TEHRAN – F kills his wife based on vague, unverified suspicions of infidelity. He cites religious law as justification, treating hearsay and jurisprudence as equal to civil legislation. 

Though personally irreligious, he identifies as Zoroastrian. He views clerics as illegitimate rulers and hopes for foreign intervention—specifically from the U.S. and Israel—to “liberate” Iran. 

He believes civil war is necessary for free elections, arguing current ones lack legitimacy under clerical rule. Paradoxically, he supports monarchy while rejecting democracy as a corrupt Western construct serving global conspirators. His case reflects a volatile mix of personal belief, ideology, and cultural tension. It shows how fragmented narratives and conflicting identities drive extreme actions when law, faith, and politics blur in public imagination.

Under persistent failure, fascism emerges not from strength but grievance. It offers limitless repression as a cure for humiliation. Nazi Germany rose from Versailles’s ashes, framing defeat as betrayal and purging dissent in the name of rebirth. Mussolini exploited Italy’s postwar instability to justify authoritarian control. In each case, failure wasn’t hidden—it was mythologized. Fascism reframes collapse as proof that compromise is treason and moderation a threat. Violence becomes sacred, law a weapon, and domination is sold as redemption. This logic adapts to local narratives, feeding on disillusionment and fractured identity. It doesn’t copy foreign regimes—it reinvents repression through familiar myths. The appeal lies not in order itself, but in the fantasy that only force can restore what was lost.

Fascism thrives on a deceptively simple diagnosis of failure—one that ignores structural complexity and offers seductive clarity. This clarity enables construction of a utopia that feels not only possible but imminent. In Iran, the devastating impact of sanctions and global hierarchies on purchasing power is routinely erased from the narrative. Instead, the existing order—legal, political, and cultural—is cast as the root of all suffering. Law becomes tyranny, culture becomes contamination.

The fascist imagination depends on this inversion: it must turn reality into the enemy to justify its fantasy. By rejecting nuance, it replaces analysis with moral absolutism. The promise is not reform but rupture. And in that rupture, it finds purity—not through understanding, but through destruction. It is a politics of grievance masquerading as salvation.

Fascism seeks not to debate rationality but to dissolve it. It targets institutions of limitation—academia, democracy—not through argument, but erasure. It promotes mental rupture in individuals, where coherence is dismissed as corruption and intellectual structure replaced by erratic impulses. Thought no longer forms systems; scattered assertions dominate, disconnected and contradictory. Logic isn’t suppressed—it’s rendered obsolete. What remains is mission: not philosophical or epistemic pursuit, but raw, weaponized will. This mission doesn’t emerge from understanding—it emerges from desire, from utopian fantasy armed against reality. Fascism doesn’t build minds—it breaks them, then mobilizes the fragments. It thrives on disorientation, bypassing resistance and converting confusion into obedience.

When full-blown fascism cannot dominate the public sphere, it mutates into microfascism—a diluted form infiltrating semi-private spaces like families and social circles. Unable to seize the streets, it colonizes living rooms. The household becomes a miniature state, where authority mimics political repression in intimate settings. Males become enforcers, wives and children subjects, and ideology seeps into rituals. Microfascism doesn’t need mass rallies; it thrives in quiet coercion, in control disguised as tradition. It reconstructs utopia in miniature—through rigid roles, symbolic objects, and moral surveillance. The family is no longer a refuge from power; it becomes its proxy. In this domestic theater, fascism rehearses ambitions, embedding hierarchy and obedience where resistance is least expected. It’s not a failure of fascism—it’s its wishful evolution.

Microfascism follows a historical trajectory of emergence. It begins by rejecting rational and democratic constraints under the guise of entertainment, freedom, and national pride. This paves the way for a fragmented, impulsive mode of living detached from reason. Symbols of anti-rationality—weed, alcohol, defiance of law—are elevated as lifestyle markers. Nostalgic mythmaking replaces civic identity: archaic masculinities are glorified, current national identity denied in favor of a fictitious ancient one, and both misogyny and aggressive femininity weaponized against social order. The shift from self-destructive insular lifestyles with inflated self-importance leads to calls for action, spawning fascist movements marked by hatred of women, migrants, police, and intellectuals. Eventually, Orwellian language takes hold: the foreign invader is seen as kin, while the native government is cast as occupier. National identity is redefined through fractured criteria—accepting monarchy becomes proof of genetic purity, rejecting it signals illegitimacy and moral decay.

Under identical conditions, a narrow yet loud fascist faction emerged in Iran, amplified by hostile Persian-language media, often cloaked in monarchist nostalgia. This movement idolized American Trumpism—resentful, theatrical, myth-driven. It was misogynistic while claiming to defend women. It rejected religion yet promoted Zoroastrianism as cultural purity. It attacked Islam but weaponized Islamic sexual invective against dissenters. These contradictions were tactical. Each borrowed symbol fractured civic identity and replaced it with volatile pride and aggression. The movement didn’t seek coherence; it thrived on emotional spectacle and symbolic inversion. Its strength lay in mimicking legitimacy while eroding it, creating an echo chamber where confusion passed as authenticity and hostility masqueraded as heritage. It wasn’t grassroots—it was a curated performance of rage and exclusion, designed to destabilize, not liberate.

The twelve-day failed war by Israel against Iran stripped the monarchist-fascist movement of symbolic authority. Its already narrow social base shrank, and cultural legitimacy collapsed after aligning with foreign aggression. Explosions and assassinations exposed its boundless appetite for violence—less resistance, more nihilistic spectacle. The symbolic leader appeared helpless and dependent, shattering illusions of strength. Failure fractured the movement internally, revealing ideological rifts and confusion. Mental disintegration, once masked by slogans of death and purity, now led to retreat. The banner of annihilation lost its appeal. What remained was not a revolutionary force but scattered rage—no longer seductive or coherent. The war didn’t just defeat the movement militarily; it dismantled its mythos, exposing a hollow core sustained by borrowed power and collapsing under contradiction.

In the initial phase of the war, the monarchist-fascist movement was decisively pushed back, losing its ability to meaningfully engage with Iranian society. Its rhetoric, once amplified through foreign media and online echo chambers, now rings hollow amid disillusionment. The failure to mobilize, reliance on external actors, and detachment from lived realities rendered it irrelevant. Attempts to reframe defeat as strategic silence failed to convince even core supporters. The war exposed its lack of depth, strategy, and genuine connection to the people. What remains is a scattered network of slogans and nostalgia, unable to reclaim lost ground. The movement’s symbolic collapse has turned into social invisibility. It no longer commands attention—it provokes indifference. The war didn’t just silence it; it erased its presence from the national conversation.

These days, F has vowed at a prison shrine to a Shiite saint: if his murdered wife’s family forgives him, he’ll sacrifice a sheep in gratitude.