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Whose Infrastructure, Whose Celebration?
Podcast On Reza Pahlavi’s Odesa narrative and the laundering of a war’s human cost In Odesa last week — at a forum convened on the principle that bombing a nation’s grid, ports and apartment blocks is a crime against that nation — Reza Pahlavi reportedly told his hosts that the Iranian people celebrated when “the… — read more
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Dead Air: A Throne on Subscription
Podcast 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… — read more
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Built from Scratch
Podcast 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… — read more
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Without the Adjectives: What the Evidence Reveals About Pahlavi’s Political Project
Podcast 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… — 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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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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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
