Articles

The Ghost in the Machine: Iranian Society and the Failure of Opposition Politics, by Mina Khanlarzadeh – 1 April 2026

As American and Israeli bombs fall on Iran, a question long central to Iranian political life returns with new urgency: How did we reach this point? If you walk through the bookstores of Enqelab Square in Tehran, you will find book after book organized around some version of this question. I want to ask it again now, even though, under current conditions—with civilians killed, homes and civilian infrastructure destroyed, nuclear sites struck, and water, air, and electricity themselves under threat—it is hard to look anywhere but at the geopolitical forces closing in. That investigation is necessary and must be pursued as rigorously as possible. What is less often examined—and what risks being lost under the weight of geopolitical accounting—is Iranian society itself, and the oppositional forces closest to it. My focus here is on Iranian society, which spent years trying to prevent this moment and is now too often treated as a mere backdrop to a geopolitical drama. I argue that Iranian society has been made into a ghost in the machine: present, vocal, and costly in its resistance, yet repeatedly denied recognition as a political force in its own right. That denial is one reason the present catastrophe became possible.

What the Street Was Already Saying

Over the last several years, especially after the presidency of the reformist Hassan Rouhani (2013–2021), as the limits of reform from within the state became increasingly clear, Iranians in the streets—and in statements issued by labor unions, student groups, and teachers unpaid for months—made clear that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear, military, and regional policies were not in their interest. They saw those policies as exposing society to sanctions and the threat of war. While the state insisted that “nuclear energy is our absolute right,” protesters answered with a bitter reversal: “nuclear energy is our absolute pain.” In recent years, they chanted, “Leave nuclear policy alone and do something about us”—haste’i ro raha kon, fekri be hal-e ma kon, or “Stopping nuclear energy – this is the national slogan“. Worker activists pushed the reversal further in a joint statement issued a few months after the twelve-day war of June 2025, insisting on ghani-sazi-ye zendegi, the “enrichment of life,” instead of uranium. “Water, electricity, and life are our undeniable rights,” they wrote, turning into organized political language what others had already been chanting in the streets. “Defending our livelihood is our undeniable right.” And more explicitly still: “Ballistic missiles and nuclear enrichment are not our choice; the enrichment of our lives is our undeniable right.” What began as a slogan of sovereign entitlement was turned into a language of social suffering, shifting the meaning of enrichment from uranium to livelihood, from state ambition to the material conditions of life itself.

Both in the streets and in political statements, people condemned the vast budgets directed to proxy groups and regional conflicts. “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran,” first heard during the 2009 Green Movement, questioned the Islamic Republic’s patronage of resistance movements in the region. The same accounting appeared in the streets during the November 2019 uprising known as Bloody Aban. Among the slogans heard then was: “Our money is gone; it’s been spent on Palestine.” Such slogans mapped the deepening rift between state and society, pitting the survival of the Iranian household against the state’s ideological expansion abroad.What had begun as a chant became organized social criticism, as worker activists made the same point more explicitly: “With the massive budgets spent on ultra-reactionary terrorists in the region, every hardship of our lives and livelihood could be resolved.” When the state became deeply involved in the Syrian uprising, protesters responded with “Leave Syria alone and do something about us”—suriyeh ro raha kon, fekri be hal-e ma kon. And when the state justified its presence there as a fight against ISIS, the reply came back: “Basiji, Sepahi, you are our ISIS,” naming the Basij paramilitary and the Revolutionary Guards themselves. These slogans did not all mean the same thing to those who shouted them, nor did they come from a single ideological camp. What they shared was a recurring line of grievance: the sense that everyday life was being sacrificed to state ideology, militarization, and regional war. The state was spending on proxy wars and political spectacle while ordinary people were left with unpaid wages, blackouts, inflation, water shortages, and a steadily collapsing social life.

As these policies exposed society to impoverishment, sanctions, and the threat of war, broad parts of Iranian society came to see the state itself as waging war on them. As one coalition of labor groups put it in the summer of 2025, “by cutting off water and electricity, abandoning society in the depths of insecurity amid the scorching hell of summer, and imposing backbreaking prices, the ruling power has launched a relentless war against our livelihood.” They continued: “We are no longer willing to pay the price for the policies of rulers who care only for advancing their warmongering and militarism. They have turned our lives into a dangerous game and brought the threat of war to our very doorstep.” Nothing exposed this more starkly than the contradiction between a state that insisted it need not fear war or seek resolution and the lived reality of abandonment. As Nasrin Sotoudeh said in an interview on March 30, 2026, “The city [Tehran] is abandoned. It is a city where, during an attack, no air-raid sirens sound, no shelters exist, and no necessary guidance is provided.” She went on: “The government that foolishly pursued nuclear energy as a source of electricity has, through its idiotic stubbornness, put the country’s entire power grid on the brink of destruction. The government that for half a century chanted ‘Death to this country’ and ‘Death to that country’ has now placed us in the shadow of death.”

This was the language Iranian society had already been speaking for years. The question is why this language was never taken up in oppositional politics and what structural conditions made that failure so total.

Why No One Carried the Demand

Three kinds of political groups might have carried this speech into politics, and each failed in different ways. The first was the reformist and anti-imperialist left wing of the opposition. Many in these groups wanted human rights improvements, more press freedom, and a less repressive state. In that sense, they were genuinely critical of the Islamic Republic. But their critique stopped at the border of foreign policy. Nuclear energy was treated as Iran’s right, the missile program as necessary deterrence, and proxy warfare as a way of keeping war outside Iran. As a result, the very things Iranians in the streets were criticizing—proxy wars, military spending, and the nuclear gamble—were not things these groups could consistently turn into political demands. While they criticized slogans such as “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran” as nativist or insufficiently internationalist, they often showed little regard for the destruction the Islamic Republic’s policies brought to the Arab world, especially in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. These countries became sacrificial geography for someone else’s sovereignty. Anti-imperialism stopped at Iran’s border. Beyond it, Arab societies became expendable to the Iranian state’s ambitions. More than indifference was at work here. For this milieu, the victims of the Islamic Republic’s policies often became a justifiable cost because their political framework had already decided whose suffering counted. In that moral economy, the Islamic Republic’s violence could be excused as collateral to a larger anti-imperial struggle. These populations were not only subjected to the violence of their own states, but also caught within the asymmetries of US and Israeli power and the regional fallout of the Islamic Republic’s own militarized response to that order. Iranians, Syrians, and Lebanese civilians were thus repeatedly instrumentalized: by states, by geopolitical struggle, and by the discourses that obscured how these forces became entangled.

The broader Iranian left faced its own internal paralysis, split into fragments that could not speak to one another, let alone to the street. One part—more radical and embedded in labor and grassroots politics—had been hollowed out by decades of state violence. Surveillance, imprisonment, and organizational attrition had pushed these activists into a state of enforced invisibility, stripping them of the infrastructure needed to shape public life. A second part had retreated into a high intellectualism; though theoretically sophisticated, relying heavily on translation of Western philosophy, its language was so far removed from the material urgency of the street that it became a form of academic exile. Between these poles, the broader left remained fragmented and politically unstable. Some currents drifted back toward reformism, while others remained captured by anti-imperialist commitments that blunted criticism of the state’s regional and military policies. This susceptibility to oscillation, combined with repression on one side and abstraction on the other, left the left unable to consolidate a language that could carry the street’s grievances into a coherent oppositional program. The left, in short, arrived at this crisis as a broken instrument: one part silenced by the state, another estranged by its own abstraction, and the rest either drifting toward reformism or anti-imperialism or failing to build a durable political form adequate to the demands already being voiced from below.

The second group was a broad liberal milieu, often the closest to the streets and to activist networks inside Iran. This was a broad umbrella, stretching from social democrats to more conservative currents, but held together by a shared commitment to liberal values and to a secular democratic future beyond the Islamic Republic. Yet outside the country, many of them were active primarily as human rights advocates, journalists, and documenters of repression. So despite their commitment to moving beyond the Islamic Republic, they were structurally occupied: documenting abuses, maintaining archives, and reporting events as they unfolded. This work was necessary, but it consumed their labor and left little room for the slower work of building coalitions, formulating demands, and shaping a political narrative around what people were asking for. Human rights discourse has its own grammar—victim, perpetrator, violation, record—and while that grammar is indispensable for documenting abuse, it does not on its own produce coalition, strategy, or political program. The voice of the street passed through them and became record more readily than demand.

The third group was the monarchists. Here, something unexpected happened. Precisely because they lacked strong ideological filters and responded more populistically to public language, they also lacked the reflex to sort street speech into acceptable and unacceptable categories. They listened, and they repeated what they heard. Where the liberal milieu preserved the speech of the street as record, the monarchists turned it into slogan and repeated it in a form that resonated most with the street. For that reason—not because of a developed political program—they became the group most closely aligned with the language of the street, including its critique of militarization and economic strain. This is also why accounts that explain monarchist traction primarily through satellite television and media manipulation remain inadequate: they miss the deeper historical context and conditions that made this language resonate in the first place. That proximity was also shaped by the monarchists’ relationship to the pre-1979 period, imagined as a time of modernization, national development, and a foreign policy of dignity, in contrast to the Islamic Republic’s permanent condition of crisis, sanctions, and war. This made them especially receptive to criticisms of the present. But they were not capable of building from that receptivity. They could not build durable coalitions with other opposition groups. They relied on outside forces that had no intention of realizing their political horizon, while the oppositional spaces around them remained vulnerable to infiltration and strategic distortion by the IRGC. So even where they seemed closest to the street, they could not reliably turn its language into an independent and sustainable politics.

Some factions within this milieu did openly welcome the US-Israeli attack, speaking in a triumphalist register that was politically reckless. That posture reflected not only an absence of political judgment but also a raw desire for retribution among those who had watched the state massacre their neighbors in January 2026 and saw no internal path to accountability. In this, they were amplifying a real sentiment—the search for a “final” exit when all others had been bloodily closed—but without the political infrastructure to navigate where such desires lead once attached to imperial military power. Yet to treat these voices as the authors of the war is to exaggerate their power and deflect attention from the forces that actually made it possible: the Islamic Republic’s own policies, the long-standing rupture between state and society, and the calculated interests of US and Israeli state power.

Who Gets Blamed When the War Arrives

Besides the absence of a political program, this failure of mediation is also visible in some of the anti-war commentary produced in the US context, where estrangement from the language of Iran’s streets often gives way to a narrowed reading of Iranian society through the twin lenses of desperation and manipulation. In this displacement, more energy was often spent scrutinizing the emotions or rhetoric of Iranians than pressuring the Islamic Republic over the policies that were bringing war ever closer. In this frame, the Islamic Republic appears mostly as a corrupt and repressive backdrop, insufficiently analyzed in its own right as a producer of war, militarization, and social devastation. Iranian suffering is explained primarily through sanctions and economic pressure, while the turn of some Iranians toward monarchism—or, after the January 2026 massacre, toward imagining military intervention as a possible opening—is attributed chiefly to media manipulation.

Beneath this displacement lay a consistent posture toward Iranian society itself. First, a paternalistic anti-war posture: Iranians were treated as too desperate or too wounded by violence to know what was good for them. In this frame, the task of the anti-war commentator was to withhold endorsement from those feelings and correct them from a position of superior judgment. Second, a pedagogical posture, at times with unmistakable civilizing overtones: the problem was understood as one of manipulation by outlets such as Iran International and a lack of proper political consciousness. In this frame, the commentator did not merely disagree with Iranian reactions; they imagined themselves as bringing a truer politics, a more mature anti-imperialism, or a more enlightened political literacy to a society presumed not yet to understand its own predicament. Whether paternalist or pedagogical, both postures shared the same assumption: that Iranian society required correction from outside rather than recognition as a political subject in its own right. The demand Iranian society had been articulating for years, at enormous cost, went unheard because too many listeners had already cast themselves as its teachers rather than its students.

The January 2026 massacre matters here because it did not create the rupture between state and society; it exposed it with catastrophic clarity. After thousands of protesters were killed by the state, many Iranians changed their assessment of what remained possible within the existing order. But that response did not make war possible. What made war possible was the long-standing rift between state and society produced by the Islamic Republic’s own policies—a rift the state tried to conceal through blackout and narrative control, and that others failed to translate into politics. The problem, then, was not that people exhausted by state violence were induced to see war as liberation. It was that a long-articulated social demand against the Islamic Republic’s own war-making capacities was never fully heard, carried, or turned into politics by those outside. Once that history is stripped away, attention shifts too easily from the state policies that made catastrophe possible to the post-January feelings of the people forced to live with their consequences. And now, after the war erupted, the same people in the streets who had long warned against these policies are often blamed: for being manipulated, for imagining something potentially liberatory in military intervention, or for the war itself. But this gets the sequence backward. These people did not bring about the war, and they have no power to stop it now. The real question is why, when society was speaking in an anti-war language from below, so few outside were willing to carry that language and turn it into politics.

What we are left with is an orphaned demand. The demand for the “enrichment of life” over uranium exists; it is voiced clearly and repeated at enormous personal cost, yet it remains politically unclaimed. This ghosting is a double erasure. Inside Iran, the state produced it through massacre, silencing, and information blackouts, making society present in its suffering but absent as a legible political subject. Outside, the organized opposition—in its various currents—could not convert that presence into politics: the demand was received, documented, and at times amplified, but it was never carried into coalition, program, or effective pressure. The society massacred in January 2026 is now also the society blamed for the war. It was silenced so that others could speak for it, and then held responsible for what was spoken in its name. That is what it means to be a ghost: not absent, but denied the recognition that would make presence politically real.

Mina Khanlarzadeh (Ph.D., Columbia University; B.Sc., Physics, Sharif University of Technology) is a historian whose interdisciplinary work engages global political thought, literary and translation studies, gender studies, and the history of science.

This article was first published on Mina’s Substack.

, , , , , ,
Views: 8
More content from this blog
, , , , , ,