Guess Who's on Third?

One of the most grotesque things about the reaction to Khamenei’s assassination was watching Americans immediately pivot into fantasising about a “secular Iran” or a “free Iran” before the blood had even dried.

Not mourning the dead. Not acknowledging the 160 schoolgirls killed. Not reckoning with the fact that this violence was inflicted on actual human beings. Just instantly launching into imperial wish-fulfilment: maybe NOW Iran can become the version of the country WE want it to be.

And it revealed something deeply ugly about how Americans engage with the rest of the world politically. Entire countries only exist to them as symbols in their own ideological narratives. Iran is not a real place full of people with complicated political histories, internal movements, contradictions, factions, and trauma. It becomes a blank screen for western projection: oppressed women waiting for western liberation, secular democracy waiting to be “unlocked,” grateful citizens waiting to be saved through bombs and assassinations.

It is such a profoundly unserious and anti-intellectual way to understand politics. People genuinely talk about regime collapse like they are discussing a season finale instead of the destabilisation of an 90+ million person country with enormous ethnic, religious, regional, and geopolitical complexity. They do not study history. They do not learn from Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, or literally any other intervention where western fantasies about liberation produced mass death and instability. They reduce politics to aesthetics: “religious government bad, secular government good,” as though societies can simply be traumatically shocked into becoming western liberal democracies overnight.

But more than stupidity, it was the speed of the dehumanisation that was horrifying. Americans could not even pause their fantasies long enough to process the bloodshed THEY were celebrating. The deaths themselves became secondary to the imagined outcome. The massacre was reframed as potentially “worth it” if it created the Iran they wanted to see.

That is the logic of empire in its purest form: other people’s suffering becomes acceptable, even exciting, if it can be turned into political transformation desirable to the west.

And the sickest part is how casually this mindset appears. People say these things like they are discussing sports trades or fictional worldbuilding, completely detached from the reality that the “birth” of their ideal secular state would come through terror, mourning, orphaned children, destroyed families, and mass instability.