Islamic Ambi­tions and Impe­rial Imagi­na­tions: The Iranian Revo­lu­tion in the longue durée

On the last day of February 2026, the world woke up to the news of a joint mili­tary strike of Iran by American and Israeli forces at the order of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu—the largest aerial campaign in recent history by the two count­ries. A few short hours later, these same leaders announced the death of Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, alle­gedly under the rubble from the thirty bombs that were dropped on his compound at the center of Tehran. The news was offi­ci­ally confirmed later by the Iranian tele­vi­sion in a state­ment issued by the National Secu­rity Council. In the mean­time, two very contras­tive sets of images started to appear on tele­vi­sion screens: one showed Iranians inside and outside of the country dancing and honking on the streets, chan­ting anti-government slogans, and welco­ming the inva­ders; another showed pro-regime crowds mour­ning the death of their leader in Tehran, Beirut, Baghdad, Karachi, Kashmir. The New York Times ran this head­line: “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Hard-Line Cleric Who Made Iran a Regional Power, Is Dead at 86.”

For the last few weeks, I have been waking up every day, going to my cell­phone to get the latest update on Iran, fran­ti­cally scrol­ling through the news and analyses throug­hout the day, and going to bed with a deep sense of worry and uncer­tainty as to what might happen across the globe while I am in sleep. Without excep­tion, every day started with images and stories of the young men, women, and children massacred brut­ally by govern­ment agents and militia, with parents mour­ning their fallen children, dancing, chan­ting, and reci­ting mythical poems in deep pain and agony, and with pundits promi­sing the imme­diate down­fall of the Islamic regime. The inva­sion by Israel and the U.S. seems to be a first step in that direc­tion, and people have every right to be happy and to cele­brate. I find myself baffled, confused, and worried, however. What follows is an attempt to explain why.

50 years of upri­sings in Iran

Iranians are in revolt—yet again. For the last 150 years, the modern history of Iran has been punc­tuated by protests, rebel­lions, and upri­sings of various dura­tions, inten­si­ties, and outcomes: the consti­tu­tional revo­lu­tion of 1905, the shel­ling of the newly estab­lished parlia­ment by the Qajar king Mohammad Ali Shah in 1908, the upri­sing in the reli­gious city of Mashhad against the impo­si­tion of chapeau hats on men by the foun­ding monarch of the Pahlavi Dynasty Reza Shah in 1935, the left- and liberal-leaning protests of the early 1950s, the right- and religious-instigated upri­sing of 1963, the revo­lu­tion of 1979 that brought the Islamic regime to power, the violent clashes of 1981 between regime militias and armed groups, urban unrests in 1992 and 1995, student protests of 1999, the Green Move­ment of 2009 to chall­enge a rigged elec­tion, the economically-driven protests of 2017 and 2019, the Women, Life, and Freedom upri­sing of 2022, the recent upri­sing of early 2026 along with parallel rallies by Iranian diaspora across the globe, and between all of these big and small student protests, strikes by nurses, teachers, truckers, and pensio­ners, not to speak of mass execu­tions, extra-judiciary assas­si­na­tions, forced tele­vised confes­sions, and fights between youth, women, and the mora­lity police of the Islamic govern­ment on a day-to-day basis—a dense colorful pattern of poli­tical action by a suffe­ring but relent­less people, which is hard not to appre­ciate and admire, indeed.

While socio-economic, poli­tical, and cultural grie­vance has been a constant throug­hout this period, a pattern of rising frequency, inten­sity, and geogra­phic expan­sion of protests, along with growing state violence is discer­nible throug­hout the roughly half-a-century rule of the Islamic regime. The apex of this trajec­tory, thus far, was the murde­rous killing of tens of thou­sands of men, women, and children across the country on January 7-8, 2026, in the hands of the mili­tary and secu­rity forces of the govern­ment, aided by foreign merce­na­ries from Afgha­ni­stan, Iraq, and Lebanon.

These events have given rise to a coll­ec­tive sense of grief, rage, and anxiety among the public, and to sober ques­tions among obser­vers about the future of the Islamic regime and, more poignantly, the future of Iran as the birth­place of one of the oldest civi­liza­tions on the globe.

While it is hard to make solid predic­tions, it behooves us as obser­vers, intellec­tuals, and citi­zens of a globa­lized huma­nity to step back and draw on “surprise and distance,” in the words of the great histo­rian Fernand Braudel, “those important aids to compre­hen­sion [that] are both equally neces­sary for an under­stan­ding of that which surrounds you—surrounds you so evidently that you can no longer see it clearly,” to make sense of the events. What is it, we may ask, that surrounds us so evidently that we cannot see it clearly at the current moment in Iran and around the globe?

What surrounds us and we cannot see

Here is a quick snapshot of what surrounds us evidently: A reli­gious regime, riding on the wave of public discon­tent with the Shah’s regime in the 1970s, comes to power with the promise of economic prospe­rity, social free­doms, and a repu­blic. What it deli­vers instead is a broken economy in the grip of misma­nage­ment, corrup­tion, infla­tion, and poverty, an oppres­sive poli­tical system under the auto­cratic rule of the clergy, and sustained viola­tion of the basic human rights of various social groups (women, children, ethnic and reli­gious mino­ri­ties, social and envi­ron­mental acti­vists, artists and intellec­tuals, prisoners, LGBTQ indi­vi­duals, even foreign tourists and visi­tors). As a result of these poli­cies and prac­tices, the country’s envi­ron­ment and water resources are in critical distress, forty percent of the popu­la­tion has fallen below the poverty line, the value of the currency has dropped by about 20,000 times since 1979, eighty percent of the exports (inclu­ding national resources such as oil) are in the hands of elites and olig­archs connected to the regime, para­sitic foun­da­tions control 55% of the GDP in the name of “anfal” with no accoun­ta­bi­lity to the public, and the bulk of the remai­ning income is allo­cated to mili­tary spen­ding and to the support of regional proxies.

In response to these dete­rio­ra­ting trends, the public and various social and poli­tical groups have tried all means of enga­ge­ment and civic parti­ci­pa­tion to express their demands and grie­vances, all of which fell on deaf ears, pushing more segments of the society to street action. In fact, the recent protests were set in motion by small bazaar merchants, deemed as tradi­tional supporters of Islamic rule, but they soon exploded into an all-out poli­tical upri­sing across the country, with explicit slogans against the regime and the supreme leader. A novel element also emerged quickly on the scene in support of the exiled son of the deposed Shah and mili­tary inter­ven­tion by the U.S., ulti­m­ately leading to the massacre of January 8 and 9^th.

This, in brief, is what surrounds us. But what is it that we don’t see clearly in Braudel’s words? In thin­king about this ques­tion, I would like to draw on the two aids that Braudel offers for compre­hen­sion, asking what surprises have been in store in the unfol­ding of these events, and how we could distance ourselves from the poli­tics of the moment to under­stand them from a histo­rical perspective.

Surprise: Demo­graphy, Monarchy, and Imperialism

Let us start with surprises, of which there are many, but three stand out in parti­cular: the demo­gra­phic makeup of the protes­tors, the rise of the monar­chist alter­na­tive, and the alacrity of foreign inter­ven­tion. These are inter­re­lated and under­stan­dable only in conjunc­tion with each other, but no less surpri­sing each in their own right.

Of Villains and Victims

The massacre that took place on the streets of Iran in January 2026 was enabled by a blanket order from the supreme leader to “put the rioters in their place.” The ensuing violence by the opera­tives of the regime was unmat­ched, . It was a blind violence applied indis­cri­mi­na­tely to citi­zens regard­less of age, gender, social status, and even their posi­tion vis-à-vis the protests. The elderly, teen­agers, and even children were turned into legi­ti­mate targets. Anyone on the street was marked whether they were protes­tors, bystan­ders, shop keepers, or first respon­ders. Women were pulled by their hair, kicked in the head, and stabbed with machetes. A fire­fighter was shot to death while carrying a wounded protestor to safety. Wounded indi­vi­duals were taken away from hospital beds to be inter­ro­gated or executed. Even doctors and nurses were the targets of violence while performing their duties. The explicit aim was to kill, not to control. All kinds of weapons and ammu­ni­tion were used to this end by the secu­rity forces: rifles, machine guns, pellets, knives, machetes, snipers—you name it. The total number of casu­al­ties is yet to be deter­mined, but numbers run to tens of thou­sands, inclu­ding children. This was violence without limit!

Equally telling is the demo­gra­phic distri­bu­tion of the masses, accu­ra­tely repre­sented by the more than 50,000 indi­vi­duals arrested: 27% under 18, 77% under 30, and 82% single. Of these, 65% belonged to the middle class, 32% to the lower class, and only 3% to the upper eche­lons of the socio-economic groups. What is striking about these statis­tics is not its uneven socio-economic distri­bu­tion, which suggests that a large segment of the popu­la­tion joined the protests for poli­tical rather than economic reasons, but the alar­mingly young age of the protestors.

The high-school age teen­agers, often referred to as Gen Z, is a popu­la­tion with no poli­tical expe­ri­ence or alle­gi­ance, no sense of history, no memory of the past, and deeply influenced by the fads and fashions offered by the surroun­ding media envi­ron­ment. Equipped with cell­phones and social media accounts, it enjoys a strong sense of entit­le­ment to its own percep­tions, with little respect for autho­rity. Whether we cele­brate or casti­gate these tenden­cies, we cannot deny the agency of these young people who turned into victims of violence not so much by their own choice, but by the dictates of a very vola­tile and high-temperature environment.

By the same token, this gene­ra­tion can be easily provoked to action and swayed in a desired direc­tion by loud voices, of which there is plenty in the current media ecosystem. Among these voices, the ones with funding and logi­stic support get the lion share of audi­ence atten­tion. In recent times, with offi­cial ideo­lo­gical media in Iran failing disas­trously, that share has gone to foreign-funded alter­na­tive media such as Iran Inter­na­tional—a well-managed foreign-funded multi­l­in­gual tele­vi­sion network, which serves as a plat­form for the pro-monarchist move­ment in Iran.

Of Kings and Kingmakers

The media land­scape provides a key expl­ana­tion for the sudden promi­nence of Reza Pahlavi, whose rise as the de facto “leader” of the current upri­sing has caught many obser­vers by surprise, given his scant record of accom­plish­ments as a public figure or a private indi­vi­dual. Having lived in exile since he was a teen­ager, Pahlavi has appeared on the poli­tical scene at every turn when there was an upri­sing against the Islamic regime. In 2009, for instance, he posi­tioned himself as a staunch supporter of the Green Move­ment, which was led by Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister of the Islamic govern­ment. More recently, in February 2023, in the after­math of Women, Life, Freedom move­ment, Pahlavi was part of a broad alli­ance that came to be known as the George­town Coali­tion, but that fell apart rather quickly due to internal disagree­ments. His role changed drasti­cally in the current move­ment, and his name turned into a symbol of unifi­ca­tion among vast segments of the popu­la­tion inside and outside of Iran, with large crowds in hundreds of large and small towns across the country chan­ting slogans such as “This is the final battle, Pahlavi will return,” or even “Long live the Shah.”

It was within this back­drop that Reza Pahlavi called for public demons­tra­tions on January 7 and 8. The wisdom of the call is a matter of bois­te­rous bicke­ring between his supporters and his detrac­tors who criti­cize him for lack of stra­tegic thin­king and for sending defen­se­less people to a slaugh­ter­house. Those criti­cisms, however, do not seem to have nega­tively affected his follo­wers, who put the blame of the violence justi­fiably on the Islamic regime. That senti­ment partly explains why his later call to the Iranian diaspora for demons­tra­tions on February 14, 2026, brought hundreds of thou­sands of people to the streets of major cities in Europe and North America in an impres­sive show of orga­nized soli­da­rity. The same senti­ment was on full display in late February, when pro-monarchist slogans were heard from students at nume­rous univer­si­ties in Iran—a deve­lo­p­ment that caught many by surprise, given that univer­si­ties have tradi­tio­nally been hotbeds of left poli­tics in Iran.

This turn of direc­tion can be mainly attri­buted to two inter­re­lated narra­tives actively cons­tructed and vigo­rously promoted by the monar­chist move­ment. One is a conspi­racy theory about the demise of the Shah in 1979 as the outcome of a vicious plot by Western powers, espe­ci­ally demo­crats in the United States, who were keen on punis­hing the monarch for his role in the oil embargo of 1973. In this narra­tive, the Shah is portrayed as the victim of Western conspi­racy and Jimmy Carter as the villain who drove him out and brought Khomeini to power. Like all conspi­racy theo­ries, the narra­tive is partly supported by factual but scant “evidence”—e.g., the relo­ca­tion of Khomeini from exile in Baghdad to Paris, which gave him a free plat­form for spre­a­ding his word and his influence; the G7 summit in Guad­a­lupe that swit­ched the support of big powers away from the Shah to his oppon­ents; the subse­quent dispatching of General Hauser by the Carter Admi­nis­tra­tion to Iran to neutra­lize the mili­tary; and so forth. What is lost in this narra­tive is that the Western powers did not plan the revo­lu­tion, rather they reori­ented them­selves only after Iranian people took to the streets in the millions throug­hout 1978, leading to the self-exile of the Shah in December of that year. In fact, Jimmy Carter saluted the Shah on the New Year’s Eve of that year, describing his realm as an island of stabi­lity in the region. Unless we think that the U.S. Presi­dent had lied with a flat face a year earlier, leaving the world and his stron­gest regional ally in the dark, there is no reason to believe that he had any clue about the immi­nent threat of a reli­gious insur­gency. By suggesting the oppo­site, conspi­racy theo­rists put the horse of revo­lu­tion behind the carriage of geopolitics.

This global conspi­racy theory is further tied to another anti-intellectualist narra­tive about “57ers” (refer­ring to the year 1357 in Persian calendar when the revo­lu­tion happened), which portrays the oppon­ents of the Shah as, at best, idiots and, at worst, trai­tors who did not appre­ciate his moder­niza­tion project, follo­wing instead a reac­tionary cleric such as Khomeini. Little do the monar­chist propon­ents of this narra­tive talk about the fail­ures of the Shah to sustain­ably distri­bute the wind­falls from the oil boom among the popu­la­tion, his growing autho­ri­ta­rian tenden­cies, the atro­ci­ties of his secret police, and many other short­co­mings and mistakes that brought people to the streets in 1978.

Despite the blatantly narrow, biased, and lopsided character of these narra­tives and conspi­racy theo­ries, they have found a recep­tive audi­ence among the public, inclu­ding large segments of the educated class, whose memo­ries of years of bloodshed and violence by the Islamic regime have left them with a distorted memory of the past. In this respect, as in many other parts of the world, the Iranian situa­tion provides yet another case in current global poli­tics where “histo­rical memory has become another thing to fight over,” as the histo­rian Erika Pani put it recently.

Of Savages and Saviors

To compli­cate things further, the monar­chist move­ment has gone further, invi­ting foreign inter­ven­tion in Iran in the form of mili­tary inva­sion. The irony of this posi­tion is not only in its undoing of a basic tenet of the long Iranian struggle for auto­nomy and liberty, but also in the fact that it resorts to foreign inter­ven­tion while at the same time blaming foreig­ners for the rise of the Islamic regime. The only way out of this para­do­xical irony is to bring American dome­stic poli­tics into the picture, suggesting that the Islamic regime owes its fortunes to soft Demo­crats, not to hawkish Repu­bli­cans. The biggest propo­nent of this narra­tive in American poli­tics is Donald Trump, who keeps blaming his Demo­cratic prede­ces­sors, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, for leni­ency toward the regime in Tehran. In Trump’s impe­ria­list imagi­na­tion, the people of Iran, left to their own devices, cannot libe­rate them­selves from the rule of savage mullahs; they need the U.S. and Israel, as the harbin­gers of demo­cracy, to rescue them.

To make matters more surpri­sing, the continued degra­da­tion of living condi­tions, along with oppres­sion and violence, has aligned a large portion of Iranians behind the idea of an attack on their home­land by foreign powers. And not just any foreign power, but someone like Benjamin Netan­yahu who is under inves­ti­ga­tion at home for corrup­tion charges and also charged of war crimes by the Inter­na­tional Court of Justice. In one of the most tragic twists in contem­po­rary history, the impe­ria­list logic has found broad hearing among the Iranian popu­lace, a large segment of whom seem to not only welcome the inva­ders as saviors, but to vehe­mently plea for their inter­ven­tion. Other than false propa­ganda, of course, we have largely the Islamic regime to thank for this gross misper­cep­tion and misstep on the part of the public. The fever of inter­ven­tion has gone so high that the hawkish U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham is remade into “Uncle Lindsey” in the hands of fascist-leaning monar­chists in Iran.

The jubi­la­tion of the public over Khamenei’s death at the onset of foreign inva­sion, thus, repres­ents more than anything their rage and anger toward the Islamic regime, in the same way that the dancing of mour­ning mothers wearing white on their children’s graves a few weeks earlier demons­trated their grief and outrage. The inimical approach of Khamenei toward Israel and the West, along with his regional and global ambi­tions to spread the power of Islam, brought the country to a dead end, leaving the public with what seems to be an easy and fast way out—namely, foreign inva­sion. The same cannot be said about pundits and poli­ti­cians who milked on public outrage and anger to take agency away from them and put it in the hands of foreign powers. In so doing, they radi­cal­ized the situa­tion in an irrever­sible manner, putting the country at the risk of violence and disin­te­gra­tion, while at the same time gambling on their own poli­tical future.

What are we to make of these ironies and surprises in the makeup and direc­tion of the Iranian struggle for liberty? Can we inject some measure of sense into this by gras­ping on Braudel’s second aid to comprehension—namely, distance?

Distance: Geography, Geopo­li­tics, and Civilization

A key contri­bu­tion of Braudel to histo­rio­graphy is his concep­tion of histo­rical time as consis­ting of three diffe­rent struc­tures: the event, the conjunc­ture, and the longue durée. Throug­hout his vast and inno­va­tive writing, Braudel showed how these struc­tures deter­mine human action, limi­ting it in a nega­tive way in both mate­rial and mental ways. Without going into theo­re­tical details, I would like to think of current happenings—the upri­sing, its suppres­sion, and the foreign inva­sion of Iran—as related events in the Brau­de­lian sense, taking place within the conjunc­ture of the economic and geopo­li­tical deve­lo­p­ments of the globe in the last five decades—in specific, the simul­ta­neous rise of autho­ri­ta­rian popu­lism and reli­gious funda­men­ta­lism around the globe (Islam in the Middle East, Chris­tia­nity in the U.S. and else­where, Judaism in Israel, Hinduism in India, and even Buddhism in East Asia), the fail­ures of neoli­beral struc­tural adjus­t­ments to bring prospe­rity to deve­lo­ping econo­mies (inclu­ding Iran) and the dawn of neo-mercantilism in geoe­co­no­mics, and, finally, the emer­gence of networked computer tech­no­lo­gies and new media that has brought the thea­ters of war into people’s living rooms, while also enab­ling asym­me­tric warfare in a “demo­cra­tized” use of inex­pen­sive drone tech­no­lo­gies made available on a large scale. The rise and fall of the Islamic regime in Iran embody these conjunc­tural deve­lo­p­ments in a rather ironic way, invo­king the image of a Crusade 2.0.

These conjunc­tural cycles can be further unders­tood within the perspec­tive of the longue durée. In his writing, Braudel high­lights geogra­phic and geolo­gical struc­tures, along with civi­liza­tional pheno­mena, as long-term cons­traints on histo­rical processes. The loca­tion of Iran as the geopo­li­tical bridge between the East and West is a well-understood aspect of its geography. To that we can add its geophy­sical wealth as home to vast oil, gas, and mine­rals reserves that are in sharp demand in an incre­asingly compu­te­rized world.

Three years ago, in the pages of this journal and in the context of the Women, Life, Freedom upri­sing, I briefly described the modern poli­tical history of Iran as a power struggle between monarchs and mullahs. That struggle, I argued, has defined, for the most part, the alter­na­tives of power available to Iranians in their long fight for auto­nomy and liberty. That same struggle, I hasten to add, also deter­mines the reper­toire of action mobi­lized and used by Iranians throug­hout their long-term fight with these two powers.

Reper­toire of action in social move­ments refer to the limited, routi­nized, and cultu­rally learned set of tools that acti­vists use to express their grie­vances, make claims, and chall­enge authority—e.g., strikes, rallies, peti­tions, street demons­tra­tions, and so forth. Being inhe­rited from previous strug­gles, these tool­kits tend to be stable over time, and are adapted to specific poli­tical, social, and tech­no­lo­gical contexts. They, thus, mani­fest at once histo­rical conti­nuity and context dependency.

In modern times, Iranians have crea­tively used a vast reper­toire of actions in their ongoing struggles—from sit-ins and strikes to rallies, arson, and armed resis­tance, and from poetry, jokes, and slogans, to cuisine, clot­hing, and other visible and invi­sible forms of symbolic expres­sions such as the flip­ping of mullah turbans in 2022. Along with these, a specific form of protest, with reli­gious roots, took shape in 1978 in the cele­bra­tion of the death of fallen “martyrs” in funeral proces­sions and on their 40^th day, gene­ra­ting a sustained momentum throug­hout the protests. In the current upri­sing, this ritual has been revived despite the regime’s best efforts, but with an inte­res­ting twist. Rather than wearing black, reci­ting Koranic verses, and cler­gymen giving sermons, people dance fran­ti­cally over the graves of their loved ones, wearing white clot­hing, with parents and others giving fiery spee­ches or reci­ting mythical poetry from the Shahn­ameh (“The Book of Kings”). Borrowed and brought toge­ther from a combi­na­tion of pre-Islamic Persian prac­tices and modern pop culture, these symbols are invoked as expres­sions of Iranian natio­na­lism against Islamic rule.

Monar­chist media invest on these symbols, embel­li­shing them with rheto­rical flou­rishes about Iranian and Aryan excep­tio­na­lism. In the process, the reper­toire of action is incre­asingly shif­ting toward a natio­na­list, even chau­vi­nist, discourse, provo­king images of a glorious past lost to Arab inva­sion and Islamic domination.

Since the outbreak of the war, the discourses and prac­tices on all the sides of the conflict are moving toward martyrdom and a war of reli­gions. On the American side, news is emer­ging about troops being indoc­tri­nated with analo­gies of Arma­geddon. On the regime’s side, Khamenei is portrayed as a martyr who sacri­ficed his life in the service of Islam. And on the pro-monarchist side (inside and outside the country), similar symbols are invoked, although with diffe­rent names and pedigrees.

This cultural turn to natio­na­lism, combined with the poli­tical turn to the “right” and the stra­tegic turn to impe­rial inva­sion, has raised concerns among some obser­vers for the pros­pect of the rise of fascism, espe­ci­ally in light of the exclu­sio­nary and abso­lu­tist tenden­cies among monar­chists. It is prema­ture to reali­sti­cally evaluate the actual likeli­hood of such a pros­pect, but that should not lull anyone to a false sense of compla­cency. Three years ago, I warned of three possible co-optations that might hijack the Iranian struggle for auto­nomy and liberty, in the same way that the revo­lu­tion of 1978 was hija­cked by reac­tionary mullahs: neo-fascism, liberal femi­nism, and faux radi­calism. Those possi­bi­li­ties are, sadly, still in place.

In that vein, diffe­rent obser­vers and intellec­tuals resort to histo­rical analo­gies in recent and distant times in a despe­rate attempt to make sense of the current situa­tion: post-imperial France as a model of Bona­par­tism, Weimar Germany as a model of fascism, the Soviet Union as a model of systemic collapse, North Korea as a model of a closed society, the Arab Spring as a model of co-opted social move­ment, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afgha­ni­stan as models of social disin­te­gra­tion and civil war, Vene­zuela as a model of impe­rial inter­ven­tion and compro­mise, Chile as a model of peaceful consti­tu­tional reform, and so forth. The fact that all of these, except the last one, repre­sent diffe­rent scena­rios of failure speaks to the dire situa­tion that Iranians face at this critical moment of their history.

Pros­pect

To counter these scena­rios, oppo­si­tion forces in Iran should act urgently but also cautiously and crea­tively. Dogmatic adhe­rence to old doctrines and ways of thought have proven to be inef­fec­tive in mobi­li­zing the masses. This is espe­ci­ally a chall­enge for secular groups and the tradi­tional “left” that conti­nues to under­stand the world in outdated terms of the Cold War, framing the situa­tion as an oppo­si­tional conflict between “the West and the East.” The reali­ties of our world are much more nuanced, the players are much more hete­ro­ge­nous, and the options are much more diverse to lend them­selves to this kind of binary logic. Caution must also to be taken not to exclude from the tran­si­tional process the mass of belie­vers and regime supporters, who consti­tute 15-20% of the popu­la­tion (i.e., 10 to 15 million people). The cycle of violence must be broken, despite the monar­chist rhetoric of revenge.

People in Iran, espe­ci­ally the youth, do not seem to have any inte­rest in ideo­lo­gical fights between “right” and “left.” They aspire to live a digni­fied “ordi­nary” life. In their minds, the left is closely asso­ciated with anti-imperialism, which is in turn asso­ciated with the “axis of resis­tance” of the Islamic regime. The youth don’t want to have any of this. Nor do they heed the binary logics of inside and outside, insider and outsider, dome­stic and foreign. The January 2026 massacre in the hands of the govern­ment has upended their under­stan­ding of these boun­da­ries as a matter of fact. Little wonder that the large ensemble of secular and repu­blican groups has found such a small follo­wing among the young popu­lace, relin­quis­hing a lot of its poli­tical capital to pro-monarchists. To inspire the public and the youth toward common goals—welfare, tole­rance, the envi­ron­ment, and a thri­ving humanity—the thin­king and the discourse in the secular oppo­si­tion has to be adjusted to the reali­ties of the contem­po­rary world, remin­ding people of these shared values. Thank­fully, people are incre­asingly disil­lu­sioned by reli­gious rhetoric and Islamic ambi­tions. Islamic ambi­tions and impe­rial imagi­na­ries are doomed to fail in the long run, as they have in the past. The prevai­ling gap provides a ripe moment for poli­tical, inspi­ra­tional, and intellec­tual work.

For those of us who believe that history is made by people, not by poli­ti­cian ploys and plots, these events are a painful reminder that our belief might only work in the long run—“at the end of the day,” so to speak. In the short run, it is plans made in war rooms, decis­ions made on the batt­le­field, messages deli­vered to the public, and images appearing on screens that make history. This is the reality of war, as of many other social pheno­menon of our era. You don’t need to be a naive realist or to subscribe to real­po­litik in order to provide a soci­ally realist account of history.

That is the account that I seek to provide of the present moment. Unfort­u­na­tely, this doesn’t give us a crystal ball to predict the future. All that it does is to show—behind the veil of poli­tics, the cloud of messa­ging, and the fog of memory—what the stakes are in this critical moment for Iranians, for the region known as the Middle East, and for the global huma­nity, in general. And, thus, I remain as worried, baffled, and tormented as I was at the beginning.