In a non-democratic society like Iran, the rise of a war-hungry far right is not a cultural accident. It’s the direct outcome of a system of governance designed to block ordinary, collective routes to change. When there are no independent unions, no real political parties, no free media, and no genuine right to assemble, politics stops looking like a public conversation and a competition of programs.
It starts to resemble a kind of black market. And in black markets, everyday goods become scarce while contraband becomes plentiful: underground networks, unaccountable money, performative radicalism, militarism, and an ever-deeper dependence on a “foreign sponsor.”
The mechanism is pretty simple. In an open space, dissatisfaction can turn into organization: workers can build unions, students can form associations, women can create public networks, run media platforms, speak openly, and hold events; political currents can offer social and economic programs; and society can argue over solutions. But in a closed space, dissatisfaction usually turns into atomization: everyone isolated, voiceless, unable to gather, and lacking any steady tools of pressure.
In this context, purely media or human-rights funding, even if it deserves criticism, is not the main issue. The picture gets darker when the internal political vacuum turns into a battlefield for “hard” projects: armed groups, security-linked networks, and forces that see the “solution” not in bottom-up change and building social institutions, but in war, foreign intervention, or a strongman savior. They feed on the same wound the society carries: political defenselessness.
In this video, Leila Hosseinzadeh speech In today’s solidarity rally in Paris, lays it out in blunt, unfiltered language: in the latest wave of repression, the Islamic Republic has crossed the line from “street killings” into a level that international legal language can only understand as crimes against humanity, from shooting passersby and wounded people, to attacking medical facilities, to firing “finishing shots” on a wide scale.
At the same time, the internet shutdown is highlighted as a modern tool of repression: not just silencing the news, but isolating an entire nation and turning it into a kind of collective prison. The message is simple: when communication is cut, repression becomes cheaper and easier.
Extreme royalism makes sense in this setting too. When party activity is banned, and any rooted, long-term politics is crushed, politics turns into a “brand.” Brands are simple, emotional, and they promise quick fixes. Extreme royalism thrives on exactly that simplicity: it builds a one-line story, replaces society with a single figure and because it lacks a credible social and economic program, it naturally leans outward.
Inside the country it has no organized base, no ability to expand openly, and no capacity for real social negotiation. So it looks for “power” elsewhere: lobbying, foreign patrons, international pressure, and in its worst form, war. The result is that part of the opposition ends up speaking the language of geopolitics, not the language of people’s rights and everyday life.
One point matters here: authoritarianism doesn’t only repress its opponents, it also damages the quality of the opposition. By blocking healthy political pathways, it clears the field for the unhealthiest forms of politics.
Then it points to that mess and says: this is your alternative, either me, or chaos; either me, or fragmentation; either me, or war. It’s a classic authoritarian trap: first empty society of independent institutions, then use the monsters that grow in that vacuum as the excuse for more repression.
Photo from a solidarity rally in Berlin, where thousands of Iranians took to the streets in support of the protests in Iran. You rarely see scenes like this in international media, but they often imply that the only opposition and the only alternative is the Pahlavi camp. That’s simply not true.
