Stone Age-ism

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.