How the Khomeinist Regime Destroyed Iran and Dragged a Civilization into Isolation and Ruin
The ethnic groups in Iran toppling the Islamic Republic of Iran together.
Over four decades have passed since the Islamic Republic was established in Iran, and in that time, one of the world’s oldest civilizations has been reduced to international pariah status, its people impoverished, brutalized, and betrayed by a regime that promised justice and delivered tyranny. The Islamic Revolution of 1979, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was marketed as a movement for liberation from “imperialism” and despotism. But from the beginning, it was a lie. A lie so colossal and methodically executed that it brought about the slow-motion collapse of Iran's social fabric, political institutions, economic lifeblood, and national identity.
A Revolution of Deceit: Khomeini and His Inner Circle
Khomeini and his close allies—most notably Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Khamenei—ascended to power not by offering truth, but by weaponizing discontent and cloaking their ambitions in populist and Islamic rhetoric. They told Iranians that freedom was coming, that justice would reign, that the Shah’s so-called tyranny would be replaced by the will of the people.
In exile, Khomeini claimed he had no intention of ruling and would retire to Qom to study and teach. “The clerics will not govern,” he said. “We are not seeking power.” Those words were as calculated as they were false. Once in Tehran, he rapidly dismantled the nascent democratic elements of the revolution, turned on secular and liberal allies, and laid the groundwork for a clerical dictatorship. The new regime replaced a modernizing monarchy with a totalitarian theocracy—a religious autocracy where elections became pageants of obedience, and real political opposition was erased with prison sentences, torture, or bullets.
Rafsanjani, the regime’s economic mastermind and godfather of its internal mafia structure, used the transition to amass vast wealth, turning the national economy into a family business. Khamenei, the current Supreme Leader, succeeded Khomeini not because of spiritual excellence or wisdom but because he was a malleable loyalist—easily molded and viciously pragmatic. Together, they helped convert Iran into a hostage nation, both to foreign interests and to an internal gang of clerics, IRGC commanders, and oligarchs.
A Nation Held Hostage
Today, Iran is governed by a regime that bears no resemblance to the country it claims to serve. The government is not elected in any meaningful sense. Power lies in unelected institutions: the Supreme Leader, the Guardian Council, the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), and the shadowy economic empires they control. Every attempt by Iranians to speak up—whether through protests, art, social media, or journalism—is met with brute force. Tens of thousands have been arrested. Countless others have been executed in silence. The prison massacres of 1988, in which thousands of political prisoners were systematically slaughtered, are but one stain in a long trail of blood.
The regime has turned Iran into an international cautionary tale. A country that once led in science, literature, medicine, and diplomacy has become a haven for terrorism, smuggling, censorship, and fanaticism. It is isolated not because of Western injustice, as Tehran claims, but because its leaders refuse to engage with the world except through coercion or sabotage.
Erasing Iran’s Identity
No less insidious than the political violence is the regime’s attempt to sever Iranians from their pre-Islamic heritage. The Islamic Republic has waged a decades-long war against Iranian identity, replacing Persian nationalism with Shiite sectarianism, and downplaying or outright vilifying the country’s glorious ancient history. Monuments to Cyrus the Great, Darius, and the Achaemenid Empire have been neglected or vandalized. Schoolbooks have been rewritten to glorify the Islamic Revolution while glossing over millennia of Persian achievement.
Even Nowruz, the Persian New Year rooted in Zoroastrian tradition and one of the oldest continuously celebrated festivals in human history, has been the target of state-sanctioned disapproval. The message is clear: Iran’s history begins in 1979, and everything before that—its kings, philosophers, poets, and secular intellectuals—is either an error or a heresy.
Economic Ruin and Systemic Theft
The Islamic regime has looted the Iranian nation on an unprecedented scale. Despite sitting atop vast oil and gas reserves, Iran today suffers from inflation, mass unemployment, decaying infrastructure, and widespread poverty. The wealth of the country is siphoned off by the Revolutionary Guards and clerical elites. Billions have been funneled into foreign proxy militias—Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Shiite militias in Iraq, and Hamas in Gaza—while Iranian children go hungry and hospitals lack basic medical supplies.
Estimates of the regime’s financial theft vary, but some sources suggest that hundreds of billions of dollars have been lost through corruption and embezzlement. Rafsanjani’s family alone controls assets worth billions. Khamenei, who portrays himself as a simple cleric, oversees a financial empire through institutions like Setad, a shadowy organization with holdings in nearly every sector of Iran’s economy. These entities operate outside government oversight and funnel money into both personal coffers and ideological warfare abroad.
Global Terror, Regional Destabilization—and Human Shields
Far from building a “model Islamic society,” the regime has built a regional network of violence. Its elite Quds Force has trained, funded, and armed terrorist groups across the Middle East. Its embassies often serve as staging grounds for intelligence and assassination operations. The 1994 AMIA bombing in Argentina, the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, and numerous attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets across the world have been tied to the Islamic Republic’s apparatus.
At home, the regime stifles freedom; abroad, it stokes chaos. And all of this in the name of exporting the same revolution that destroyed Iran from within.
When Israel strikes back—as it has done recently—it is not the Iranian people who are to blame, but the regime itself: a Shia mafia that has made war and provocation its only strategy. The same regime that prolonged the catastrophic eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of Iranians to preserve its own power, is once again dragging the nation into danger. Just as they then refused to end the war for peace, today they provoke conflict while hiding behind civilian populations.
This strategy—weaponizing human lives as shields—is not limited to Iranians. The regime does the same with the Lebanese through Hezbollah, with Palestinians through Hamas, with Syrians through Bashar al-Assad, and with Iraqis through its Shiite proxy militias. The Islamic Republic has turned peoples into pawns and countries into battlegrounds, never sparing a thought for the destruction it causes—because its own leadership is well protected behind walled compounds and layers of security. They do not fight; they sacrifice others.
Europe’s Cynical Complicity
Perhaps the greatest betrayal of Iran’s people has come not just from the ayatollahs, but from those in the West who legitimized and enabled them. European powers, especially the European Union, have consistently prioritized cheap oil and lucrative contracts over human rights and justice. While Iranians are hanged for protesting or removed from universities for not wearing hijab properly, European diplomats sip tea with their executioners in Vienna and Brussels.
France, in particular, played a pivotal role in legitimizing Khomeini while he was in exile in Neauphle-le-Château. Intellectuals like Michel Foucault championed the Islamic Revolution as an “authentic” uprising of the oppressed—only to later admit, in so many words, that he had misunderstood its totalitarian essence. Oriana Fallaci was one of the Europeans who hypocritically conceded to wear a headscarf to sit and interview Khomeini after she had attacked and accused the Shah, who had given her an interview, of tyranny. She, however, lived long enough to recant and described the revolution as a fraud that tricked both Iranians and the world.
The EU’s blind eye toward regime brutality has remained remarkably consistent. Even after the IRGC was implicated in terror plots across Europe, the bloc refused to designate it as a terrorist organization. Why? Trade. Pipelines. Oil. The same nations that decried the Shah for “human rights abuses” now tolerate public hangings and mass executions under the mullahs.
The irony is bitter: the Shah, who modernized Iran, elevated women’s rights, expanded education, and allied with the West, was cast as a despot by many in Europe. The clerics who have burned books, shot teenagers in the streets, and exported war are described in the language of cautious diplomacy.
The Iranian People: Defiant and Unbroken
Despite everything, the Iranian people remain defiant. Every protest chant—whether "Woman, Life, Freedom", "Death to the Dictator", or "Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran"—is an act of resistance against the hijacking of their country. They know the regime does not represent them. They know the West’s moral cowardice has prolonged their suffering. And yet, they persist.
What the Islamic Republic has not managed to do is break the spirit of Iran. It has not erased Ferdowsi, Hafez, or Khayyam. It has not snuffed out the memory of Cyrus or the dream of a free and modern Iran. The soul of the country remains in its students, its workers, its exiled intellectuals, and its martyrs—those executed, disappeared, and imprisoned for the crime of wanting a better future.
The Khomeinist regime has destroyed more than just a government—it has desecrated a civilization. Through lies, terror, and theft, it has turned one of the world’s oldest nations into a cautionary tale of revolution betrayed. But Iran is greater than any regime. It is older than the Islamic Republic, and it will outlive it.
The world must stop pretending otherwise. Europe must abandon its illusions. And the free nations of the world must stand not with tyrants in turbans, but with the Iranian people—whose struggle for dignity is among the most heroic of our time.