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The Zwartboek Mirror
Podcast 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… — read more
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War Unseen, War Unleashed
Podcast 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… — read more
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The House Slave at the Microphone
Podcast 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… — read more
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A Vendetta with a Flag
Podcast 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… — read more
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The Copernican Revolution of the Iranian Mind
Podcast 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… — read more
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Wounded, Not Defeated: On the Endurance of a People and the Failure of Shortcuts
Podcast 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… — read more
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Je Me Souviens: After Mahshahr
Podcast 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… — read more
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Iran’s Digital Dead End: Why Internet Shutdowns Guarantee Strategic Obsolescence
Podcast 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… — read more
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Why Reza Pahlavi Still Matters
Podcast 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… — read more
