A video of a lecture by Hessamoddin Haerizadeh Yazdi (حسامالدین حائریزاده یزدی), a religious scholar and university lecturer who teaches what he calls “strategy drills” based on “Qur’anic rules”, went viral across Persian-language social media.
The video has drawn sharp criticism because its core aim is to construct a political subject who can kill without seeing himself as a killer. By collapsing responsibility into the claim “I didn’t kill; God chose,” it reaches the point where fascism begins: the moment when violence is no longer treated as an exception, but as a rational, moral, and even sacred duty.
Haerizadeh frames street protests not as the political action of citizens, but as a “battlefield.” This conceptual shift is decisive. With a single move, politics is reduced to war, and the citizen is turned into an enemy. From that point on, killing is no longer a question of legitimacy; the only remaining question is how to kill.
Within this logic, the sanctity of human life disappears entirely. What comes to the foreground is the “intention” of the agent of violence. The killer must kill, but without hatred, not out of respect for the victim, but to preserve his own “monotheism.” This is exactly the mechanism fascism uses to resolve its inner contradiction: killing must take place, but the conscience must remain intact. The solution is to shift ethics from the act itself to the intention behind it.
The next step is structural dehumanization. Society is divided into two metaphysical camps: truth and falsehood, pure and impure, legitimate and illegitimate. These divisions are not political; they are biological. The other side is no longer a bearer of demands, but a carrier of “contamination.” Once the enemy is defined as inherently impure, eliminating them is no longer seen as violence; it is framed as a cleansing act. This is precisely the fascist logic that has repeated itself from Nazism to ISIS: killing as social hygiene.
In the following stage, violence is detached from human decision-making and relocated into a “grand design.” Death becomes a tool of divine testing. Killing is turned into a scene for “separating the impure from the pure.” The bullet is no longer the result of an individual’s will, but a component of a plan that has already been granted legitimacy. This is the moment when politics turns into theology and responsibility is fully suspended.
The peak of this logic is the complete erasure of human agency. The agent of repression is told that victory or defeat changes nothing for God; “you just need to be there.” This sentence is the essence of fascism. The individual is no longer a moral actor or a political subject; he is a tool. A tool does not ask questions, does not doubt, and is not accountable. Fascism succeeds precisely at this point: turning human beings into unaccountable instruments of death.
This logic is not an individual deviation; it is a condensed expression of the political structure of the Islamic Republic. A system that securitizes protest, turns politics into a permanent internal war, categorizes society according to ideological purity, and justifies violence through the language of duty and destiny possesses all the core elements of fascism, with one difference: it uses religion instead of race.
In this sense, the Islamic Republic is no different, in its logic of killing, from Nazism or ISIS. The differences are linguistic and geographical, not structural. All of these projects rest on the same shared logic: dehumanization, the sanctification of violence, and the suspension of individual responsibility in the name of a higher truth.
For this reason, this discourse should not be dismissed as mere “propaganda.” It is an operational fascist theology: a body of knowledge designed to enable killing without the psychological collapse of the killer. A form of knowledge tailored precisely for a state whose survival depends not on consent, but on the management of death.
Here, fascism is not a political insult; it is an analytical diagnosis, the diagnosis of an order that can survive only by stripping human beings of their humanity.
Important note: One essential point needs to be made clear: this argument is not about Islam as a religion. The problem is not religion itself; the problem is the political use of religion and its transformation into a killing machine. The same mechanism can be activated with any belief system. Contemporary history clearly shows that when religion (any religion) is turned into a tool of the state, a means of exclusionary identity-building, and a source of legitimacy for violence, the outcome does not change.
A clear example is state-backed Buddhism in Myanmar, which, using the same logic of “purification,” “testing,” and “sacred defense,” led to the genocide of Rohingya Muslims. Or Judaism that itself carries the historical experience of the Holocaust, yet went on to commit genocide against Palestinians.
So the issue is state-engineered theology, where faith is removed from the personal sphere and turned into a political technology of death.
