The current situation in Iran is dire. Yesterday I wrote,

“A strategically minded “smart” Iran may abandon its entire nuclear program in order to survive as a regime, now completely ruled by the Pasdaran. From the ashes will rise a military dictatorship and police state sans mullahs. So, making things for the populace massively worse.”

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Council may have taken over the Iranian Republic already. The appointed rahbar, or Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen in public and, despite denial, may actually be incapacitated.

While the situation is much worse than in 2009, after the questioned re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I want to share the epilogue of Hooman Majd’s book of 2010, The Ayatollahs’ Democracy, which I had recently revisited.

Shia concepts of martyrdom, but more important victimhood, concepts deeply imbedded in the Iranian psyche – even in the psyche of non-Shia Iranians – play a bigger role in the culture of politics than is imagined in the West. We are Shia, Iranians say; our sect has long been a victim of greater Sunni oppression in the Muslim world; our original saints, the blood of the prophet in their veins, were victims of cruel and despotic Caliphs a millennia and a half ago, and we still weep for them, on cue and on time, every year. For centuries we have been the victims of foreign imperialist ambitions, then victims of tyrant Shahs who suppressed any democratic movement that would limit their power. Our latest political model, an Islamic Republic we voted for, has been a victim of foreign plots to destroy it, our independence a thorn in the side of every greater power. We were victims of Saddam, much more so than you Westerners, and yet no one wept for us as he gassed our children and rained bombs down on our cities. We are victims of a Western attitude of superiority that deems nuclear technology to be safe in the West’s hands, but unacceptable in the hands of Shia Iranians, even as European man has wreaked more havoc on the planet than any other species.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man who embodied the democratic notion, never before tested in Iran’s history, that all citizens have equal access to power, is the victim of scurrilous attacks by an established elite. Ayatollah Rafsanjani, representative of that elite, is a victim of Ahmadinejad’s relentless attacks on him and, worse, on his defenceless family. Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, and Mohammad Khatami are all victims of Ahmadinejad’s and Khamenei’s vengeful intimidation tactics and the attempt to remove the democracy from the Islamic democracy, their supporters are victims of a stolen election. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are victims of plots, foreign and domestic, to illegally overthrow them, to remove the Islamic from their mardomsalari’e dini, their self-proclaimed Islamic democracy; the Revolutionary Guards and Basij are victims of violent, Molotov cocktail-throwing mobs of protesters. The peaceful protesters are victims of a brutal military apparatus determined to crush their rights to protest and peacefully assembly, guaranteed under the Islamic Constitution. Iranian exiles and those inside Iran opposed to an Islamic regime altogether are victims too, victims of fate, a fate they believe has led to the loss of the souzld of their Persian nation. We are all victims, all of us Iranians, and no matter on which side of the political fence we fall, we understand our victimhood, as well as that of our leaders. And we mourn our victims like no other peoples, seeking unforgiving vengeance for every wrong, real and perceived, and wishing death to every enemy, even when the enemy is ourselves.

The millions of Iranians, and the leaders who have braved the stern und unforgiving dictates of the regime they helped to create, are looking to finally break free from what has defined their political lives, and when they are successful – and they will be, in an Ayatollah’s democracy or not – there will be, finally, no more victims.

Tamam Shud – The End

19 April 2026 @ 13:28 UTC+2.

Last modified April 19, 2026.