Iran Between Tyrannies

Iran Between Tyrannies

_Words by_Elham Rahmati

I returned home from a thirteen-year migration in November 2025. During the years, I had made sure to visit Iran at least a month or two every year. Beyond the need to see family and friends, I was wary of becoming out of touch with the realities of a country I planned to return to when the time was right. And I suppose I couldn’t have picked a better time. In January, as I was busy taking driving lessons and figuring out what I want to do with my life, hell broke loose in Iran. The kind that takes more than a few drop-ins in and out of the country to make sense of. That is why, writing this essay, I rely on not just my understanding of the situation but also those of others more grounded in social and political work in Iran in the past decades.

After yet another currency collapse, the initial unrest began at the Aladdin Mall in central Tehran. The following day, as I was walking along Valiasr Street, I noticed a group of women chanting as they walked, calling on “honorable” Iranians to join them. Male shopkeepers watched with admiration, saying, “women will free us all.” Yet none joined them. I didn’t join either. Fifteen years ago—during the 2009 Green Movement—I would have not only joined but tried to lead the crowd. That hesitation stayed with me in the days that followed. When Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed monarch, issued a two-day call for protests on January 8th and 9th, I knew for certain that I wasn’t going anywhere. I refused to join protests in which voices coming from every street, alley, rooftop, and window across the country were already co-opted by yet another despotic figure.

A glance at social media or simply listening to public sentiment made it frighteningly clear many were going to take up the call to this “final battle.” Now, as the number of deaths and arrests rises by the day, I think about what people were told versus what they faced. Pahlavi framed it bluntly: “this is a war and war has casualties.” But the presence of children and elderly parents in those streets suggests people weren’t preparing for war—they were answering what they believed was a call to mass uprising backed by concrete promises.

After all, Pahlavi had promised that 50,000 defectors had contacted him to help topple the regime. There were reports from Iran International—a highly watched channel funded by Israel manufacturing consent through propaganda for regime change—that Pahlavi is in direct communication with the Trump administration and he was expected to meet Trump at Mar‑a‑Lago. Pahlavi claimed to be making preparations for his victorious arrival in Iran. He repeatedly appealed for swift, decisive U.S. intervention in their support. He appealed for satellite internet to break the regime’s communications blockade. Through Iran International, these appeals were repackaged as promises—

none of which materialized.

And then thousands were killed—not yet in a war, but in a state massacre.
The state claimed that Mossad-linked operatives infiltrated what otherwise had begun as peaceful protests and that a lot of the brutality is to be pinned down on them. They cited Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s social‑media post during the early days of the protests in which he explicitly referenced Mossad agents “walking beside” Iranian demonstrators:_“Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them.”,_and a Farsi‑language X (Twitter) message posted by an account described as associated with Mossad who urged Iranians to take part in nationwide protests and stated support for demonstrators “not just from afar and verbally, but also in the field.”

It’s certainly not out of habit for the CIA or Mossad to infiltrate movements and steer them in directions best suited for their interests and use any means necessary in that regard. It is also not out of habit for Iran’s military and security apparatus to shoot people—even children—dead during peaceful protests. But even if infiltration occurred, would that exonerate the Iranian state in its central responsibility for the violence, when it maintains absolute control over security forces and still fails to protect its people? Absolutely not. The state either actively caused the killing of citizens or, by neglecting its duty to protect them, allowed circumstances that led to their deaths. The negligence to protect isn’t just a failure of state security, but a failure in creating conditions in which millions of people feel so thoroughly abandoned and sociopolitically alienated that they see their only path to liberation in reinstating a patriarchal discredited monarchy, shaped by decades of exile, resentment, and entitlement, whose Israel-flag-worshipping clan’s fascist rhetoric already gestures toward a “bloodbath” for those who refuse to align with them.

Weeks before the deadly uprising, a slightly reworked line from Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto (1848) appeared everywhere: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.” Interestingly, this rallying cry was invoked by the Pahlavist camp, who blame leftist ideologies for the occurrence of the 1979 Revolution—a revolution in which leftist organizations like the Tudeh Party, Fedayeen, People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), National Democratic Front (NDF), Line Three, Peykar, and the Organization of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class played crucial roles in overthrowing the Shah, only to be sidelined and prosecuted by the very Islamic Republic they helped bring into being. These groups barely held power, yet today they receive a widespread share of hatred from regressive opposition voices, perhaps because any line of thought in pursuit of egalitarianism is incompatible with the royalist restoration project as much as it is with the current order.

Setting the irony aside, what does this used-out-of-context phrase actually communicate? It speaks to the expendability of life under conditions where the majority of people—particularly women, working classes, ethnic minorities, and migrants—are marginalized by political, economic, and cultural institutions that claim to serve the public while functioning primarily for a few. This turn toward fascism’s seemingly straightforward but actively devastating solutions is rooted in a long history of betrayal by a state that has continuously denied its citizens basic rights, including the right to protest, organize, and dissent. Pahlavism mirrors this callousness, both in its deceptive calls for protest and its post-bloodshed rhetoric: On February 14th, during the Munich demonstration, it was proclaimed in a speech that “Today Iran has spread a carpet of blood for Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi.” If the state treats its citizens as expendable in service of maintaining its grip on power, Pahlavism treats them as expendable in service of seizing it.

The erosion of faith in the 1979 revolution, once a powerful symbol of popular hope, is the product of both internal failure and external pressure. U.S.-led economic sanctions—designed for furthering its imperial interests, the reasons and damages of which couldn’t possibly fit in this text—have deepened Iran’s economic crisis, not only through depressed revenues but more destructively by fostering a new oligarchy—state-connected middlemen who circumvent sanctions, siphon export earnings abroad, and entrench systemic corruption. Yet the worst damage stems from the state’s own policies: decades of neoliberal reforms, privatization, and shock-therapy austerity that have left over 90 percent of workers in precarious employment while inflation and food prices spiral beyond reach. The monopolization of media and the appropriation of anti-imperialist discourse once very much at the core of the people’s Revolution, combined with decades of educational policies emphasizing conformity over analytical and critical inquiry and the systematic elimination of spaces for free political debate through the forceful silencing of journalists, students, and social, political, environmental, and women’s rights activists, have further constricted the discursive field in which long-term civil movements can be imagined as a viable path forward.

Over the weeks of internet shutdown, as I scrolled endlessly through state media—the only accessible source of information online—I came across a clip of an American woman asking with genuine confusion, “How can Iranian people, when they see what America has done to Iraq, how can they think that America is going to save the day?” Her question is echoed by anti-imperialist voices fervently countering the myth that is “humanitarian intervention,” and warning that the future being conjured up for Iran in the genocidal imprint of imperial imagination is not one of economic prosperity or of “becoming another Qatar or the UAE” (Gulf monarchies built on migrant exploitation), a reverie entertained by Iran’s wealthy elite, but far more closely resembles what was done to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya––countries shattered by intervention, with their infrastructures destroyed, societies pushed into civil war, and their resources extracted while millions were displaced or killed.

It’s important to assert that people don’t pray for U.S. bombs or step into the streets because they necessarily calculate the odds or accept the costs, but because the anguish of waiting itself has come to resemble a form of slow death that can no longer be tolerated. When legitimate social rage exists without the organizational capacity to channel it toward transformation, the political field becomes fertile ground for saviors who offer lies as shortcuts. Despite catching many off guard, the turn to authoritarian solutions, each under different cloaks, is a predictable symptom of societies caught between an order that refuses to change and the absence of organized alternatives within the country that can lead the change. It is then that resistance ceases to be a practice of living and becomes instead that of a noble death as one’s sole offering to the cause, a tragic death rigorously mourned and sanctified by those who remain.

It is in this context that Pahlavism—which previously was hardly taken seriously by advocates of civil movements, within Iran or in the diaspora, as an opposition force warranting significant concern—found its opening. In 2023 and in the midst of the Jin Jiyan Azadi movement, many of us were surprised by a fraction of people who saw Reza Pahlavi as a valid alternative, or at least someone who could advocate on official grounds as a representative of the people in Iran. Pahlavi formed a coalition with other prominent Iranian opposition figures with the declared aim of unifying them around a transition roadmap for a post-Islamic Republic State. The coalition didn’t last long; of course, the “crown prince” could not tolerate having an equal voice as others. Later, in June 2025, Pahlavi rejoiced in Israel’s 12-day war on Iran that killed over a thousand people and destroyed state infrastructures. He issued a call to uprising during the war (yet another “final battle"), which wasn’t taken up, because who has time for an insurrection while taking shelter from bombs? It was then that I naively thought, “This is it! He’s been seen for the pawn he is and no more do we have to worry about our movements being hijacked by him and his war-loving agendas.” What I had missed was that warming up to the idea of returning to monarchy isn’t due to society’s optimism towards the Pahlavi project or restorative nostalgia alone. For those inside Iran who feel stripped of their political agency, he appears not as an ideal vision of democracy and justice but as a mere exit strategy: a top-down swap of leadership that leaves all underlying structures of oppression intact. No need to rebuild institutions, no challenge to economic inequality, and no grassroots organizing required. Just replace the Supreme Leader with a Shah and hope for the best. Here, authoritarianism is not understood as reproducing the cycle of repression but as the only tool that might work against the current state. It’s fighting tyranny with tyranny.

The risk extends beyond the odds of Pahlavi seizing power, but in the normalization of authoritarian logic among the seemingly growing number of people who support him, even if only as the leader of the “transition era.” As Tehran-based leftist political analyst and economist Mohammad Maljoo argued in a recent brief analysis, we hear in monarchist discourse an echo of the Islamic Republic’s founding slogans calling for the monopolization of legitimacy and the equation of disagreement with treason. Both reduce politics from a competition of programs to the elimination of alternatives, turning the leader into a messiah and the critic into a threat. This is not yet fascism in power, Maljoo notes, but it is fascist potential taking root in language and thought—a rehearsal of exclusion before any power is captured. The Islamic Republic itself began this way in 1979: not with actual fascism but with fascist potentials, with discourse that normalized monopoly before it became a state apparatus. If this logic spreads unchallenged, we license its return under any name, even if the specific monarchist project fails.

Yet the relationship between the Islamic Republic and Pahlavism is more complex and sinister than simple opposition. Both the state and the Pahlavist project push the same idea: that grassroots movements are incapable of meaningful revolt and that only foreign military intervention can bring change. When that intervention fails to materialize—whether due to the state’s defense capabilities or geopolitical calculations—those demoralized by Pahlavism’s narrative are left with no alternative, thereby achieving precisely what the Islamic Republic needs: a population unable to organize against it. It’s no accident the state settled on Pahlavi as its opposition of choice, particularly after the Jin Jiyan Azadi movement showed how a genuinely grassroots movement with no single leader to arrest or kill won concrete victories through sustained civil disobedience. And guess what slogan is now banned from the monarchist-led protests: Jin, Jiyan, Azadi.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

***

This text, up until here, was written at the beginning of February. Three weeks later, we live in a much different reality with much higher stakes. On February 28th, Israel and the U.S. launched a joint invasion on Iran, beginning by the mass killing of 168 school children in the city of Minab; and bombing the residence of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, whose news of death I learnt from the cheers of joy coming through the windows. I didn’t participate in the celebration as it was certain the terror would not end there. At the beginning of the month, Iran’s political horizon was held captive by a false choice between the status quo and its crowned opposition. Our challenge was not only to reject the present order, but to imagine a patient path forward committed to memory, responsibility, moral clarity and democratic possibility, built through the slow, difficult work of organizing from below that does not trade one catastrophe for another.

Now, in the midst of a war with no clear end in sight, we have different choices to make. After yet another week of internet shutdown, I opened my instagram to watch a demonstration in Berlin with a banner that said: “We do not choose between our killers.” Beautiful slogan shrouded in morality that one chants in the absence of fighter jets flying over one’s home. When that’s the case, you either go up the roof and cheer the pilots in their quest for your destruction, or you stay home, temporarily put aside your feelings and all the contradictions and you hope for the victory of those forces fighting to keep you, your friends and family alive. When survival is at stake, when at every turn of moment, a neighbourhood you cherished gets flattened, you can’t exactly afford purity in finding your footing. Here is the “humanitarian intervention” requested repeatedly by Nobel prize winners and human rights activists freeing us from our ability to choose, from our infrastructures, our hospitals, schools, defence capabilities, from our people.

To the imperialist invader, who has no history but that of creating death and despair, there is no distinction between a people and their state. They don’t take our political allegiances in consideration when bombing us. So I choose to support anyone who resists this invasion, by any measures at disposal; and I refuse to die in a defeated country that has surrounded without resistance.

***
To keep from losing myself to hopelessness, I turn to friends and acquaintances—over coffee, through phone calls, and in fleeting social media posts and stories. And what a lifeline and consolation it is to cling to the clarity of their every word, reaching out from depths of sorrow, anger, fear and mourning; calling for retrospection and criticality even if no one wants to hear, especially when no one wants to hear; calling for life even when starting our days with footage of death; and calling for liberation from imperialism and oppression while being silenced from every direction at once.

Earlier in the month, I read that the Global Sumud Flotilla has announced a new, bigger aid flotilla to set sail for Gaza in March. Today, speaking of Palestine in Iran and within large fractions of its diaspora is almost treasonous by the “Iran first” logic of some. Yet for the past two years, I’ve watched Palestine, its relentless unapologetic resistance, and the movements it has sparked across the world. There is something I’ve never quite understood but have always been in awe of: a quality in Abu Obaida’s eyes when he spoke to his people, in Fatima Hassouna’s smile amid the rubble of bombed buildings, in Anas al-Sharif’s refusal to stop reporting even as he faced his imminent martyrdom, or in the final defiant moments of Yahya Sinwar. The only word I can find for it is ‘faith’. A faith forged in a struggle so righteous that nothing can break it. I think about them a lot these days as a way to not lose strength and to feel connected to others no matter how far from me they are, to stay vulnerable, and to rescue my agency from hesitations. Because this is precisely what imperialism, authoritarianism and fascism uproot from you: your ability to remain human, when you are constantly told you’re not one.
Forever chanting:

Jin, Jiyan, Azadi,Free Palestine.
Long live the resistance in Lebanon, Palestine, Iran and Yemen
Down with U.S.ADown with Israel
And eternal shame on the colonial European Union and the pathetic Gulf states for their undying support of imperialism everywhere.