Iranian Government, Quit Your Bullshit.
You say your civilization is three thousand years old. It is. Persia produced poets who still make the world weep, mathematicians who shaped the foundations of science, and a culture of hospitality so deep that strangers are treated like family. Cyrus the Great legitimized power by restoring peoples and traditions instead of crushing them, long before modern politics existed. That civilization is real. It has survived empire, conquest, dynasty, and revolution. It remains one of the most extraordinary in human history. But you are not it. You have only existed since 1979. You are a regime standing on Persia’s neck claiming to be its voice, and Persia will survive long after you are gone.
You say your religion gives you divine authority. Your current religious identity didn’t fall from the sky. It was consolidated and enforced centuries ago by a state that turned a minority sect into the national standard — often by force. This was not some timeless, organic continuity. It was built, imposed, and defended by power. That’s not a divine mandate. That’s a branding exercise with a body count. And now you stand on the result of that and call it eternal truth. It isn’t. It’s politics cloaked in religion.
You say you stand for justice. You have a seat in parliament for your Jewish community and you parade that like a trophy. But those Jews must publicly denounce Israel to survive. They perform loyalty under surveillance and you call it coexistence. That’s not justice. That’s a hostage reading a statement.
You say “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” are just slogans. Political expressions. Don’t insult us. You chant them in parliament. You print them on missiles. You teach them to children. And the movement that carried out October 7 is one you armed, funded, and praised. And then you come to the negotiating table and wonder why no one believes you want peace? We don’t wonder anymore. You’ve proven you want our death.
You say you stand for Palestine. Do you? Did you ever? Their suffering is your fuel. The October 7 attack gave Israel justification to level Gaza. Palestinians paid for your proxy war with their lives — tens of thousands of them. You called it resistance. They called it caskets and rubble. If you actually cared about Palestinians, you would have been the last country on earth to hand their enemy that pretext. Instead, you keep the wound open because it justifies everything — your military spending, your repression, your grip on power. Your identity depends on constant opposition to external enemies — so much so that you don’t know who you are without one. If Palestine were free tomorrow, you’d panic. Because you’d have to explain to your own people why they’re still poor, still censored, still trapped — without an enemy to blame it on.
You say you oppose a world with a single master. Fine. So does most of the world. But opposing American influence doesn’t require hanging dissidents from cranes. It doesn’t require morality police. It doesn’t require shooting women in the street for showing their hair. You’ve conflated sovereignty with tyranny and called anyone who notices a puppet of the West.
You say we have never respected your sovereignty. That’s not entirely true — our foreign policy changes with each president. But in 1953 we did overthrow your elected prime minister because he tried to renegotiate an oil contract with a private British company. A contract with 42 years left on it. A contract that paid you a fraction of what other producers were getting. A contract you had no right to audit. He asked for fair terms. The company said no. He took it to the International Court of Justice. The court said it couldn’t rule. So he nationalized the oil company. And we toppled your government at the request of the British government because of it. That much is true. You know what’s also true? Most of us didn’t even know it until the CIA acknowledged its role in 2013.
But let’s be honest about something else. You don’t actually mourn Mossadegh. You broke his memorial stone. You don’t teach him as a hero. He was secular, constitutional, democratic — everything you despise. You aren’t angry that we overthrew a democracy. You’re angry that we installed our man instead of making way for yours. Your grievance with 1953 was never about what was lost. It was about who got to replace it. And the proof is simple: if Mossadegh had survived, you probably would have come for him yourselves. Because everything he stood for — popular sovereignty, constitutional law, the citizen above the cleric — is everything your system exists to prevent.
You say freedom is not your highest value. At least that’s honest. But then stop pretending your people are choosing your system. They’re not choosing it, they’re fleeing it. Not your enemies. Your people. Your doctors. Your scientists. Your poets. Your daughters. They run to the very countries you call decadent, and when they arrive, they stay. They don’t come back. Persian civilization survives under your rule. Everywhere else — in Los Angeles, in London, in Toronto — it thrives.
You say God ordained your revolution and your system will outlast democracy. Maybe. But you’ve had 47 years. What have you done with them? Your currency is worthless. Your people can’t afford eggs. Your doctors have left. Your students can’t travel. Your infrastructure is crumbling. A woman studying engineering does it by candlelight because your power grid is failing. You’ve spent billions arming Hezbollah and Hamas while your own hospitals run out of medicine. You’ve built missiles and neglected roads. You’ve funded proxy wars across the region while your middle class disappeared. Forty-seven years. Full control. No foreign occupation. No excuses. This is what you built. Not what was done to you. What you chose. And when your people stand in the streets and beg for something better — in 1999, in 2009, in 2019, in 2022 — you answer with bullets. Is that God’s plan? Or is that yours?
You say you are entitled to a nuclear program. Let’s skip the legal debate and talk physics. We both know that the most expensive, time-consuming part of building a nuclear weapon — producing the fissile material — is identical to the process of making civilian fuel. The machines are the same. The facilities are the same. The expertise is the same. By the time you’ve built a “peaceful” enrichment program, you’ve completed the hardest part of building a bomb. And once the material exists, the final weaponization steps can be measured in weeks or months, not years.
And if your nuclear program is for civilian use, why have you enriched to levels that go far beyond any credible civilian energy need? Why have you buried facilities under mountains? Why have you limited cooperation and restricted the access needed to verify that program is nothing like the coordinated weapons-related program you had in the past? You know how this looks. And you know why no one believes your explanation. So what choice do you leave us? You call for our death. You were complicit in October 7. You must never have enrichment capability. No centrifuges. No threshold capability. A regime with this record does not get to operate the part of a civilian program that can be rapidly converted into a weapons pathway.
None of this is about the Iranian people. It never was. The people you govern are the heirs of that civilization — warm, brilliant, generous, and proud by every account of anyone who has actually met them. They didn’t choose this. They are surviving it. And they deserve better than to be instruments of your grip on power.
And you are wasting them.
The real crime is that you took one of the most extraordinary populations on earth and buried them under a system built on a religion their ancestors didn’t choose, governed by a theory most clerics rejected, organized around the destruction of a country that exists because the world failed a people who had nowhere else to go, and sealed shut by the claim that God said so.
Quit your bullshit. Your people deserve better. And somewhere, underneath all the slogans and the missiles and the self-deception, you know it.