Waging War Against God – with a Microphone

I am a political scientist, and the most uncomfortable thing I can tell you about the Islamic Republic is this: it is not paranoid. Its threat assessment is correct, its priorities are rational, and its cruelty is calibrated with precision. That is why this obscene system has stood for 47 years.

Let me put it as crudely as I can. One man against a lion loses. A million men against a million lions win — every time, everywhere in history. Individually, we are mediocre animals. What made us the species that decides everything on this planet is not strength or even raw intelligence; many animals have both, and emotional intelligence besides. It is coordination. The ability of strangers to act as one. The Word.

Every dictatorship senses this. The Islamic Republic understands it scientifically.

The arithmetic of January

Look at what this regime survived six months ago. In January 2026, Iranians rose in the largest uprising since the revolution. On January 8 and 9, the state answered with slaughter — and then cut the entire country off the internet for months, the longest blackout in its history, so that no one could count the bodies.

At least 30,000 people were killed in those two days. Hospital records that reached Time and The Guardian point to that figure as a floor, not a ceiling — I have laid out the case in detail in a previous piece. Iran International, after reviewing classified internal documents, called it the deadliest two-day massacre of street protesters in history. Tiananmen pales beside it. Amnesty International documented security forces firing into crowds, into homes, at a hospital — and rape and sexual violence used against detainees as instruments of interrogation.

And the regime did not fall. Its Supreme Leader was assassinated weeks later in a war; his son now sits in his place; the Islamic Republic still stands. Even the late Soviet Union — a totalitarian state — was no longer executing people for dissent by the 1980s. Tehran shoots wounded protesters in their hospital beds and endures.

How? Not because of the Revolutionary Guard’s tanks. Because this regime solved, decades ago, the one problem every fallen dictatorship failed to solve: it makes sure that 90 million unhappy people never find out, all at once, that they are 90 million.

Why the word, and not the gun

Here is what Western readers keep missing. The regime treats an armed insurgent as a manageable problem and a pop singer as an existential one — and by its own murderous logic, it is right. For two reasons.

The first is mechanical. An armed group is legible. The MEK, Kurdish separatist militias, Baloch insurgents — they have bases, weapons caches, supply lines, command structures. A........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)