Manoto, Foreign Money, and the Constituency That Was Never There When Manoto television ceased satellite broadcasting on 31 January 2024, the event was widely read as a financial failure, and the channel’s subsequent history did little to dislodge that reading. A diminished online operation followed; then, in February 2026, even live programming was suspended […]

 On the Equation That Turns a Nation Into Acceptable Rubble Do we distinguish between Iran and the Islamic Republic? Are they one and the same? It sounds like a pedant’s quarrel, a hotspot for social media. It is not. And you may be surprised which side of it you find yourself on. Begin with […]

 A paradox haunts contemporary intellectual life, one that demands we examine ourselves with uncomfortable honesty. Here stands a senior scholar in the humanities—trained in textual analysis, ethics, even mysticism—whose political views are so flawed, so deeply troubling, that we find ourselves asking: where did the critical thinking go? And more disturbingly: how did these […]

SAVAK, State Torture, and the Dangerous Nostalgia of Forgetting In cities across the West—Los Angeles, London, Munich, Regensburg—a strange phenomenon has taken root. At demonstrations ostensibly calling for a free Iran, young men and women don SAVAK T-shirts, wave the emblem of the Shah’s secret police, and chant slogans glorifying a security apparatus that tortured, […]

A Critique of the Iran Ledger’s “Sanctions as Market Control” I have spent the better part of a decade building an analytical framework that demands one thing above all else: that claims earn their keep. Every concept I deploy—the emergency mind, the occupation myth, the algorithmic militia—is coined, defined, stress-tested against counter-examples, and offered up […]

I was there—present online—when Dr. Fatemeh Sadeghi and Hossein Hamdieh, speaking from London and Tehran respectively during Iran’s internet blackout, began discussing something that has haunted me for months. An interrogator assigned to question young protesters arrested during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising had confessed his bewilderment. He could not understand what they were saying. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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, […]

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: […]

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 […]

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 / […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Think about this situation carefully—don’t run away. Be honest with yourself and with your conscience. This is not an easy test. It is not meant to be. The measure is simple and merciless: beyond our political divisions—whatever they may be—can we refuse to forget that we are human? Here is the test. Imagine you are […]

The fracture between Iranians living under the Islamic Republic and those in the diaspora is not, at its core, a political disagreement. It is something much older, cruder, and far more difficult to resolve: a collision between two entirely different lived realities that have, over decades, produced two incompatible languages, two irreconcilable hierarchies of suffering, […]