Iran’s 86-year-old supreme chief, who believes that he represents God’s will on Earth, ordered what now seems to be one of many deadliest two-day mass slaughters in trendy historical past. In accordance with estimates offered by two nameless senior officers within the nation’s ministry of well being, as many as 30,000 residents could have been killed throughout this 48-hour rampage on January 8 and 9. If these estimates show right, Ali Khamenei’s January 2026 bloodbath—the climax of a decades-long reign of repression—will rank amongst trendy historical past’s deadliest single episodes of state violence.
For the reason that rise of the trendy state within the seventeenth century, political legitimacy has come to relaxation on a social contract, through which the federal government offers safety and sustenance in alternate for the consent of the ruled. The Islamic Republic’s relationship with Iranians doesn’t resemble a social contract, however a predatory lease signed in 1979 that has lengthy since expired.
The phrases of this lease—imposed by the owner upon the tenants—are nonnegotiable:
You, the tenant, will dwell contained in the non secular fever dream of a person, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who seen the state not as a vessel for nationwide development, however as a weapon for private retribution, and whose copious writings supplied detailed pronouncements in regards to the non secular penalties for fornicating with animals, but no insights on the right way to run a contemporary economic system. “Economics,” he as soon as mentioned, “is for donkeys.”
You may be dominated for 4 a long time by his successor, Khamenei, whose views will stay mounted irrespective of how a lot the world, and Iranian society, adjustments. He’ll preach resistance and faux he’s a pious man who eschews worldly wealth. However an entity known as Setad—a shadowy monetary empire below his private management—has amassed property valued at greater than $95 billion in 2013 and doubtlessly exceeding $200 billion right now, a lot of it confiscated from Iranians who fled political and non secular persecution.
We, the owner, will micromanage your private life. Whom you’re keen on, the films you watch, the music you take heed to, what you drink—all can be topic to our approval. Beneath our Sharia-based legal guidelines, ladies can be stoned for adultery, whereas males are permitted to take a number of wives.
You may be subjected to routine energy outages, although your nation possesses the world’s third-largest confirmed reserves of oil and second-largest reserves of pure gasoline. We’ll preside over one of many highest inflation charges on the planet, wiping out your financial savings because the nationwide forex loses greater than 99 % of its worth towards the U.S. greenback because the revolution.
We’ll so profoundly mismanage the environment–as a consequence of corruption and incompetence–that we’ll dry up your rivers and switch your lakes into salt flats, creating mud storms that choke your cities. We’ll pump the groundwater till the land beneath Tehran actually sinks, imperiling its habitability for future generations.
Our nationwide slogans can be “Dying to America” and “Dying to Israel,” by no means “Lengthy Reside Iran.” As Khomeini as soon as put it, “Patriots are ineffective to us. We want Muslims. Islam is against patriotism.” Whereas we chant these slogans, we’ll ship our personal kids to check within the West.
We’ll deal with half the inhabitants as second-class residents. In case you are a girl, your testimony in courtroom can be value half that of a person’s, and your inheritance can be half that of your brother’s. We’ll make a bit of fabric—the hijab—the first image of our state’s authority, and we’ll beat you to loss of life in detention facilities for carrying it “improperly.”
Though we’ll rule from an ethical pedestal, we’ll lie with out reserve. Because the longtime Khamenei adviser Mohammad-Javad Larijani likes to say, “With the ability to preserve a secret even when you must mislead is taken into account an indication of maturity. It’s Persian knowledge. We don’t need to be perfect folks. All people lies. Let’s be good liars.”
Our biggest nationwide export would be the intelligence of our nation. We’ll undergo from one of many highest ranges of mind drain on the planet. 100 fifty thousand of our residents will depart yearly, at a value that even our personal officers have conceded might quantity to about $150 billion yearly.
Moderately than recruit the brightest minds from our diaspora again to Iran to contribute to our nation, we’ll take them hostage and promote them for ransom to the USA and European nations. We’ll take visiting international lecturers hostage and commerce them for convicted terrorists.
Although we’ll boast about our independence, 90 % of our oil exports—the lifeblood of our economic system—will go to China, which calls for steep reductions.
We’ll use a large portion of our nationwide wealth—tens of billions of {dollars}—to finance and arm Arab militias all through the Center East. This shouldn’t be confused with concern for the well-being of Palestinians. In distinction to American, European, and Arab governments that fund Palestinian human-welfare initiatives, our sources will arm and finance Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Our aim is to not construct Palestine however to destroy Israel. We’ll obtain neither.
We’ll spend properly greater than $500 billion—together with the income misplaced to sanctions—for a nuclear program that gives neither vitality nor deterrence, as was evidenced by Israel and America’s repeated penetration of Iranian air house.
We’ll ally with Russia, a rustic that excised a 3rd of our territory within the nineteenth century, that occupied and tried to take extra territory within the twentieth century, and that advantages from protecting our nation remoted in order that we can’t compete with them in world vitality markets or for affect in Central Asia.
We’ll preach a “resistance economic system” of austerity for you, whereas our Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps operates as a tax-exempt mafia that controls as a lot as 50 % of the nationwide economic system, together with telecommunications, ports, and building. You’ll stand in line for backed bread whereas our elites smuggle iPhones and luxurious automobiles by way of unique, unmonitored airport terminals. Our middlemen will funnel your nationwide wealth into European property empires—shopping for ski resorts in Austria and mansions on London’s Billionaires’ Row—all whereas financing the very guards who repress you.
We reserve the suitable to make use of you as human shields. Once we concern an assault, we could refuse to shut civilian airspace, shoot down a passenger aircraft filled with our personal residents, lie about it for 3 days, after which torment the households of the victims.
When you protest our corruption or incompetence, you can be known as a terrorist and charged with “waging warfare towards God” or “corruption on earth.” We’ll execute you with out due course of, sustaining the world’s highest execution fee per capita.
We’ll construct a digital wall round you. We’ll sluggish your web speeds to a crawl and block world platforms to forestall you from speaking with each other or the skin world, whereas our officers submit freely on X to unfold propaganda to the West.
Even earlier than this newest bloodbath, the hole between the Iranian authorities and its residents was one of many widest on Earth. A vital mass of Iranians, together with inside the regime, have realized that the construction is condemned. They know that breaking the lease can be pricey and terrifying, particularly with out international assist. However additionally they know that dwelling below its phrases is at finest a lifeless finish, and at worst a loss of life sentence. They don’t search to renegotiate the contract. They search to evict the owner.
