, not a space for pluralism but a theatre for the very intolerance they claim to have fled. Homo Exsul Furens must be named, because what is unnamed cannot be resisted. And what is unresisted, spreads viciously right under our nose. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast On the Cancer of Calling Others Cancer A certain rot has taken hold of political discourse—one that begins the moment we cease to see our adversaries as human beings and begin to see them as diseases. The metaphor of cancer, that most dreaded of diagnoses, has become a favoured instrument in the rhetorical arsenal of those who wish to circumvent the difficult work of politics. The Iranian regime is cancer. The opposition is cancer. Israel is cancer. Palestine is cancer. The pattern repeats with grim predictability, and with each deployment, something essential to our humanity quietly atrophies. The Grammar of Dehumanisation John Keane, in his rigorous examination of the relationship between violence and democratic life, observed that fascist regimes were “obsessed with unifying the body politic through the controlling, cleansing and healing effects of violence, which was often understood through ‘medical’ or ‘surgical’ metaphors.” The language of surgery and sanitation, of excision and eradication, served then—as it serves now—to transform political adversaries into pathological agents that must be removed for the health of the collective. Keane noted with precision that “mature democracies find such euphemisms embarrassing. They regard them as corrupting and contestable.” The question before us is whether we still possess the capacity for such embarrassment. When the current regime in Iran is likened to a cancer requiring aggressive intervention at its centre—the only way, purportedly, to address a malignancy that will otherwise metastasise—we witness not political analysis but a suspension of it. The metaphor performs a sleight of hand. It transforms a complex political formation, with its millions of complicit and resistant and indifferent subjects, into a tumorous growth that exists outside the body it has ostensibly invaded. But here is what the metaphor conceals: in this particular “treatment,” everyone knows that killing the patient in the process of removing the carcinogenic tumour is not an unfortunate side effect but a tolerated—even welcomed—outcome. The cure, we are told, may be worse than the disease, but desperation has made such calculations acceptable. This is not medicine. It is murder dressed in a white coat. Keane warned that when politicians speak of “surgical strikes, sanitary cordons, mopping-up operations and fighting the ‘cancer’ or ‘plague’ of terrorism,” they deploy language that “corrupts and contests” the foundations of democratic deliberation. The surgical metaphor promises precision that violence never delivers. The oncological metaphor promises necessity that politics rarely requires. Together, they provide moral permission for what would otherwise be recognised as the indiscriminate destruction of human beings who happened to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Foreclosure of Politics The cancer metaphor does something more insidious still. It transforms the enemy into something that cannot be negotiated with, reasoned with, or accommodated. One does not negotiate with carcinoma. One does not seek compromise with metastasis. The metaphor forecloses precisely those possibilities of engagement that distinguish political action from mere violence. As Keane observed, “even when it comes dressed in velvet, violence is a relational act in which the victim of violence is regarded, involuntarily, not as a subject whose ‘otherness’ is recognised and respected, but rather as a mere object potentially worthy of bodily harm, or even annihilation.” The medical metaphor is precisely such velvet: it drapes the annihilation of the other in the sterile language of clinical necessity, transforming political subjects into pathological objects whose elimination requires no justification beyond the diagnosis itself. Consider the rhetorical construction that accompanies the cancer metaphor in contemporary discourse about Iran. The regime is cancer; therefore, it must be excised. The process of excision will be painful, but all cancer treatment involves suffering. Those who counsel caution or diplomacy are accused of advocating for the spread of disease. The metaphor creates its own logic, impervious to evidence or consequence. That similar prescriptions applied to Iraq produced not democracy but state collapse and sectarian slaughter, that Libya’s surgical liberation produced slave markets, that Syria’s intervention produced half a million dead—these precedents dissolve in the certainty that this cancer is different, that this surgery will succeed where all others have failed. There is a deeper pathology at work here. When do people resort to metaphors? They resort to metaphors when they are no longer capable of solving the problem. The metaphor becomes a substitute for analysis, a way of wrapping intractable complexity in an aura of comprehensibility. It suspends the question. It transcends the real issue while permitting all the follies of humanity to continue behind this smoke screen. The metaphor does not illuminate; it obscures. It does not enable thought; it substitutes for thought. And in political discourse, where thought is already scarce and precious, this substitution is catastrophic. What the cancer metaphor ultimately accomplishes is the postponement of the moment when we must face our conscience and think rationally about what we are actually proposing. To bomb a city is to kill children. To destroy infrastructure is to deprive the sick of medicine and the hungry of food. To collapse a state is to unleash chaos whose victims will number in the hundreds of thousands. These are not abstractions. They are consequences that the metaphor exists precisely to obscure. When we speak of “treating” a regime, we avoid the word “kill.” When we speak of “excising” a government, we avoid the word “destroy.” The medical vocabulary provides a moral anaesthetic, numbing us to the reality of what we advocate. The corruption operates in both directions. It is worth noting that the Iranian propaganda machine has itself deployed the cancer metaphor against Israel—and with equal bankruptcy of imagination and equal contempt for the human beings it would sacrifice on the altar of its rhetoric. Both deployments share the same fundamental error: the conviction that those who live under a political arrangement we find abhorrent have thereby forfeited their claims to continued existence. Both assume that political problems admit of surgical solutions. Both are wrong. The ‘Occupation’ Metaphor and the Logic of Double Standards The cancer metaphor, however, is not the only instrument of rhetorical corruption at work in contemporary discourse about Iran. There is another metaphor, quieter but no less potent, that has attached itself to the Iranian regime in recent years: the metaphor of occupation. Iran, we are told, is under ‘occupation’—its people subjugated by a force that has seized their land and holds it against their will. The language is striking in its strangeness. Iran has not been invaded. No foreign army sits in its barracks. No external power has drawn its borders anew. The regime, whatever its myriad crimes against its own citizens, is not an occupying force in any sense recognised by international law. It is a domestic political formation—authoritarian, theocratic, brutal in its repressions—but it is not an occupation. To call it one is to engage in a purely rhetorical act, one that borrows the moral clarity of anti-colonial resistance and drapes it over a situation to which it does not apply. The irony is lacerating. Israel, which maintains what the International Court of Justice, the United Nations General Assembly, and the overwhelming consensus of international legal scholarship recognise as a military occupation of Palestinian territories, is rarely subjected to the same rhetorical framework by those who deploy the ‘occupation’ metaphor against Iran. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is engulfed in the political rhetoric of terrorist designation, its every action framed as illegitimate; yet the actual, physical, legally recognised occupation of another people’s land by a sovereign state has, over seven decades and countless UN resolutions, never been granted the same moral urgency. Fighting the Iranian regime is presented as self-evidently legitimate—a people rising against their occupier. Fighting an actual occupation, by contrast, remains perpetually contested, perpetually deferred, perpetually hedged with qualifications that the word ‘occupation’ applied to Iran never seems to require. The ‘occupier’ label, when applied to the Iranian regime, functions as a psychological instrument rather than a descriptive one. It exists to convince its audience that resistance to this regime belongs to the same moral category as resistance to colonial domination—that it is not merely desirable but righteous, not merely political but existential. The metaphor does not describe a reality; it manufactures a permission. And in manufacturing that permission, it quietly erases the case where the metaphor actually applies, where the occupation is not figurative but literal, where the dispossession is not rhetorical but physical. The deep chasm between reality and political depiction here is not an accident. It is the metaphor’s entire purpose: to rearrange moral categories so that what is figurative feels urgent and what is literal feels abstract. Mirrors, Not Opposites What emerges from this tangle of competing metaphors—cancer, occupation, terrorism—is an uncomfortable recognition that the Iranian regime and the Israeli state function, in the rhetoric of their respective opponents, as mirrors of one another. Both are called cancers. Both are called occupiers. Both are called existential threats requiring extraordinary measures. Both Iranian and Israeli propaganda machines have likened the other to a malignancy that must be eradicated for civilisation to survive. And neither depiction—neither the Iranian regime’s portrayal of Israel as a cancerous tumour on the body of the Islamic world, nor the Israeli and diaspora portrayal of Iran as a metastasising threat to regional and global order—has led humanity to a better place. They are mirrors, not opposites, and yet they are treated with radically different degrees of seriousness by Western media, by international institutions, and—most troublingly—by the Iranian diaspora itself, which has too often adopted one set of metaphors while remaining blind to the other. The task of intellectual honesty is not to choose between these distorting mirrors but to smash them both. Toward Honest Language The alternative to the medical metaphor is not passivity but politics—the difficult, frustrating, often unsatisfying work of engagement, pressure, negotiation, and incremental change. It requires acknowledging that the millions who live under systems we oppose are neither tumours nor accomplices, but human beings whose suffering cannot be the acceptable cost of our ideological satisfaction. It requires, in Keane’s phrase, the “democratisation” of violence—the insistence that means and institutions of violence be publicly accountable, that their deployment be subject to scrutiny and their consequences openly acknowledged. There is something embarrassing about the cancer metaphor that those who deploy it rarely acknowledge. It reveals a poverty of political imagination, an inability to conceive of solutions that do not involve the destruction of the enemy. It betrays the very desperation it claims to diagnose in others. When we call our opponents cancer, we announce that we have given up on the possibilities of political transformation and settled for the fantasies of annihilation. We have stopped thinking and started merely wanting—wanting the problem to disappear, wanting the enemy to vanish, wanting the complexity of the world to resolve itself into the simplicity of a pathology report. The most honest response to this temptation is a recognition that both sides of these rhetorical wars—those who call regimes cancer and those who call their opponents the same—have arrived at the same intellectual and moral dead end. Neither has led humanity to a better place. Neither has produced the transformation it promised. Both have contributed to the degradation of political discourse into a competition in dehumanisation, where the prize is the moral permission to treat others as less than human. We would do better to retire the metaphor entirely—to speak of political formations as political formations, of governments as governments, of human beings as human beings. This is not a retreat from moral clarity but an advance toward it. It is easier to condemn a cancer than to condemn a government; it is easier to advocate excision than to advocate the difficult work of political change. The metaphor flatters our moral self-image while excusing us from moral responsibility. But the children in the rubble do not care whether we called their killers surgeons or soldiers. They are dead either way. The pathology we should be diagnosing is not in our adversaries but in ourselves: in our willingness to reach for metaphors that transform political problems into medical ones, that excuse violence as treatment, that permit us to sleep at night while advocating positions that would, if enacted, fill morgues and orphanages across the earth. This is the true cancer of political discourse—and unlike the metaphorical diseases we so freely diagnose in others, it is one we might actually cure, if only we could muster the intellectual honesty to recognise its symptoms in ourselves. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast On the Weaponisation of Historical Morality and the Erasure of Conscience There is a phrase that circulates through political rhetoric with the confidence of an axiom and the substance of a mirage: stand on the right side of history. It is uttered with the gravity of moral certainty — by presidents and pundits, by those who wield power and those who merely perform proximity to it. It has been repeated so often, and deployed so promiscuously, that it has achieved what all effective propaganda achieves: it no longer requires justification. It simply is. And in that unchallenged existence lies its most dangerous function. But let us pause and ask: what does it actually mean? History, as a discipline and as lived inheritance, does not possess sides. It is not a courtroom with a dock and a bench. History is — to borrow from Walter Benjamin — wreckage upon wreckage, debris at the feet of the angel who would like to stay and make whole what has been smashed, but who is propelled irresistibly into the future by the storm we call progress. The “right side of history” is not determined by justice. It is determined by survival — by who remains standing when the dust settles, and who commands the pen that writes the aftermath. The Grammar of Domination Antonio Gramsci, writing from the confines of a fascist prison, understood this with devastating clarity. Hegemony, he argued, is not merely the exercise of force but the manufacture of consent — the process by which the ruling class embeds its interests so deeply within common sense that they cease to appear as interests and begin to appear as nature, as inevitability, as “the right side of history.” The phrase does not describe a moral position. It constructs one. It is not an observation about where justice resides; it is a speech act that claims to decide where justice resides — and in doing so, silences every competing claim. Michel Foucault would recognise this mechanism intimately. Power, he demonstrated, does not operate solely through prohibition and punishment. Its most potent mode is productive: it produces knowledge, it produces subjects, it produces the very categories through which we understand ourselves. When someone declares that you are on the “wrong side of history,” they are not merely disagreeing with you. They are performing an act of epistemic exclusion — removing you from the circle of those whose speech is granted the dignity of being heard. The phrase functions, in Foucault’s terms, as a technology of power: not an argument to be met with counter-argument, but a classification that renders counter-argument illegitimate before it is uttered. The Manufacture of the Sub-Human It is here that the phrase reveals its most corrosive function — one that Hannah Arendt would have identified with chilling precision. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt traced how dehumanisation operates not through the sudden eruption of violence but through the patient erosion of a person’s standing as a political being — stripped first of rights, then of belonging, then of the very quality of humanity itself, until violence against them ceases to register as violence at all. The phrase “the right side of history” operates within this architecture. When it is wielded — as it is now, conspicuously, by a segment of the Iranian diaspora cheering for the US-Israeli military posture toward Iran — it does not merely express a political preference. It performs a partition. Those who align with the dominant narrative are granted the status of moral subjects. Those who dissent — who question the wisdom of invasion, who refuse to celebrate bombs falling on a nation of eighty-eight million souls — are cast into the outer darkness of the “wrong side.” Once there, they are no longer interlocutors. They are, in the language Giorgio Agamben has given us, reduced to bare life — homo sacer, the figure who exists outside the protection of law and the recognition of the political community. This is not hyperbole. It is the operational logic of the phrase. Its primary function is the elimination of difference — the flattening of a complex political landscape into a binary of the righteous and the damned. What we are left with is a distorted image of humanity itself: one in which human beings are only those who align with the dominant manufactured narrative, and all others are surplus, expendable, unworthy of moral consideration. The Neo-Fascist Echo Let us be precise, because this connects to currents far larger than any single diaspora debate. The twenty-first century has witnessed the resurgence of a political logic supposed to have been buried in the rubble of the mid-twentieth century: eliminationism dressed in the vocabulary of liberation. From ethno-nationalist movements sweeping Europe to authoritarian populisms across the Americas, from the normalisation of collective punishment in Gaza to the rhetoric of “civilisational struggle” from Washington and Tel Aviv, a pattern emerges that Umberto Eco, in his prescient taxonomy of Ur-Fascism, would recognise instantly: the cult of action for action’s sake, the rejection of criticism as treason, the obsession with an existential plot — and above all, the conviction that disagreement is betrayal. The phrase “the right side of history” is the rhetorical fingerprint of this logic. It forecloses debate not by winning it but by abolishing it. It does not persuade; it conscripts. And in the Iranian diaspora context, it performs a function breathtaking in its cynicism: it asks Iranians to celebrate the very forces that have imposed sanctions starving their relatives, funded proxy wars destabilising their region, and maintained a geopolitical architecture designed not to liberate Iran but to subordinate it. The “right side of history,” in this rendering, is indistinguishable from the winning side of empire. History Without Truth Is Not History And here we arrive at the deepest fraud: the invocation of “history” itself. What history? Whose history? History, to deserve the name, requires a commitment to truth prior to and independent of political convenience — what Paul Ricœur called the “critical moment,” the willingness to subject one’s own narrative to the same scrutiny one applies to one’s adversaries. Without this, what is called “history” is merely curated narrative: half-truths arranged not to illuminate the past but to manufacture consent for the present. We live in the age of post-truth — but the phrase itself is a concession we should refuse. There is no “post” to truth. There is only truth and its deliberate obscuration. Those who deploy “the right side of history” with such casual authority have confused the pen spun in the service of power with the pen that serves the historical record. As I have argued elsewhere — in the context of inflated atrocity figures and the manufacture of indifference — when numbers are fabricated, when grievances are instrumentalised, when the dead are counted not to honour them but to weaponise them, it is not justice that is served. It is the architecture of war — the same architecture now being assembled, brick by rhetorical brick, around the case for military confrontation with Iran. The Battle We Are Fighting What, then, is to be done? The answer is not complicated, though it is demanding. It is the oldest and most difficult of human obligations: to resist. To resist dehumanisation — the quiet, daily work of insisting that those who think differently remain fully human, fully entitled to speak. To resist the normalisation of violence — the slow anaesthetisation of conscience that allows us to accept bombing campaigns as “liberation” and collective punishment as “strategy.” To resist the erasure of conscience in the name of history — the seductive invitation to surrender moral judgement to a phrase that asks us to stop thinking and start choosing sides. Arendt warned that the most dangerous evil is not radical but banal — the product not of monstrous ideology but of the catastrophic failure to think. “The right side of history” is an invitation to precisely this failure. It asks us to replace judgement with allegiance, inquiry with obedience, conscience with conformity. It offers the comfort of moral certainty at the price of moral agency. Stand upright before this mockery of truth. History does not have a right side. It has only the truth — fragile, contested, infinitely precious — and those willing to defend it at the cost of their own comfort, their own belonging, their own place in the manufactured consensus. The right side, if it exists at all, belongs to those who, in Gramsci’s enduring formulation, maintain pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will — who see the world as it is and refuse to stop demanding what it ought to be. For when we allow a phrase to do the thinking we refuse to do ourselves, we do not stand on any side of history. We stand outside it entirely — complicit in its worst chapters, and absent from its best. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast A Regime That Does Not Cooperate With Its Own DownfallAn Israeli journalist recently made ironic commentary on President Trump’s war strategy, capturing in a single tweet what might be called the most revealing paradox of our time. But this is not merely about Donald Trump. This is about a cognitive dissonance that has come to define large portions of the Iranian diaspora—a contradiction so fundamental that it exposes the very chasm between rhetoric and reality, between wishful thinking and strategic coherence. Over the past year, one question has echoed persistently through diaspora networks, social media platforms, and satellite television broadcasts: Why doesn’t the regime just give up? It is one of those astonishingly simple questions that, upon examination, reveals a caricature so profound that those asking it seem unable to see themselves reflected in it. The Logical Paradox at the Heart of Diaspora Politics Let us examine this question with the cold clarity it demands. If the Iranian regime is meant to be so compassionate, so caring, so benevolent, and so kind that one can simply ask those in power to step down for the good of the country and its people—then why, precisely, do you want its downfall? Why mobilize international pressure, sanctions, and military threats against a government capable of such selfless surrender? Conversely, if the regime is as cruel and tyrannical as claimed—as corrupt, as violent, as utterly indifferent to human suffering—then why do you keep asking it not to resist? Why expect mercy from the merciless? Why anticipate rationality from those you’ve characterized as fundamentally irrational? Why demand altruism from those you’ve spent decades condemning as irredeemably selfish? There is a discrepancy here, a dissonance in the cognitive architecture of certain segments of the diaspora that fails to grasp—or refuses to acknowledge—the gravity of the situation. You cannot simultaneously argue that a regime is brutally authoritarian and expect it to behave with democratic gentility when facing its own extinction. The two positions are logically incompatible. They cancel each other out, leaving only the hollow echo of moral posturing without strategic substance. This is not mere philosophical hair-splitting. This is the difference between understanding power and performing outrage, between formulating strategy and indulging fantasy. No authoritarian regime in history has ever politely excused itself from power because external voices deemed it appropriate. The Soviet Union did not dissolve because dissidents asked nicely. Apartheid South Africa did not end because the international community expected benevolence. Authoritarian systems collapse when the internal contradictions become unsustainable, when the cost of maintaining power exceeds the capacity to extract it—not when they are asked to cooperate with their own demise. The Existential Stakes and the Spiral of Threat For the regime, this is an existential situation. Not a political inconvenience. Not a public relations crisis. An existential threat. And existential threats are not met with negotiation—they are met with survival instincts that override all other considerations. When the dominant voices of the diaspora openly threaten repercussions not only for those responsible for atrocities committed over the past forty-seven years—a legitimate demand for justice—but also for all those who even slightly differ from them in opinion, even those who have themselves been victims of the same regime, what message does this send? What incentive structure does this create? If the choice facing regime officials is between fighting to the death and facing execution anyway, rational calculation dictates one course of action: resist with everything available. If surrender promises no mercy, if stepping down guarantees the same fate as fighting on, then why step down? Will they be executed more humanely? Will their families be spared because they cooperated? History suggests otherwise. This is the perverse logic the diaspora’s maximalist rhetoric has created: by promising total retribution regardless of cooperation, it eliminates any incentive for de-escalation. By conflating every level of complicity, from active perpetrator to passive bureaucrat, it ensures that everyone within the system has equal reason to fight until the end. This is not a strategy for regime change. This is a recipe for catastrophic escalation. And what of the Iranian people—the millions who have no choice but to live with the consequences of this confrontation? If we accept the premise that the regime is so corrupt, so committed to its own survival that it will fight to its last breath even at the expense of destroying Iran and all its infrastructure before surrendering, then we must confront an uncomfortable question: Is a strategy that pushes for confrontation at any cost truly in the interest of those people? Or is it something else entirely? The Test of Solomon: Biophilia or Necrophilia? There is a story shared by both Jewish and Muslim traditions that illuminates this moment with devastating clarity. In the Tanakh, King Solomon is confronted with two women, each claiming to be the mother of a newborn baby. How does he discern the truth? With what Erich Fromm would later call a biophile-necrophile test: ‘Cut the baby in half and give each woman half.’ The true mother—the biophile, the lover of life—is immediately prepared to give up her child rather than see it killed. The impostor—the necrophile—prefers to have a properly divided dead child than to see a living one belong to another. (1 Kings 3:16-28) The question this ancient parable poses to the Iranian diaspora is uncomfortable but necessary: What happens when your preferred strategy risks cutting Iran in half? When the escalation you advocate threatens to destroy the very infrastructure, institutions, and social fabric of the nation you claim to love? When military confrontation promises devastation to cities, displacement of millions, and generational trauma? Does the true lover of Iran step back from the brink, even if it means not seeing immediate regime change? Or does the pursuit of revenge—let us be honest enough to call it what it often is—justify any level of destruction, any amount of suffering, any price paid by people who had no role in the decision-making that led to this moment? This is not a question about whether the regime deserves to fall. That is not in dispute. This is a question about whether the commitment to Iran itself—to its people, its heritage, its future—takes precedence over the commitment to see specific individuals punished. It is a question about whether the discourse is driven by profound love for the living nation or by profound hatred for the existing government. Both can coexist, certainly. But when they conflict—when the path to punishment requires destruction, when the route to justice demands catastrophe—which impulse prevails? The answer to that question reveals everything about the true nature of the movement. The Iranian diaspora faces a moment of moral reckoning. It must decide whether it is advocating for the liberation of Iran or the annihilation of its enemies, whether it seeks the flourishing of its people or the satisfaction of its grievances. These are not the same thing. They have never been the same thing. And the persistent refusal to acknowledge this difference—the insistence on asking a tyrannical regime to cooperate with its own downfall while simultaneously threatening total destruction—reveals a fundamental unseriousness about the work of actual change. Common sense demands we confront reality as it is, not as we wish it to be. Conscience demands we ask whether our strategies serve the living or simply satisfy the aggrieved. And wisdom—the wisdom of Solomon—demands we recognize that sometimes the greatest act of love is not fighting for possession at any cost, but fighting for preservation above all else. The baby must not be cut in half. Iran must not be cut in half. The question is: who among us loves her enough to say so?Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast There is a particular cruelty in inflating the number of the dead. It does not honour the victims — it instrumentalises them. And when the inflation is eventually corrected, it does not restore credibility — it destroys it, along with every legitimate grievance buried beneath the exaggeration. This is not a hypothetical. It is a pattern with deep historical roots and a recognisable operational logic. And the recent trajectory of reporting around the January 8–9 events in Iran offers a textbook case — one that demands not merely journalistic scrutiny, but a rigorous analysis of how inflated atrocity figures function within the broader architecture of manufactured consent for war. The Numbers That Shifted In the immediate aftermath of the January crackdown, Iran International — the most prominent Farsi-language outlet operating outside Iran — reported figures exceeding 30,000 deaths. The number spread rapidly across social media, was cited by diaspora commentators, and entered the English-language information ecosystem with little interrogation. Then came the revision. A senior figure within the network acknowledged that the verified death toll stood at approximately 1,100, with some 6,000 additional names remaining unverified. The gap is not a rounding error. It is an order of magnitude — the initial claim of 30,000 was nearly thirty times higher than the confirmed figure of 1,100. To be clear: 1,100 confirmed deaths in a state crackdown is staggering and damning. It demands accountability, independent investigation, and justice. The revision does not diminish the horror. But the inflation — and the manner in which it was deployed — raises questions that extend far beyond journalistic carelessness. The question is not whether the Iranian state committed atrocities. It did. The question is why the scale of those atrocities needed to be inflated by a factor of thirty, who benefits from that inflation, and what political objectives it serves. The Mechanics of Narrative Inflation Why does the inflation matter, if the underlying event is genuinely horrific? Because inflated figures do not exist in a vacuum. They are not neutral errors that simply overstate a tragedy. They serve a specific narrative architecture — one designed not merely to document atrocity but to construct a hierarchy of evil in the public imagination. The psychological mechanism is well-documented in propaganda studies, from Harold Lasswell’s foundational work on wartime communication to the more recent scholarship on information warfare. When one actor is depicted as absolute evil — through numbers so extreme they overwhelm comprehension — two things happen simultaneously. First, the targeted actor is placed beyond the threshold of rational political engagement: negotiation becomes unthinkable, diplomacy becomes appeasement, and the only “serious” response becomes force. Second, and more insidiously, the conscience develops a perverse tolerance. Other atrocities, measured against the inflated benchmark, begin to seem lesser. Manageable. Even, in the darkest calculus of wartime rhetoric, acceptable. This is not speculation. It is the operational logic identified by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their analysis of the propaganda model: the systematic creation of “worthy” and “unworthy” victims, where media attention and moral urgency are allocated not by the scale of suffering but by the geopolitical utility of outrage. The inflation of Iranian casualties to 30,000 performs precisely this function. It establishes an emotional ceiling so high that other death tolls — verified, documented, often larger — register as background noise. Consider the broader context. Reports of a devastating school bombing in Minab — killing 168 girls — during a period of military escalation received a fraction of the coverage. The death tolls in Gaza, documented by international agencies under extraordinary constraints and verified through multiple independent methodologies, were met with scepticism or silence in the same circles that had uncritically amplified the 30,000 figure. This asymmetry is not coincidence. It is manufactured consent operating in plain sight. The logic runs as follows: if they killed 30,000 in two days, then what are a few hundred elsewhere? If this regime is uniquely monstrous, then other actors — however destructive — occupy a lower rung of moral urgency. If the Iranian state is beyond redemption, then whatever is done to its people in the name of liberation requires no moral accounting. This is how propaganda creates false equivalence by first creating false dis-equivalence. The inflation does not merely distort one event — it recalibrates the entire moral scale against which all other events are judged. The Historical Pattern: From Incubators to Interventions The use of inflated atrocity figures as a precursor to military action is not novel. It follows a pattern so well-documented that its recurrence should provoke not surprise but recognition. In October 1990, a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl known as “Nayirah” testified before the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers removing premature babies from incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital and leaving them to die on the floor. The testimony was devastating, widely broadcast, and cited by President George H. W. Bush and multiple U.S. senators in making the case for war. It was later revealed to be a fabrication, orchestrated by the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton on behalf of the Kuwaiti government-in-exile. Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. She had never been a nurse. The incubator story was a manufactured atrocity, and the Senate vote authorising military action passed by a margin of five votes — with seven senators having specifically cited the fabricated testimony. The parallels are not exact, but the structural logic is identical. A figure — whether a casualty count or a testimony — is introduced into public discourse at a moment of maximum political utility. It is amplified through emotional resonance rather than evidentiary rigour. It serves to collapse the space between “something terrible has happened” and “military intervention is the only moral response.” And when it is later corrected or debunked, the correction arrives too late. The political architecture it supported has already been built. In the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, the pattern repeated with allegations of weapons of mass destruction — claims that were not merely unverified but actively contradicted by available evidence, yet which were systematically amplified by media institutions that failed to exercise even rudimentary scepticism. The cost of that failure was not abstract. It was measured in hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, the destabilisation of an entire region, and the erosion of international legal norms that had taken decades to construct. The question that must be asked of the 30,000 figure is not whether it was an honest mistake. The question is whether it fits the pattern — and if so, whose strategic interests it serves. The Architecture of Moral Anaesthesia The most corrosive effect of inflated atrocity figures is not that they produce outrage. It is that they ultimately produce its opposite: indifference. This paradox is central to understanding how propaganda functions in the contemporary media environment. The initial shock of a massive figure — 30,000 dead in two days — produces a spike of moral intensity. Condemnations issue. Hashtags trend. The news cycle devotes its attention. But this intensity is inherently unstable. When the figure is revised downward — dramatically, embarrassingly — the public response is not a recalibrated concern proportional to the verified toll. It is fatigue. Scepticism. A vague sense of having been manipulated, which attaches not to the manipulators but to the cause itself. This is the cruelest irony. The people who inflated the figures did not strengthen the case against the Iranian state. They weakened it. Every legitimate grievance — the imprisonment of journalists, the suppression of protests, the systematic denial of civil liberties — is now contaminated by association with discredited claims. The regime’s own propagandists could not have designed a more effective weapon against its critics. The mechanism operates on what psychologists call “compassion fatigue” — the documented phenomenon whereby repeated exposure to suffering, especially when accompanied by a sense of helplessness or manipulation, produces emotional withdrawal rather than sustained engagement. But in this case, the fatigue is not incidental. It is engineered. Inflated figures, by their very nature, guarantee their own correction, and that correction guarantees disillusionment. The cycle is self-reinforcing: inflation, amplification, correction, cynicism, indifference. And indifference, in the calculus of those who manufacture narratives for war, is not a failure. It is the objective. An indifferent public does not protest military escalation. An indifferent public does not demand evidence before sanctions. An indifferent public accepts the framing that the target population is somehow complicit in its own government’s crimes — and therefore that whatever befalls it is, if not deserved, at least not worth opposing. Diaspora Media and the Credibility Trap None of this can be understood without examining diaspora media — and the structural conditions that gave it outsized influence over narratives about Iran. The Islamic Republic’s crackdown on domestic journalism — the imprisonment of reporters, the shuttering of outlets, the comprehensive censorship apparatus — created a vacuum. When a state systematically destroys its own information infrastructure, it does not eliminate the demand for information. It outsources it. Into the vacuum stepped foreign-based Farsi-language networks, many with opaque funding structures and editorial lines that track closely with external geopolitical interests. Their audiences are real. Their journalists often courageous. The grievances they document are frequently legitimate and deeply felt. But legitimacy of grievance does not guarantee accuracy of reporting. And this distinction — between the moral validity of a cause and the factual reliability of its advocates — is precisely where the credibility trap closes. When outlets operating under the banner of press freedom engage in the same distortions they condemn in state media — when they inflate figures, suppress corrections, and treat narrative utility as a higher value than accuracy — they do not strengthen Iranian civil society. They undermine it in three specific and measurable ways. First, every inflated figure, once corrected, becomes ammunition for the regime’s own propaganda apparatus. The Islamic Republic’s media machinery thrives on the claim that Western-backed outlets are instruments of foreign interference rather than sources of truth. Every demonstrable exaggeration validates that claim — not because it is universally true, but because it becomes specifically true in the case at hand. The regime does not need to prove a general conspiracy. It needs only to point to a specific, verified instance of inflation, and the discrediting effect radiates outward to contaminate all reporting from that source. Second, the exaggeration erodes the trust of the domestic audience that diaspora media purports to serve. Iranians inside Iran are not passive consumers of external narratives. They have their own networks, their own sources, their own capacity to assess claims against observable reality. When a figure of 30,000 is broadcast to a population that experienced the crackdown firsthand and knows — through direct observation, community networks, and local knowledge — that the number does not correspond to what they witnessed, the result is not radicalisation against the regime. It is alienation from the opposition. Third, the inflation degrades the international advocacy ecosystem. Human rights organisations, international legal bodies, and diplomatic institutions rely on credible casualty data to build cases for accountability. When the figures entering public discourse are inflated by an order of magnitude, these institutions face an impossible choice: cite the inflated figures and risk their own credibility, or cite the verified figures and appear to be minimising atrocities. Either way, the cause of accountability is damaged. The diaspora commentariat faces a choice it has largely refused to confront: whether its commitment is to truth or to narrative utility. In moments of crisis, these diverge sharply. And the pattern of choosing utility over truth has consequences that compound over time, eroding the very foundation on which credible opposition must stand. The Convergence: Inflation as Infrastructure for War The threads identified above — inflated figures, moral anaesthesia, the credibility trap, and the historical pattern of manufactured pretexts — are not isolated phenomena. They converge into a recognisable infrastructure: the media architecture that precedes and enables military intervention against sovereign states under the banner of humanitarian concern. This architecture has three components, each of which is visible in the current moment. The demonisation threshold. The target state must be placed beyond the pale of legitimate political engagement. This requires not merely documenting its crimes — which may be real and severe — but inflating them to a scale that forecloses any response short of regime change. The 30,000 figure accomplishes this. A state that kills 1,100 of its citizens is criminal and must be held accountable. A state that kills 30,000 in two days is an existential threat that must be eliminated. The distinction is not moral — both are atrocities. The distinction is strategic: only the latter figure justifies the scale of intervention being contemplated. The moral inversion. Once the target is sufficiently demonised, the ordinary moral calculus inverts. The deaths that intervention itself will cause — through bombing, sanctions, economic collapse, displacement — are reframed as the lesser evil. The population that will suffer is reconceptualised as the population being “saved.” This inversion requires the emotional groundwork laid by inflated atrocity figures: only against a backdrop of supposedly unprecedented evil can the predictable devastation of war be presented as mercy. The silencing of dissent. Anyone who questions the inflated figures, who calls for verification, who points out the pattern — is positioned not as a sceptic performing due diligence but as an apologist for atrocity. This is the most effective disciplinary mechanism in the propaganda architecture. It transforms the act of critical inquiry into a moral failure, thereby ensuring that the narrative proceeds unchallenged through the crucial window between the manufacture of outrage and the commencement of military operations. Each of these components has been deployed before — in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria. In each case, the pattern was visible in retrospect to anyone willing to look. The question is whether it will be visible in prospect this time — before the architecture has served its purpose and the irreversible consequences have begun. A Pattern, Not an Anomaly I want to be precise about what I am arguing and what I am not. I am not claiming certainty about any single number. Narratives around casualty figures in conflict zones are inherently contested. Verification is difficult, politically charged, and often incomplete. Reasonable people acting in good faith can arrive at different estimates, and the fog of crisis genuinely obscures the truth. What I am identifying is a pattern: the systematic inflation of figures in service of a narrative arc that leads, with grim predictability, toward the justification of military intervention. This pattern has identifiable structural features — the magnitude of inflation, the timing of its deployment, the resistance to correction, the alignment with geopolitical interests — that distinguish it from ordinary reporting errors. It is a pattern visible across decades and across conflicts, and its recurrence is neither accidental nor benign. The analytical framework for recognising this pattern is not new. Herman and Chomsky articulated it in 1988. The Nayirah testimony exposed it in 1992. The Iraq WMD debacle confirmed it in 2003. The Libya intervention reprised it in 2011. Each time, the pattern was identified after the consequences had become irreversible. Each time, those who identified it in real time were dismissed as naive, conspiratorial, or morally compromised. The dead deserve to be counted honestly — not because precision is a bureaucratic virtue, but because every fabricated number is a theft. It is a theft from the victims whose suffering is instrumentalised for strategic objectives they did not choose. It is a theft from the public whose moral judgement is deliberately corroded by cycles of inflation and disillusionment. And it is a theft from the future — because every successful deployment of this pattern makes the next one easier, the sceptics fewer, and the consequences more devastating. When we allow atrocity to be inflated, we do not magnify compassion. We manufacture indifference. And indifference, in the end, is what makes the next atrocity — and the next war — possible. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast A thoughtful critic argues that my essay commits a fundamental inversion by shifting moral scrutiny away from the conditions producing violence in Iran and toward diaspora Iranians who speak about that violence. The critique contends that diaspora members are not detached spectators but rather members of the same society with families and personal histories inside Iran, many forced into exile by political circumstances. When internal voices are constrained by communication restrictions and internet shutdowns, diaspora communities become essential conduits for information reaching international audiences—not symptoms of moral detachment but responses to enforced silence. The critic further argues that I collapse diverse diaspora perspectives into a monolithic caricature of “war advocacy,” stretching analytical concepts like “long-distance nationalism” beyond their scholarly purpose into sweeping moral indictments, and that I use humanitarian language to redirect suspicion toward those raising alarms while leaving the oppressive structures that produced the suffering “largely outside the frame.” Ultimately, the critique insists that diaspora Iranians constitute a transnational community working to ensure that when voices inside Iran are silenced, the world does not mistake that silence for consent. I trust this is a fair summary of the critique. The critique deserves a serious response because it raises important questions about diaspora voice, moral standing, and the boundaries of legitimate critique. However, I believe it fundamentally misreads both the target and the evidence of my argument across the three pieces I have written over the past few days (1, 2 and 3; full text of comment by Mr Hakami Zanjani below 3). Here is my response. On the Question of Inversion You argue that I shift moral scrutiny “away from the conditions producing violence and toward the people who speak about that violence.” This characterisation would be accurate if my essays addressed all diaspora speech about Iran. They do not. The target is precise and narrow: those who actively advocate for foreign military intervention as the solution to Iran’s crisis. This is not about “speaking about violence”—it is about calling for violence as policy. The distinction is not semantic. In “Trading in Pain: The Inside/Outside Iran Emotional Market,” I detailed how a specific segment of diaspora voices has constructed an economy of outrage where maximalist positions—particularly demands for military strikes—generate social capital, visibility, and political influence within echo chambers. These are not people merely “raising alarms about suffering.” They are prescribing bombs as the cure. On Connection and Moral Standing You write that diaspora Iranians “are not outsiders commenting on a foreign tragedy” but “members of the same society, with families, friends, and personal histories inside Iran.” This is absolutely true, and I have never disputed it. Connection to Iran, however, does not settle the moral question of what one advocates for Iran. Consider the testimony I presented in “While You Celebrate: A Voice from the Fire.” Hasan Aghamiri—a man with an eight-year prison sentence for his opposition to the regime, a man who stayed when he could have left—described in searing detail the deaths of 168 schoolchildren, the pulverisation of second-graders, the pregnant women with nowhere to go, the cancer patients without medicine. His words were not directed at all diaspora Iranians. They were aimed at those who celebrate strikes, who cheer each bombing, who treat civilian deaths as acceptable collateral in a geopolitical fantasy. Aghamiri himself has family. He has personal history. He has suffered under the regime. Yet his conclusion—”war is the most cowardly way to achieve freedom”—is precisely the voice that gets drowned out, vilified, and branded as “regime apologism” by the segment of the diaspora I critique. When you say diaspora voices “ensure that when voices inside the country are silenced, the world does not mistake that silence for consent,” I must ask: which voices? Because Aghamiri’s voice—urgent, anguished, anti-regime, and anti-war—is systematically silenced by parts of the diaspora, not amplified by them. On Diversity and Caricature You suggest I “collapse a wide range of political views into a single caricature of ‘war advocacy.’” Again, this would be fair criticism if I had claimed all diaspora Iranians hold uniform views. I have not. What I have documented is a specific pattern: advocates who explicitly call for military intervention, sanctions escalation, and “unconditional surrender” policies, and who treat any internal Iranian voice urging caution as treason. This is not a straw man. These voices dominate certain media platforms, lobby foreign governments, and have material influence on policy debates. To say “Iranian diaspora communities hold diverse perspectives” is true but evasive. The question is not whether diversity exists—it obviously does—but whether a particular segment within that diversity is advocating irresponsibly for policies that will kill people they will never have to bury. My answer, grounded in the historical record of Iraq, Libya, and Syria, is yes. On Academic Concepts and Moral Indictment You argue that concepts like “long-distance nationalism” and “dislocative nationalism” are “analytical tools” being “stretched…beyond their original meaning” when used as “moral indictments.” I disagree. These concepts were developed precisely to explain how geographic and psychological distance from consequences enables forms of political engagement that would be untenable if one had to live with the results. Benedict Anderson coined “long-distance nationalism” to describe how exiles can maintain intense political commitments to homelands while being insulated from the costs of their advocacy. Reza Zia-Ebrahimi’s “dislocative nationalism” explains how ideological frameworks can rhetorically remove a nation from its actual reality. These are not neutral descriptions—they carry implicit critique of the pathologies they identify. Using them to analyze diaspora war advocacy is not a stretch; it is their proper application. On the Frame of Moral Suspicion You write that my essay uses “humanitarian language…to redirect moral suspicion toward those who raise alarms about suffering while leaving the structures that produced that suffering largely outside the frame.” This is simply incorrect. In “Trading in Pain,” I explicitly analyze the dual pressure Iranians face: authoritarianism from within and maximalist diaspora demands from without. The regime’s brutality is not “outside the frame”—it is the context that makes diaspora war advocacy so morally grotesque. To demand aerial bombardment of a population already suffering under dictatorship is not “raising alarms.” It is compounding tragedy with catastrophe. The historical evidence is unambiguous. The Iraqi diaspora that lobbied for the 2003 invasion promised liberation and delivered a million dead, sectarian civil war, and ISIS. The Libyan National Transitional Council’s collaboration with NATO produced state collapse and slave markets. The Syrian opposition’s calls for intervention yielded half a million dead and the greatest refugee crisis of the century. These are not “alarms about suffering.” They are prescriptions for suffering, written by people who never paid the check. On Silence and Speech Finally, you argue that when internal voices are silenced by internet shutdowns, “diaspora communities often become one of the few ways through which information and testimonies can reach international audiences.” This is true and important. But there is a categorical difference between amplifying internal voices and substituting one’s own preferences for theirs. When Hasan Aghamiri uses a VPN bought with money he doesn’t have to beg the diaspora to stop celebrating bombings, and when that plea is met with accusations of collaboration, we are not witnessing diaspora filling a silence. We are witnessing diaspora enforcing a silence—ensuring that only one narrative (pro-intervention) is deemed legitimate, while lived testimony from the ground is dismissed as “regime propaganda.” That is not voice. It is ventriloquism. The Line That Must Be Drawn I want to be clear: I do not question the right of diaspora Iranians to speak about Iran. I do not deny their connection, their pain, or their stake in Iran’s future. What I critique—insistently, and without apology—is the specific advocacy for policies that will kill people these advocates will never have to face. You write that “diaspora Iranians are not ‘speculators in suffering.’” Some are not. But those who call for military intervention while living thousands of miles from the blast radius, who brand internal dissent as treason, who treat Iraq’s ruins as irrelevant precedent, and who have constructed entire media ecosystems to monetize and amplify maximalist positions—they are exactly that. They speculate in futures contracts written in other people’s blood. And when those people—like Hasan Aghamiri—beg them to stop, the least we owe them is to listen. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast The fracture at the heart of the Iranian crisis is not, at its deepest level, a disagreement about strategy, ideology, or even the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic. It is something far more elemental and far more difficult to resolve: a collision between two entirely different lived realities that have, over decades of displacement and repression, produced two incompatible languages, two irreconcilable hierarchies of suffering, and two mutually exclusive claims to the right to speak about what should come next. I have spent recent weeks writing about this fracture with an urgency that surprises even me — not because the underlying dynamics are new, but because the current war has brought them to a point of moral crisis from which there may be no easy return. The fall of the Supreme Leader, the decimation of senior military leadership, the bombardment of Tehran’s infrastructure, and the desperate signals of de-escalation from what remains of the regime have produced a moment of maximum volatility. And it is precisely in this moment that a vocal segment of the Iranian diaspora has reached a fever pitch of advocacy for total regime change through continued foreign military intervention — advocacy conducted, with striking consistency, from apartments in Los Angeles, conference rooms in Washington, and living rooms in Berlin. The asymmetry that defines this moment is absolute, and it must be named plainly. For those inside Iran, the current conflict is not a geopolitical abstraction or a long-awaited historical correction. It is written in a language that admits no euphemism: the language of rubble, of children’s bodies, of cancer patients without medicine, of pregnant women with nowhere safe to deliver. When Hasan Aghamiri — a man with an eight-year prison sentence for opposing the regime, whose anti-regime credentials are paid for in flesh, not rhetoric — spends seven million tomans on a VPN to tell the world that 168 schoolchildren were killed in a single strike, that a five-year-old girl in Tehran has been rendered mute by trauma, that fifty children’s bodies were never recovered because they were pulverised, he is not performing politics. He is bearing witness. And when he screams into the static that “war is the most cowardly way to achieve freedom,” he speaks with an authority that no amount of diaspora commentary can match, because he is standing in the burning building while others watch from the monitoring room. This metaphor — the burning building and the monitoring room — is not intended as an insult to those in exile. Exile is its own form of destruction: the slow erosion of identity, the grief of severance, the particular torment of watching catastrophe unfold from a position of enforced helplessness. I do not dispute this. What I dispute, and what I believe must be disputed with the full force of moral and intellectual clarity available to us, is the transmutation of that helplessness into a mandate for prescribing violence. The Iranian inside the country inhabits a world defined by the immediate and the mortal. The spectre of arbitrary arrest, economic asphyxiation, state violence, and the daily disappearance of neighbours and colleagues has pushed the collective psyche into what can only be called a psychology of survival. The Iranian abroad, for all the genuine anguish of dislocation, possesses something the other does not: distance. Distance from the immediate threat, and with it, the cognitive space to analyse, theorise, debate, and disagree. When the outsider speaks — even from a place of genuine solidarity — their words arrive inside the burning building as something close to an insult: the composed vocabulary of someone who has the luxury of composing themselves. From this asymmetry grows one of the most corrosive dynamics in Iranian political life: the transformation of suffering into a form of moral capital. To have stayed, to have endured, becomes not merely a biographical fact but a credential — the credential that supposedly confers the right to determine how resistance should be conducted and whose voice carries weight. The diaspora, in this framework, has forfeited its standing by leaving. And in the grammar of survival, leaving is indistinguishable from abandonment. Yet the insider’s totalising verdict carries its own distortion: the diaspora is vast and heterogeneous, containing the self-promoting and the self-effacing, the cynical and the genuinely devoted. To flatten that complexity into a single figure of the comfortable, complicit exile is to commit precisely the kind of reductive thinking that the insider rightly resents when directed at them. What I have been compelled to address in recent writings, however, is not the diversity of diaspora voices but a specific and identifiable pattern within them — a pattern that has acquired material influence over policy debates and that poses, I believe, a direct threat to the lives of the very people it claims to champion. This is the phenomenon of diaspora war advocacy: individuals and networks who actively lobby for foreign military intervention, who treat internal anti-war dissent as treason, who ignore or dismiss historical precedents, and who have constructed what can only be described as an economy of outrage in which maximalist demands for military strikes generate social capital within echo chambers. The political scientist John Keane, in his seminal work Violence and Democracy, observed that “the roads through the lands of violence are typically littered with brazen lying, hubris and corpses.” Across two major books, Keane has documented and protested against precisely this pattern: advocates who champion military intervention from positions of comfortable safety, thousands of miles from the wreckage they prescribe. The historian Reza Zia-Ebrahimi has anatomised a particular variant of this phenomenon in The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism, identifying what he calls “dislocative nationalism” — an ideology that rhetorically removes Iran from its geographical and cultural reality and drives some toward an embrace of external violence as vicarious revenge. Benedict Anderson’s concept of “long-distance nationalism” provides a further lens: the observation that distance from consequences does not diminish political passion but can, perversely, intensify it while stripping it of the moral weight that proximity to suffering provides. These are not abstract scholarly concepts deployed for rhetorical effect. They describe, with uncomfortable precision, the dynamics visible in the current crisis. When parts of the diaspora share celebratory posts with each military strike, when they frame bombardment as liberation, when they dismiss the testimony of people like Aghamiri as “regime propaganda,” they are enacting a pattern that history has catalogued with devastating regularity. The Iraqi diaspora’s role in building the case for the 2003 invasion produced not democracy but state collapse, sectarian slaughter, and a regional conflagration whose consequences are still unfolding. Libya’s post-intervention landscape features not pluralism but slave markets. Syria’s external opposition claimed to represent a people it had largely lost contact with, entered geopolitical games with the confidence of a government-in-waiting, and was seen from inside the rubble as simply another set of actors using Syrian blood as a bargaining chip. The lesson these cases offer is stark and unambiguous: when the diaspora mistakes its platform for a mandate, it does not merely fail to help — it actively deepens the wound. And the mechanism of that deepening is worth examining, because it operates not only at the level of policy but at the level of information itself. We are witnessing, yet again, the dynamics of what is often described as a post-truth environment: selective framing, partial narratives, and at times outright fabrication shaping public perception in real time. The impact of this informational distortion is profound. It not only influences international understanding but affects communities directly connected to the conflict. It is particularly painful to observe how prolonged experiences of repression and political frustration can lead some to interpret war through lenses of desperation, inadvertently normalising or endorsing outcomes that are neither lawful nor humanitarian. What William Cavanaugh called “the myth of religious violence” — the self-serving narrative that frames Western violence as rational while casting the Other’s violence as fanatical — finds its mirror image in the discourse of diaspora war advocacy. These advocates have constructed their own myth: that external military force represents liberation rather than destruction, that the current bombardment is a surgical correction rather than what it demonstrably is — the indiscriminate devastation of civilian infrastructure, industrial towns evacuated not for military reasons but because everything has been bombed, oil depots whose destruction does not weaken the regime but starves the population. The regime once told Iranians that sanctions were a blessing. Now, segments of the diaspora say war is a blessing. Both are lies paid for in blood — just not the blood of those telling them. Twenty-four million Iranians live below the poverty line. Aghamiri’s factory — food production, nothing strategic — was destroyed. Cancer patients cannot find medication. When Aghamiri draws the parallel that “sanctions killed us, war is killing us now,” he articulates a truth so simple and so devastating that it should function as an indictment of every comfortable exile who frames this catastrophe as opportunity. I have been asked, with some irritation, what I propose instead. The implication is that criticism of war advocacy is itself a form of complicity with the regime — that to oppose bombing is to endorse tyranny. This is a false binary of breathtaking moral poverty. A history of tyranny does not justify the emergence or endorsement of another form of it. The critical question is not whether the Islamic Republic deserves to fall — few serious analysts dispute the depth of its illegitimacy — but whether foreign military intervention has ever, in the modern history of the Middle East, produced the democratic outcome its advocates promise. The evidence is not ambiguous. It has not. Not once. The appropriate response to this evidence is not to insist that this time will be different, but to ask why the same prescription keeps being offered by people who will never pay its price. There is a line that must be drawn, and I draw it here: between the right to speak and the advocacy of policies that will kill people the advocate will never bury. Diaspora communities can and do serve as essential conduits for information when internal voices are constrained by communication restrictions and internet shutdowns. This function is legitimate, necessary, and deserving of protection. But amplification becomes something else entirely when it operates selectively — when it amplifies only those internal voices that align with pro-intervention narratives while branding anti-war testimony from people who have bled for the cause of freedom as “regime propaganda.” This is not information filling a void. It is narrative enforcement. It is the replacement of testimony with war cries. I write these words knowing they will be met with hostility from those who have let hatred enter their being to such a degree that their judgment has become flawed — who see day as night and night as day, who have, in Aghamiri’s devastating formulation, let hatred turn them into the very people they despise. I write knowing that I have already been the target of smear campaigns so virulent, so calculated, and so devoid of mercy that friends have whispered to me to retreat. I have chosen instead to keep a record — not for the courts of men, but for the sanctuary of my own conscience. I hold every word, every toxic profiling, and every betrayal in the light of my own memory, not for the sake of vengeance, but for the ultimate test of my own soul: that when the dust of this era has finally settled, I can look every friend and every foe in the eye and say that I refused to be defined by their hatred. The fracture between Iranians inside and outside the country is, in the end, the fracture of a society that has been under sustained, extreme pressure for more than half a century. It is the product of collective trauma, of histories of betrayal, of languages that have drifted apart under the pressure of incompatible circumstances. From Belgrade to Santiago, from Damascus to Tehran, this fracture has followed the same grammar in every society shattered by authoritarian violence and mass displacement. In Pinochet’s Chile, the exiled left spent years in mutual suspicion with those who had remained, yet it was ultimately the accumulated networks, legal expertise, and international relationships of that same diaspora that helped make Chile’s democratic transition possible. In the former Yugoslavia, diaspora communities simultaneously gave voice to victims and, in some cases, amplified the ethnic hatreds that produced them — before, in later years, contributing meaningfully to documentation, reconciliation, and the slow reconstruction of civic trust. The common thread is this: the gap between inside and outside does not close through argument, and it does not close through the assertion of superior suffering. It closes, where it closes at all, through a specific and difficult discipline — the willingness of each side to recognise the other’s pain not as a competitor to its own, but as a different expression of the same rupture. For the Iranian outside the country, this means something more demanding than the standard repertoire of diaspora activism. It means asking, with genuine honesty, whether any given act of political engagement serves the people inside or primarily serves the actor’s own need for relevance, absolution, or identity. There is a meaningful difference between amplifying the voice of an unknown prisoner and placing one’s own name on the poster. There is a meaningful difference between making resources available to those at direct risk and using those same resources to sustain one’s own political infrastructure. The most important thing the diaspora can do is to disentangle its own visibility from its usefulness — to understand that the two are not the same thing, and that confusing them is precisely what has eroded trust for so long. For those inside, the corresponding discipline is equally demanding: to resist the temptation of the totalising verdict, to recognise that not everyone who left did so lightly, and that exile is also a kind of devastation — different in texture but not necessarily lesser in weight. This recognition does not diminish the insider’s claim. It enlarges the conversation. I do not pretend to offer a programme. Programmes are cheap, and the current crisis is too grave for the pretence that any single voice holds the blueprint. What I offer instead is a moral orientation: that when internal voices urge restraint, the diaspora’s role is to listen — not to replace their testimony with war cries. That when the call for war comes from those who will never fight it, never flee it, never bury its victims, the appropriate response is not action but suspicion. That the speculators in other people’s suffering should be recognised for what they are. And that the sentence which has been the first stone of every bridge that was ever actually built between fractured communities — “you have lived a different kind of hell, and that hell was real” — remains, in its devastating simplicity, the only place from which reconstruction can begin. The children of Tehran cannot wait for our conferences and our communiqués. But they deserve, at the very minimum, that those who claim to speak for their future do not do so while advocating for their destruction. That is not a high bar. It is the lowest bar imaginable. And the fact that so many cannot clear it is the true measure of the moral crisis we face. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast There is a peculiar species of political actor that emerges from every fractured nation—those who, having escaped the inferno, appoint themselves firefighters from across the ocean and prescribe gasoline as the cure. They populate the comment sections, the conference panels, the corridors of foreign capitals, advocating with remarkable enthusiasm for missiles to rain down on neighbourhoods they will never see reduced to rubble. John Keane, the prominent political scientist and democracy expert at Sydney University, observed in his work Violence and Democracy that “the roads through the lands of violence are typically littered with brazen lying, hubris and corpses.” Across two major books—Violence and Democracy and The Life and Death of Democracy—Keane has extensively documented and protested against precisely this pattern: advocates who champion military intervention from positions of comfortable safety, thousands of miles from the wreckage they prescribe. His scholarship stands as a sustained warning against those who would cheer for journeys through violence they will never themselves undertake. The phenomenon represents what I have elsewhere called a failure to nurture “critical thinking across self-other dichotomies”—a moral dislocation so profound it resembles a clinical condition. One observes individuals who fled oppression now demanding that those who could not flee be subjected to the infinitely greater oppression of aerial bombardment. They speak of “liberation” while history’s catalog overflows with evidence that foreign military intervention invariably produces not democracy but state collapse, sectarian slaughter, and humanitarian catastrophe. Iraq, Libya, Syria—these names should function as cautionary epitaphs. Instead, they are forgotten footnotes in the ongoing performance of what Benedict Anderson termed “long-distance nationalism”: an intense political engagement with the homeland that remains conveniently insulated from the consequences of its advocacy. Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, the King’s College historian, has anatomised a particular variant of this phenomenon in The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism, identifying what he calls “dislocative nationalism”—an ideology that rhetorically removes Iran from its geographical and cultural reality. This worldview, he argues, drives some toward an embrace of external violence as vicarious revenge, a “graduation ceremony” in what he acidly terms “the curriculum of whiteness.” The suffering of others becomes not tragedy but karma; destruction becomes purification. What Zia-Ebrahimi describes is the endpoint of a psychology in which the advocate’s identity has become so entangled with grievance that the nameless millions who would pay the price have been abstracted into raw material for someone else’s political performance. Keane’s concept of “monitory democracy,” articulated in The Life and Death of Democracy, offers a framework for understanding what is lost when such voices dominate. Healthy democracies depend upon institutions that scrutinise power, that force accountability upon those who would exercise violence in the public’s name. The diaspora war advocate inverts this logic entirely. They demand violence while evading all scrutiny of their own claims. They call for accountability for the regime they oppose while accepting none for the catastrophic consequences of the policies they promote. They function as lobbyists for destruction without portfolio—accountable to no constituency that will bear the costs of their advocacy. More troubling still is the treatment of dissent. Any voice from within the suffering population that urges caution, that points to catastrophic precedents, that suggests perhaps those who will actually die deserve a voice—such perspectives are met with vilification. They are branded regime sympathisers, traitors, cowards. The dynamics mirror what Keane identified in his analysis of “communicative abundance” and its pathologies: in our media-saturated age, the loudest voices often drown out the most informed ones, and the performance of militant certainty becomes more valuable than the substance of wise counsel. The exile sitting safely in Los Angeles or London arrogates to themselves the exclusive right to define liberation and who may question its terms. What William Cavanaugh called “the myth of religious violence”—the self-serving narrative that frames Western violence as rational while casting the Other’s violence as fanatical—finds its mirror image here. The diaspora war advocate has constructed their own myth: that external military force represents liberation rather than destruction, that they speak for the oppressed population rather than about them, that their comfortable distance provides moral clarity rather than moral blindness. The pattern of dehumanisation Keane documented in his studies of “uncivil war”—where civilians become abstractions, where destruction loses its human dimension—infects not only those who drop bombs but those who call for them. In my own work on extremism and education, I have argued that the problem of violence cannot be addressed by projecting responsibility onto the Other. The same principle applies with devastating force to diaspora politics. The advocate who locates all evil in the regime they oppose, all virtue in the intervention they demand, has abandoned the critical rationality that makes genuine political analysis possible. They have embraced, in Popper’s terminology, a theory immunised against refutation—one where every failure of intervention proves only that more intervention was needed, where every civilian death proves only that the enemy was worse. History’s verdict on diaspora-backed intervention is written in the rubble of a dozen failed states. The evidence is not ambiguous. Those inside the burning building watch with rage and bewilderment as comfortable exiles demand still more gasoline. They cannot fathom how anyone could be so detached from reality, so immunised against shame, so willing to gamble with lives not theirs to wager. When the call for war comes from those who will never fight it, never flee it, never bury its victims, the appropriate response is not action but suspicion. These are not freedom fighters. They are speculators in other people’s suffering, and they should be recognised as such. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast A VOICE FROM THE FIRE: What the Diaspora Doesn’t Want to Hear “They killed 168 children in a school. They hit the school twice. TWICE.” These aren’t statistics from a news ticker. These are the words of a man whose voice cracks between fury and grief, who paid seven million tomans—money he doesn’t have—for a VPN just to tell you this. His name is Hasan Aghamiri. He’s inside Iran, under bombardment, with an eight-year prison sentence hanging over him. The Saturday the war started? That was supposed to be his court date. While you debated geopolitics from your apartment in Los Angeles or Berlin, he was dodging missiles in Tehran. “I sent the photos to Alireza,” he says, his voice trembling. “Look at them if you have the guts.” Fifty children’s bodies were never found. Pulverized. Second-graders turned to dust. A five-year-old girl sits somewhere in Tehran right now, mute—her speech stolen by a missile that landed in the city center. She has no words left. Neither does her mother. Here is what Hasan Aghamiri wants you to understand: You, who cheer from abroad. You, who share celebratory posts with each strike. You, who believe war will bloom into spring. “War is the most cowardly way to achieve freedom,” he screams into the static. “The ones who start wars are those who don’t have the guts to pay the price of peace.” He draws the parallel no one wants to hear. The regime once told Iranians that sanctions were a blessing. Now, some in the diaspora say war is a blessing. Both are lies paid for in blood—just not theirs. “Sanctions killed us! War is killing us now! They said sanctions are a blessing, you say war is a blessing! WE ARE DYING!” His two sisters’ children died during sanctions. The medicine that could have saved them never arrived. They could have lived. The reality on the ground: 24 million Iranians are below the poverty line. Industrial towns have been evacuated—not for military reasons, but because everything has been bombed indiscriminately. Hasan Aghamiri’s factory? Food production. Nothing strategic. Gone anyway. “When they hit the oil depots, they are hitting the people.” Cancer patients can’t find medication. Pregnant women are helpless—there’s nowhere to go, no hospital that’s safe. A man Hasan Aghamiri called told him: “Where can I go? I don’t even have money for provisions. Should I go be a burden on someone’s family while my wife and kids stay under the fire?” Three minutes. That’s how close Hasan Aghamiri came to death. He was walking on the next street over when a building was hit. Pedestrians—men, women, children—were torn apart before his eyes. “If I had gone earlier, I wouldn’t be here now. And you would have said, ‘Where was he?’ I WAS IN THE STREET. A NORMAL STREET.” What enrages him most isn’t the bombs. It’s the silence. “Children are being killed and you don’t even offer a single word of condolence! You’re looking for someone to blame. For that mother, what difference does it make who is to blame? Her child went to school. He’s dead.” He isn’t asking you to support the regime. He has eight years of prison time to prove his opposition. Hezbollahis smashed his car and called him a hypocrite. He has bled for change. “We’re getting hit from the inside, and we’re getting hit from you.” He stayed. When others with the means left, he stayed. His conscience wouldn’t let him abandon his workers, his friends, his community. “I’m not saying you’re without a conscience. You were able to leave. I couldn’t.” The final plea: “Don’t fool yourselves. If you have let hatred enter your being, your judgment has become flawed. You see day as night and night as day. Why did you let hatred turn you into the very people you despise?” Here, extremists beat the drums of war. There, parts of the diaspora beat them too. And in the middle? Ordinary Iranians—workers, mothers, first-graders—shredded in the crossfire. Over a thousand dead. Ninety percent are civilians. Not officials. Not soldiers. People. “I swear to God, war will not bring democracy to this country. It won’t bring freedom. This winter will not become spring.” Before you share your next post celebrating strikes, look at the photos he sent to Alireza. Second-graders. Little girls in school uniforms. Their bodies—what remains of them. Ask yourself: Is this your liberation? Is this your spring? Because it looks like winter to the people bleeding on the streets of Tehran. And they are asking you—begging you—to see them. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Iran has infrastructure. Iran’s infrastructure is not the Islamic Republic’s infrastructure. It’s that simple. Even if the IRGC uses the bridges, hospitals, schools, and internet, this infrastructure still belongs to Iran. Even if we call the IRGC “occupiers” (strange, isn’t it? A label Israel has worn proudly for decades now gets slapped on the IRGC through media sleight of hand!), this infrastructure still belongs to Iran. Destroying it doesn’t hurt the IRGC or the autocrats. Destroying it destroys everyone. No ifs, ands, or buts. Iran has internet. Iran’s internet gets shut down; it gets filtered. The solution is not to obliterate the entire internet infrastructure—the solution lies elsewhere. You claim to be “the voice of Iran.” The voice of which Iran? An Iran that doesn’t exist? An Iran in some parallel universe where no civilian infrastructure has been damaged? An Iran where no civilians have been killed? An Iran where the dead have already been convicted in trials that never happened, executed through methods that violate every law? Which Iran is yours? Whose voice are you, really? In your Iran, the voices from Minab’s school must not be heard, because what matters more—what’s more acceptable—is amplifying the Islamic Republic’s crimes so loudly that the aggressor’s atrocities fade into the background or become forgivable! That’s your Iran! You object to internet shutdowns and instability during the most horrific war conditions? That’s a legitimate objection. But if you can’t see the context of aggression, if blatant violations of the UN Charter are acceptable to you, then you’re a hypocrite. You’ve buried your conscience. You say you’re the voice of Iran? Anyone who truly speaks for Iran and wants freedom wouldn’t say “keep hitting them”—they would immediately demand a ceasefire and an end to hostilities. Here’s the litmus test for your humanity: Are you calling for an immediate ceasefire, or are you saying “let it continue until the regime falls, then we’ll figure something out”? Be honest with yourself. Your issue isn’t Iran’s freedom. It isn’t the security of Iran’s people. Your issue is the non-existence of the Islamic Republic, even if it costs the destruction of all of Iran. The city is polluted. Tolerance and pluralism require one fundamental condition: both sides lay down their weapons. When someone comes at you with a drawn sword intent on killing you, you are not only morally and rationally obligated to defend yourself—you’re obligated to strike back, and you’re justified in doing so. Yes, we must draw clear boundaries, or we’ll become victims. Our path diverges from those who want Iran’s destruction while speaking the language of solidarity with Iran. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast I write this in English because the collapse of our shared morality is not a local tragedy; it is a human one. I am calling for a spotlight, not merely on the hypocrisy that surrounds me, but on something far more frgile: the survival of our humanity in an age of organized hate. For three years, I have lived under the shadow of a relentless execution of character. I have been the target of smear campaigns so virulent, so calculated, and so devoid of mercy that they seem to have no floor, no end, and no conscience. Friends, moved by fear for my well-being, have whispered to me to be cautious, to retreat, or to offer an “olive branch” to those who seek only to set the tree on fire. Believe me, I have tried. I have reached out until my hands were bruised, only to find that some hearts are currently unreachable. But I am doing something else now. I am keeping a record—not for the courts of men, but for the sanctuary of my own conscience. I am holding every word, every toxic profiling, and every betrayal in the light of my own memory. I do this not for the sake of vengeance, but for the ultimate test of my own soul. I am a witness to this darkness so that one day, when the dust of this era has finally settled, I can look every friend and every foe, every relative and every stranger in the eye and say: I remember what was done, and yet, I refuse to be defined by your hatred. I forgive you. My politics are not on trial here. My humanity is. We are living through a Great Betrayal—a moment where the sacred bond between fellow beings has snapped. I am reeling from the weight of it, but I refuse to let my heart turn to stone to match the stones being thrown at me. The question I leave for you is the same one I wake to every morning: In the face of such ferocity, are we still capable of keeping our conscience intact? Or will we let the cruelty of others become the architect of our own ruin? Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS