Iran’s theater of victimhood: How the Islamic Republic poisons minds and nations - opinion

The Islamic Republic of Iran has perfected the ancient alchemy of turning victimhood into an empire-building instrument.

Observe its taxonomy of humanity. The Islamic Republic categorizes people the way a botanist might arrange poisonous flora: with precision, purpose, and malice. Ethnicity, creed, sexuality – each is plucked out and pinned like an exhibit, then wielded as a blade to slice apart the delicate fabric of society.

Kurds against Azeris, Sunnis against Shi’ites, women against men; the regime understands that the surest way to weaken a people is to disassemble their unity, and reduce them to quarreling tribes.

What remains when all bonds of shared nationhood have been systematically shredded? There is only ideology, but not a vibrant, life-affirming creed but a stern, joyless dogma – a kind of monochrome painting over a once kaleidoscopic civilization.

Iran – that land of poets and scholars, of Hafez and Rumi – has been reduced by its rulers to a stage set, a gaudy theater where the performance of piety is everything and the spirit of humanity is nothing. This is not governance; it is theater as tyranny.

Yet the regime is not content to manipulate its own people. Its ambitions extend far beyond its borders. With the silky, sinister charm of a professional confidence trickster, Tehran has beguiled the West with a narrative of victimhood so compelling, so artfully crafted, that even our brightest minds have fallen for it.

Western intellectuals, marinated in post-colonial guilt, see Iran not as a theocratic prison but as a misunderstood martyr – a noble nation beset by imperialist bullies. How Tehran must chuckle at this theater of the absurd! To be both the jailer and the victim, the persecutor and the persecuted, is a masterstroke of propaganda.

The West, meanwhile, falls for it every time. We preen, we posture, we issue statements and sanctions, and yet, beneath our stern words, we lack the will to confront the underlying rot.

Our students, those bright-eyed heralds of the future, have become perhaps the most tragic casualties of this charade. From the lecture halls of Cambridge University to California campuses, they rise to their feet and proclaim themselves the guardians of justice, the champions of the oppressed. But whose justice, whose oppression are they parroting? They are the very narratives that Tehran has so painstakingly cultivated.

It is as if the regime has found a ventriloquist’s dummy in the West’s youth, feeding them lines that sound noble but serve only to mask cruelty.

How did this happen? How did the heirs of Enlightenment reason and liberal thought allow ourselves to be so thoroughly hoodwinked? Part of the answer lies in our own moral vanity. We love the idea of being righteous; we love the theater of taking a stand, of shaking our fists at the supposed villains of history.

This is the modus operandi of the Islamic Republic: divide, confuse, and invert. Its leaders understand, far better than we do, that the battlefield of the 21st century is not a desert plain but the mind. They wage war not with tanks and planes, though they have those too, but with stories, with narratives, with that intoxicating mix of grievance and grandeur that can turn even the most educated soul into an unwitting accomplice.

They do not seek to conquer land so much as they seek to conquer imagination, to colonize the moral vocabulary of the world.

Meanwhile, within Iran itself, the people suffer in ways that are almost too vast to comprehend. There is the daily grind of economic hardship, exacerbated by corruption and mismanagement; the ever-present threat of imprisonment or worse for those who dare to speak out; the suffocating atmosphere of ideological control that seeps into every corner of life, from the schoolroom to the bedroom.

Yet, these voices of suffering are drowned out, both by the regime’s own propaganda and by the well-meaning but misinformed chorus of Western apologists who mistake tyranny for resistance and cruelty for courage.

The Islamic Republic thrives on this confusion. It knows that as long as the world remains divided – between East and West, between the righteous student protesters and the so-called warmongering governments – its power will endure. The regime is like a magician performing sleight-of-hand; while we argue over the trick, the real magic is happening elsewhere, unseen.

We debate sanctions, we agonize over diplomacy, and all the while, Tehran continues its slow, methodical deconstruction of nationhood, turning Iran into a hollow vessel filled only with the fumes of ideology.

Here lies the tragedy: Iran’s people are not its regime. They are not the mullahs who claim to speak for them, nor the Revolutionary Guards who enforce silence with bullets and batons. They are a proud, diverse, and beautiful people, heirs to one of the world’s most ancient civilizations, trapped within the iron cage of a system that has mastered the art of pretending to be weak while crushing the weak. The West, in its eagerness to appear just, has too often forgotten this distinction.

We must, therefore, strip away the masks, the narratives, and the convenient myths. We must see the Islamic Republic for what it is: not a victim but a predator, not a beacon of resistance but a factory of lies. We must have the courage to call out those who, whether through naivety or vanity, repeat its lines as though they were truths. To do otherwise is to be complicit in the very poison that is slowly corroding not only Iran but the moral clarity of the world itself.