The Aryan Ghost: What the War on Iran Should Teach the Arab World

Image credit: picture alliance / ZUMAPRESS.com | V. Valcic. Source: Qantara.de (Deutsche Welle)

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 should be heard — clearly, and with alarm — not only by Iranians but by every Arab government, every Muslim-majority society, and every observer of the global far right’s metastasising reach.

The slogan is not incidental. It is foundational. It tells you, with remarkable economy, exactly what kind of political order its proponents envision: one built not on pluralism or democratic accountability, but on racial hierarchy and the explicit repudiation of the region in which Iran has existed — geographically, culturally, linguistically — for millennia. To call oneself Aryan in this register is not an innocent nod to ancient history. It is a deliberate alignment with the most toxic strands of racial nationalism the twentieth century produced — and that the twenty-first is reproducing with gathering speed.

Arab states may look at this movement and see an Iranian internal affair. They would be making a catastrophic miscalculation. The racism that powers this ideology does not stop at a border. To these ideologues, “Arab” is not a nationality — it is an epithet, fused with “Muslim,” and both are fused with everything they consider inferior and civilisationally alien. The bitterness between Arab capitals and the Islamic Republic may be deep, but what is rising on the horizon should concern them far more: a movement whose founding mythology requires their dehumanisation.

The Global Architecture of Hatred

This is not a local aberration. It is the Iranian variant of a global phenomenon — the resurgence of ultra-far-right movements that share, across borders and languages, a remarkably consistent grammar of exclusion. The Aryanist monarchists in Los Angeles and London speak the same dialect of civilisational supremacy as white nationalists in Charlottesville and neo-fascist movements across Europe. The vocabulary differs; the structure is identical. There is always a glorious, racially pure past that was corrupted. There is always a contaminating Other — Arab, Muslim, immigrant — whose presence explains the fall from grace. And there is always the promise that purity, once restored, will restore greatness.

The racism does not confine itself to Arabs. Afghans have been targeted with escalating venom — dehumanising rhetoric framing them as subhuman and disposable. Tajiks have recently entered the crosshairs. The circle of contempt expands, as it always does in such movements, because the logic of purity is insatiable. Once you define your civilisation by what it excludes, there is no stopping point. Today it is Arabs. Tomorrow it is Afghans. The day after, it is any Iranian who does not conform to the prescribed racial fantasy.

The Weaponisation of “Left” and the Death of Dialogue

There is another term that travels in the company of this ideology, and it deserves equal scrutiny: “left.” In the hands of these movements, “left” has been emptied of all political content and refilled as a vessel of pure contempt. It does not describe a political tradition or a philosophical orientation. It is an abusive shorthand that demarcates anyone who opposes their programme. When they call someone “radical left,” think twice. The target may have no association with any left movement whatsoever — a centrist, a liberal, a conservative who believes in basic decency, or simply someone who objects to racism. In their lexicon, opposition to hatred is itself a radical act.

This weaponisation of language is not incidental to the project; it is the project. It renders critical engagement impossible. It creates a binary universe in which every voice is sorted into glorification or vilification — and in which reasoned disagreement does not exist. It is the rhetorical signature of authoritarianism dressed as liberation, and it should be recognised for what it is: not a political argument, but the annihilation of the conditions under which political argument is possible.

Worse Than What It Promises to Replace

Here is the warning that must be stated without equivocation. Whatever the Islamic Republic’s crimes — and they are vast, documented, and damning — the political order that these Aryanist movements envision is not its correction. It is its mutation into something potentially more dangerous: an ethno-nationalist state built on racial supremacy, allied with global far-right currents, and animated by a contempt for the region’s peoples that would make coexistence — diplomatic, economic, cultural — structurally impossible. The Islamic Republic, for all its brutality, operates within a framework that at least theoretically affirms solidarity with Muslim-majority nations. What replaces it, if these movements prevail, would affirm nothing of the sort. It would define itself against its neighbours, not among them.

Arab governments that see in the Islamic Republic’s potential collapse an opportunity to settle old scores must ask a harder question: what rises from the rubble? If what rises is a regime animated by Aryanist ideology, steeped in anti-Arab racism, and integrated into the global far-right network, then the strategic calculation changes entirely. This is not a space for settling scores. It is the breeding ground for intolerance that will not stop at Iran’s borders — because it was never only about Iran.

Keep your eyes open. These terms, these flags, these slogans — they need to be identified and understood viscerally. “We are Aryans, not Arabs” is not a cultural statement. It is a political programme — a declaration of civilisational war against the Arab and Muslim world, wrapped in the language of national liberation. It is repeating itself with stark clarity before our eyes: not as a distant echo of the twentieth century’s darkest chapter, but as its revival, armed with social media, diaspora networks, and the dangerous illusion that racial purity has ever, in the history of nations, produced anything other than catastrophe.