These Mullahs are serious!

NO! Now is not the time for resignation!

Yesterday, Ace mentioned reports of visits to the UK for certain medical procedures by the apparent favorite of the Mullahs to be the new Supreme Leader of Iran.

He is said to be an avid gardener when not planning the massacre of protesters or celebrating terrorism. Harmless, yet "ten times as dangerous as his father", as some have called him.

I, myself, am kind of wondering why the UK would not be just a little bit uneasy about this guy owning SEVERAL luxury properties in London. And why Spain would have been happy about his recently deceased father owning property there.

Tim Orr studied Islam in London. He wrote a piece that was published in Substack and elsewhere: The Iranian Revolution and the Failure of the Secularization Thesis

History occasionally produces events that overturn the intellectual frameworks used to interpret the modern world. The French Revolution did this in 1789 by demonstrating the political power of mass mobilization, and the Russian Revolution did it again in 1917 by introducing an ideological state built on Marxism. Yet the Iranian Revolution of 1979 posed a challenge even more unsettling to modern assumptions. It had become a modernizing state that many believed was steadily moving toward secular development, given Peter Burger’s at that time on the secularization thesis, which he later rejected. It argued that as societies modernize, religion gradually loses social, political, and cultural influence.

Yet, suddenly, Iran produced a theocratic government led by clerics. For many scholars and policymakers, the outcome seemed almost inconceivable beforehand, given its shift to a more secularized government. The shock was not simply political; it was intellectual as well. The Iranian Revolution revealed a blind spot in modern political theory: the enduring political power of religion.

Prior to the revolution of 1979, most academic work, led by Burger, which was built upon the work of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, assumed that modernization caused religion to retreat from politics as secular regimes rose to power. Industrialization, urbanization, and advances in education pushed religion away from the public sphere and toward private life. Indeed, Iran appeared to be heading in this direction under the rule of Mohammad Reza Shah, whose regime was committed to economic modernization and an alliance with the West. . .

Much of the continuing Western misinterpretation of Iran reflects the lingering influence of secularization theory. Many policymakers still assume that economic development, generational change, or deeper integration into global markets will gradually normalize Iran’s political system. Yet the revolution itself suggested otherwise. In Iran, modernization strengthened the social networks through which religious leaders organized political resistance. The Islamic Republic therefore represents not simply a temporary deviation from secular modernity but a different model of political modernity in which religious authority remains central.

The Iranian Revolution ultimately forces a broader reconsideration of how political change unfolds in the modern world. Revolutions do not inevitably produce secular or liberal outcomes. Instead, they reveal which institutions command the deepest trust within a society. In Iran, centuries of religious organization prepared the clerical establishment to assume power when the monarchy collapsed. What many observers once viewed as an irrational upheaval can instead be seen as the logical outcome of Iran’s historical structure. The deeper lesson is simple: religion remains one of the most powerful political forces in the modern world. Ignoring that reality will continue to produce misunderstandings about Iran—and about revolutions more broadly.

Something to think about.

Comment on this piece, which is much longer than the excerpts above:

The Mullahs of Iran and Bolshevik rise to power in Russia have many parallels. Both future leaders were in exile in Europe, and both sent in to disrupt the political situations in Russia and Iran. Both countries were suffering from instable and reactionary governments. And, as both succeeded, a small minority was able to seize power and brutally establish an authoritarian system that eliminated the competition and enforced their agenda over the populus. The USSR eventually collapsed from its own rot, the mullahs will have to be forcibly removed or they will hold on indefinitely.

It always amazes me that so many dictators of the 20th Century who mass-murdered their own people spent time in Paris first.

I tend to think of Marxism and some of its variants as religions, too.

Tim Orr also wrote an academic piece with references concerning the theology of the Mullahs. You might want to keep it handy for reference: Iran's War Against Israel: The Shia Eschatological Vision Behind a Messianic Conflict

My personal journey into understanding why Iran is so intensely hostile toward Israel began when I studied at the Islamic College in London, which teaches the Twelver Shiʿa tradition. My time there was unique, as it gave me a rare opportunity as a non-Muslim to learn from Muslim and Shiʿa scholars and to listen carefully to their perspectives. During that time, I came to see more clearly how religion—specifically Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary, Twelver Shiʿa–influenced messianic theology—shapes the Iranian regime’s perception of reality.

While pursuing my studies, I came to my own conclusion that the animosity of Iran toward Israel is not just political, but religious, which is fundamentally different and is not well understood in the West. And while the religious nature of Israel’s elimination in Iran is often either denied or downplayed by political and academic analysts, understanding Khomeini’s Shia end-of-days ideology, is nonetheless key. Political discourse is a side-effect of the Khomeini’s worldview, which is dictated by his eschatology. Appeasement and compromise with the Iranian regime will not accomplish the elimination of its desires to obliterate Israel since the regime views the destruction of Israel as a precursor to the arrival of the Mahdi (Twelfth Imam), as revealed by Shiite texts.

Perhaps the scariest part of Iran’s apocalyptic belief system that is not deterred by mutually assured destruction is Iran’s feverish desire to obtain nuclear weapons. Whereas other states see nuclear weapons as tools for deterrence, Iran’s regime believes nuclear weapons will allow them to destroy Israel, and possibly the world, facilitating the necessary chaos for the arrival of the Twelfth Imam.

Iranian political and military officials, including the late Ahmadinejad, have claimed again and again that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” These are not empty threats. It is their religious obligation to do so. Should Iran obtain a nuclear weapon, the world will be dealing with a regime willing to use it as an act of obedience to God.

Iran’s genocidal dreams about Israel cannot be dismissed as rhetoric, political bluster, or even calculated decisions that can be altered through international engagement and rational discourse. It is a religiously motivated war, and until the world recognizes this, containment of Iran will fail. This is not a regime that can be negotiated with or appeased.

MEANWHILE,

Full mask off moment for the social justice theocracy as the UK declares its nation’s own literary legacy to be a terroristic peril https://t.co/dYLsPs9M1k

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) March 5, 2026

WEEKEND

The Week In Pictures: Ayatollahed You So Edition

The Week In Pictures: Ayatollahed You So Edition Much happened this week: there were primaries in Texas, Bill and Hillary Clinton testified on Jeffrey Epstein, Tim Walz and Keith Ellison testified in Congress, Kristi Noem’s career crashed. But there was only one really big story, our long-overdue revenge on Iran’s mullahs. So let’s get to it–The Week In Pictures, Ayatollahed You So Edition:

Music

Stairway to Heaven

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

From two weeks ago, before last Saturday's surprise: February 21, When will the left show us what "The Right Side of History" should look like?

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

Soon after the surprise, a glimpse of a leftie social media page which I follow did not find a meme to express feelings directly about what had happened in Iran. The political post quoted something from December.

Trump’s sinister achievement is to delegitimize the old intellectual and political establishment while at the same time cementing the racial hierarchies and regimes of repression that this elite exploited during the war on terror. In yet another parody of the “responsibility to protect” hucksters, the white-supremacist president also wishes to be seen as the authentic savior of a benighted world at war.

Western liberalism, constantly searching for monsters abroad, turns out to have been a moral mask for an intellectual service class—a fashion accessory tossed aside by Trump. It is of no use to those presiding over a swift and brutal reversal of racial progress. It should not surprise us how quickly the nineteenth-century prejudice that white men should dominate “inferior” Africans, Asians, and Latin American peoples has become common sense for much of Western politics and journalism. “The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface,” Arendt warned in 1950, after the nineteenth-century ideologies of racial aggrandizement had achieved a monstrous culmination in the heart of Europe. That subterranean stream has again come to the surface in 2025, and it is sweeping away the once-unassailable idea of the West.

- Pankaj Mishra, Harper’s Magazine, December 2025

Let me know if you deeply understand this text.

posted by K.T. at 11:00 AM

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