Iran Was First: A Warning From the Future
How the world is repeating the 1979 Islamic Revolution and why Iran is not backward, but ahead
Introduction: A Call to Wakefulness
Iran’s Unheeded Warning.
In 1979, Iran staged the world’s first postmodern revolution. Not a revolt of the hungry masses, but a hijacking of modernity by a petrified ideology. The country had already had its Enlightenment; the 1906 Constitutional Revolution, women in universities, secular courts, but Khomeini sold a reactionary coup as "spiritual revival." His genius? Weaponizing the language of revolution, anti-imperialism, moral purity, to dismantle modernity itself.
Now, 46 years later, the same script is playing out globally. From Trump’s "Make America Great Again" to Putin’s "Holy Russia," Netanyahu’s messianic coalition to Orbán’s "Christian democracy," the doctrine is identical: A fetishized past, manufactured spiritual voids, and the deliberate erosion of pluralism. Iran was the laboratory. The world is now the experiment.
We live in a moment of reversal. What once appeared as backward, unfree or irrational is being rebranded and reimported into the very societies that long claimed to be enlightened, modern, and secular. Across the so-called Western world, in the United States, Israel, Russia, Hungary, and beyond, a dangerous ideological movement is taking shape. It is not new. It is not radical. It is not even truly religious. It is petrified, and it is spreading.
This movement masks itself in tradition, family values, and spiritual longing. But what it represents is the fossilized return of authoritarianism, cloaked in esoteric nostalgia, enforced through patriarchal dogma, and spreading like a virus from one nation to the next. It is not about spirituality. It is not about identity. It is about power and the systems that seek to control life through religion, race, and repression.
What few realize is that Iran already lived through this nightmare. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was not a revolution in the classic sense, it was, in fact, the first postmodern counter-revolution. A regression disguised as moral renewal. An anti-modern backlash dressed in sacred robes. And now, nearly half a century later, much of the world is repeating the very mistake Iran made, only this time, with more technology, more propaganda, and less awareness.
Iran, then, is not behind the world. It is ahead of it. And the Iranian people, who have suffered, resisted, and awakened, are trying to move beyond what much of the West is just beginning to flirt with.
This essay is not just a critique. It is a warning. A signal from the future. And a call to see clearly what is happening, before it becomes irreversible.
1. Iran’s Lost Future and the First Postmodern Counter-Revolution
Iran’s story is misunderstood. The West often sees 1979 as a rupture, a religious eruption in a supposedly backward nation. But Iran was already modern. In 1906, the Constitutional Revolution brought democratic reform, parliamentary governance, and a new civil consciousness into being. Women, workers, students, they all fought to modernize a country long dominated by monarchy and clerical hierarchy.
The 1979 revolution did not continue that path, it reversed it. Led by a man who many now realize was not a prophet but a fossil, petrified in medieval ideology, blind to the future, and brilliant only in political manipulation, Ayatollah Khomeini rose to power by weaponizing a perceived spiritual void.
What was missing in modern Iran, he claimed, was meaning. Soul. Sacredness. In other words: spirituality. But what came in its place was not spirituality. It was control. Fear. Surveillance. A state religion that crushed the individual in the name of divine order.
Khomeini’s rhetoric was deeply postmodern, full of disillusionment with progress, alienation from modernity, and longing for a mythical past. But his regime was not spiritual. It was ultra-conservative, violently patriarchal, and unrelentingly anti-modern. It was not a revival of religion, but a perversion of it.
Today, we see echoes of that same pattern across the globe.
2. The Global Doctrine: Trump, Putin, Netanyahu and the Politics of Regression
The Doctrine: Fossilized Minds in a Digital Age.
These movements are not “conservative.” They are anti-human, ultra-reactionary, paranoid, and allergic to complexity.
One of their shared traits? The Spiritual Void Scam, a hocus-pocus promise to fill an invented emptiness.
“Society has lost its soul!” they cry. But what do they offer? Only dogma. But spirituality is personal, not a cudgel for state power.
What we are witnessing today is not a coincidence. It’s not random. It’s not about a few eccentric leaders with authoritarian tendencies. It’s a global doctrine, an ideology dressed up in different flags, speaking different languages, wearing different religious costumes, but always preaching the same gospel: return to the past.
Trump in the United States. Putin in Russia. Netanyahu in Israel. Orbán in Hungary. Theocrats in Iran. Hamas in Gaza. Evangelicals in Texas. Zionist extremists in West Bank settlements. Orthodox nationalists in Moscow. It doesn’t matter which name or label they wear. Strip away the superficial differences, and you’ll see the same structure:
• Worship of patriarchal order.
• Hatred of liberal individualism.
• Fear of sexuality, psychology, and critical thought.
• A fetish for militarism, nationalism, and blood-and-soil identity.
• And always, always, a claim to divine justification.
This is not spirituality. It’s not religion. It’s politics. It’s power using religion as a prop, as a tool of obedience. These leaders are not mystics. They’re not saints. They are fossilized ideologues. Ultra-conservative. Ultra-dangerous. They speak of tradition and sacredness, but what they really want is submission. What they fear most is the free, educated, independent individual.
And what makes this even more dangerous today is the fact that many people, out of fear, confusion, or desperation, are starting to find this kind of reactionary message appealing. They’re tired of uncertainty. They feel the chaos of modern life. They sense the emptiness of our consumerist, click-driven, hyper-secular societies. And instead of real answers, they’re being fed a fantasy: that going back to the Middle Ages will save them.
This is the same fantasy Khomeini sold in 1979. It was a lie then. It is a lie now.
3. Spirituality as a Weapon. The Postmodern Lie
One of the great tricks of these movements is how they exploit the idea of “spirituality.” They say the modern world is soulless. That people have lost their values. That we need to return to religion, to tradition, to divine order.
But what they’re doing is not spiritual revival. It’s political regression. They are turning personal spiritual longings into state ideology. They are forcing private belief into public law. And they are using ancient texts, often selectively interpreted, deliberately twisted, to justify total control over how people live, love, think, and dress.
Spirituality is personal. It’s a human need. It’s part of life. But the moment it becomes political doctrine, it becomes a weapon. And when you wrap that weapon in the flag, or in racial purity, or in traditional gender roles, you have something that looks very familiar: fascism.
Let’s be clear. This is not about Christianity versus Islam versus Judaism. It’s not “Muslim fanatics” versus “Zionists” versus “white evangelicals.” That’s a distraction. These movements, despite hating each other on the surface, mirror each other in form.
Their values are the same. Their enemies are the same: freedom, complexity, difference, modernity.
Their goals are the same: absolute order, sacred hierarchy, obedience to “God” which always means obedience to them.
Even in how they interpret “God,” they agree. Whether it’s called Allah, Yahweh, or God the Father, it’s always the same authoritarian father figure used to punish, judge, and silence. That’s not religion. That’s authoritarianism with divine branding.
4. Neo-Racism, Aesthetics as Ideology, and the Return of Eugenic Thinking
We are witnessing the return of an old and dangerous logic, but this time, it wears new clothes. It’s not open fascism. It’s not even old-school nationalism. It’s something more subtle: a carefully rebranded ideology of exclusion, repackaged through the aesthetics of health, beauty, tradition, and success.
Instead of talking about race directly, we hear words like fitness, quality, purity, discipline, order.
Instead of eugenics, we get lifestyle marketing. Instead of hate, we get algorithms that invisibly sort people into desirable and undesirable categories.
It doesn’t scream. It whispers. And most people don’t even notice it.
But at the core, it’s the same: a belief that some lives are more valuable than others. That some bodies, families, ways of life are more “natural” and that others are problems to be corrected, ignored, or erased.
This is not tradition. It’s not identity. It’s ideological hygiene masquerading as culture. And it’s being pushed, often unconsciously by the same forces that claim to protect freedom and morality.
We don’t need to name names. We don’t need to analyze every ad or social campaign. The point is deeper: the form of this ideology tells us what it wants purity, order, conformity. And this is exactly what led to the worst disasters of the 20th century.
What’s more dangerous now is that this ideology is no longer just coming from above. It’s coming from everywhere, across media, from influencers, from “common sense” opinions, from people who don’t even realize they’re echoing fascist logics.
We’re not calling for purity of any kind, not racial, not sexual, not national, not ideological. We are calling for something else: coexistence without coercion.
Let people live how they want spiritual, secular, traditional, queer, straight, national, post-national. But don’t turn any of it into a weapon or a system that divides people into the worthy and the unworthy.
That’s where the danger begins. And it has already begun.
5. Iran Lived It. The World Is Repeating It
The world likes to look at Iran and say: “That’s what backward looks like.”
But here’s the truth: Iran is not behind. Iran was first.
Forty-six years ago, the Iranian people were promised spiritual renewal, justice, meaning, and moral order.
What they got was censorship, surveillance, violence, and theocratic control, all under the banner of “God.”
The Conformist Collapse; Europe’s surrender to this tide isn’t accidental. The middle class, traditionally the buffer against extremism, has been gutted. Intellectuals sanitize the far right as "populism." Liberals obsess over personalities (Trump’s tweets, Putin’s machismo) while ignoring the doctrine, metastasizing beneath them.
And now? What was once dismissed as a uniquely Iranian failure is being repeated by countries that call themselves modern, democratic, and free.
From Washington to Moscow to Jerusalem, the same pattern is returning not as religion, but as a system of control. Not as faith, but as ideology.
But here’s the difference: Iranians have already lived it.
They’ve endured it.
They’ve lost their youth to it.
They’ve buried their future under it.
And now, they are rising against it.
This is what makes Iran, paradoxically, the most avant-garde country in the world today.
Not because of its system but because of its people. Because they are ahead of the curve. They’ve seen the end of the story that others are just beginning.
And they are saying: Never again.
What we are witnessing globally is not a religious revival. It’s not a cultural return. It’s a breakdown of modernity.
It’s a vacuum of meaning being filled with ideology. It’s spiritual language being used to enforce political obedience.
And it’s happening everywhere, because too many people are conforming.
Because the middle class is collapsing.
Because the intellectuals have stopped resisting.
Because people are afraid, and when fear takes over, freedom disappears.
This is a warning.
To those who think they are safe inside their democracies: you are not.
To those who think this is only happening “over there”: it’s not.
To those who think it’s about left or right, East or West, Muslim or Jew, secular or religious: you are missing the point.
This is about control.
This is about the return of petrified ideologies wearing modern masks.
And this is about your responsibility to push back now.
The time for silence is over.
The time for comfort is over.
The time for polite observation is over.
We need clarity. We need courage. We need to name what we see and resist it. Not just for ourselves, but for the generations who will either inherit freedom, or a fossilized world built on fear.
Closing Note
Let them say it’s an exaggeration. Let them dismiss it as paranoia. But those who have lived through it, like the people of Iran, know exactly what this is.
And they are trying to tell you: Do not make the same mistake.
How to Fight a Postmodern Reaction? Name the Doctrine: Stop calling it "conservatism." This is counter-Enlightenment, a war on reason, equality, and the individual. Reclaim Modernity: Defend secularism without neoliberal cruelty. Khomeini won because the Shah’s "modernity" was a veneer over corruption. Sabotage the Nostalgia: The "good old days" were never real. Flood the culture with better futures.
Aram Ruhi Ahangarani
2 August 2025