On the difference between criticism and abuse, and what the Iranian diaspora has done with it
It sounds like an obvious thing to say, and it is not. Telling criticism apart from cynicism takes training. It takes education. It takes a degree of self-discipline that nobody is born with and few of us are ever taught. Most of what follows is obvious in the same way, which is to say obvious once stated and almost universally ignored in practice.
Disagreement Is the Engine
Disagreement is normal. It is natural and inevitable, and it is the mechanism by which anything is ever found out. Knowledge grows through criticism and through nothing else; a claim nobody is permitted to attack is a claim nobody can improve. So disagreement has to be more than tolerated. It has to be encouraged, defended, given air and given somewhere to happen. Any environment in which disagreement is filed as treason or as sabotage has arranged for the death of its own knowledge, and it will get what it arranged for.
You do not owe me an argument, either. You are entitled to read a thousand words of mine and reply that you accept none of it, and give no reason at all. ‘I disagree’ is a complete sentence. Stop there and you have done nothing wrong.
Where It Stops
The line falls one step further on, and it is not a fine line.
It falls where disagreement becomes an allegation that cannot be sustained. Where it becomes a smear. Where it becomes an attack on a person’s character carried out in place of an attack on their reasoning. At that point the thing has changed category. It is exposed intellectually, it is exposed ethically, and in most of the countries where Iranians now live it is exposed legally.
Freedom of speech is not a licence for slander. It is not a justification for character assassination. Nobody’s right to speak has ever included a right to invent, and no quantity of conviction that you were wronged first will convert the one into the other.
None of this is a matter for leaders, or parents, or teachers. Every member of a civil society that intends to stay healthy has to police it in their own writing, and has to say something when they watch it done by people they otherwise agree with. That second part is the hard one, and it is where almost everybody fails.
What the Diaspora Did With It
Iranian communities, inside the country and outside it, and the diaspora above all in the political weather of the past few years, have largely stopped telling criticism apart from abuse. They have grown comfortable with curated material, with misinformation, with disinformation, and with filing the whole of it under dissent. It is not dissent. It is what replaces dissent when a community decides it has suffered enough to be excused from thinking.
Two days ago I wrote in this series that a boarding pass is not a confession, and that no Iranian owes anyone an account of a journey home.[1] Within a day of a short follow-up note, a reply arrived to tell me that the Islamic Republic keeps a spokesperson in London, and that the spokesperson is me.[2] I set it down without a name, because the name is the least interesting thing about it. Anyone who has written in Persian about Iran in the past three years keeps a folder of these. The folder is the argument.
The Thing I Have Not Said Plainly
I have written about this machinery for two years and I have written about it in the third person. I have described how a well-organised chorus gets counted as though it were the evidence, how closeness to suffering is converted into a ranking of who may speak, and how criticising the culture of the opposition gets read as siding with Tehran.[3] I kept myself out of those essays because I thought the argument travelled further without me in it.
I have changed my mind, so here it is plainly. I have been the target of slander, of disinformation and of character assassination. It has been sustained, it has at times been organised, and a great deal of it has come from people who were very close to me. The cause in every instance was disagreement, and nothing that could be put to a test. It has extended to sexual abuse aimed at the women in my family, which is where this language always arrives once it has run out of arguments and has not run out of appetite.
I say it now because expecting other people to name what is being done to them, while I decline to name what has been done to me, is not a position I can hold.
Two Flags, One Habit
The state does this. So does the opposition. Both are fluent in it, and both excuse themselves the same way, which is that they were wronged first and the ordinary rules are therefore suspended in their favour. Being wronged is not a credential. It issues no permit to break a legal norm, an ethical norm or an intellectual one, and the people who claim it loudest are generally claiming it on behalf of somebody else’s suffering.
That reasoning has an old name. A system that cannot be argued with is closed, whatever flag flies over it, and closure is not a thing anybody borrows briefly and hands back.[4]
What Is Actually Being Asked
Very little, which is what makes the refusal so telling.
Say you disagree. That is the whole of what is required, and it is entirely enough. What follows it, when what follows it is an invented crime or an invented payroll, is not criticism and never was, and the fact that it was typed in Persian by an Iranian does not make it a contribution to Iranian political thought.
Then teach the distinction, beginning with yourself, because it is a discipline and disciplines lapse. Teach it to the generation that will inherit the country and the quarrel together, and that deserves to inherit a language clean enough to do the work.
Declaration on AI use: the argument, the claims and the judgements in this essay are my own, dictated in a recorded planning note and set out in a written draft, and reproduced here in my own framing. An AI assistant was used to verify the reporting behind the factual claims, to supply the citations, and to enforce house style. No claim, source or conclusion originates with the model (Claude Opus 5).
Keywords: character assassination, critical thinking, defamation, disinformation, freedom of speech, Iranian diaspora, Karl Popper, open society, political language, public discourse
[1] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘A List Is Not a Law’, The Twin Wisdoms, 27 August 2026, https://twinwisdoms.org/a-list-is-not-a-law/.
[2] From replies under a note on my personal Facebook account, 29 August 2026. The writer is not named here, and that is deliberate.
[3] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘The Algorithmic Militia’, The Twin Wisdoms, https://twinwisdoms.org/the-algorithmic-militia/; ‘Trading in Pain’, The Twin Wisdoms, https://twinwisdoms.org/trading-in-pain-inside-outside-iran-and-the-emotional-market-of-politics/; and ‘Breaking the Mirror’, The Twin Wisdoms, 18 August 2026, https://twinwisdoms.org/breaking-the-mirror/. Publication dates for the first two are not given here and should be supplied at proofs.
[4] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Two Kinds of Certainty’, The Twin Wisdoms, 19 August 2026, https://twinwisdoms.org/two-kinds-of-certainty/. The distinction is Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1945).
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