Pahlavi Movement: an Identical Twin of the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Rhetoric

At moments of conflict and tension, people tend to search for clarity. The human mind naturally gravitates toward simple explanations: heroes and villains, liberation and oppression, victory and defeat. In such moments, the public conversation is often dominated by slogans, declarations, and emotionally charged narratives. These narratives may appear to stand in complete opposition to their enemy. Yet if we pause and look at them through a wider lens, other layers becomes visible.

This article is an invitation. Instead of focusing only on the content of political slogans — what each side says about itself and its enemies — we might also look at the patterns beneath the words: the thinking styles, emotional vocabulary, moral assumptions, and psychological postures that shape these political movements.

From a wider lens, something unexpected begins to appear. Despite their sharp opposition, the rhetoric surrounding the Pahlavi movement and the Islamic Republic seems to arise from remarkably similar underlying patterns of consciousness.

This observation is not meant as a condemnation of individuals or groups. Many of these patterns grow out of real suffering, historical wounds, and collective trauma. Revolutionary thinking often emerges from experiences of humiliation, anger, and broken hopes. Recognising this context can help us approach the subject with humility rather than judgment.

1. A Vocabulary of War and Revolution

Both narratives rely heavily on the language of war and revolution.

Within this vocabulary, the world tends to appear in stark contrasts: friend and enemy, resistance and betrayal, patriots and traitors. Politics, even dialogue becomes a battlefield where the primary goal is to defeat or break the opposing force. When this framework dominates the imagination, the ideal posture becomes that of a warrior — alert, combative, constantly mobilised against threats, aiming for a win.

Yet humans possess other archetypes as well. A society can also organise itself around the posture of the healer, the caretaker, the listener, or the mediator. These archetypes emphasise repairing relationships, understanding multiple perspectives, and slowly rebuilding trust among people who see the world differently. The language of healing and listening, however, struggles to survive in an atmosphere where every disagreement is framed as a life-and-death struggle.

2. “With Us or Against Us”

Once the world is framed as a battlefield, the next step follows almost automatically: binary thinking, binary sorting.

People are sorted into two camps — those who stand with the movement and those who stand against it. The space in between becomes increasingly uncomfortable. Hesitation, nuance, or uncertainty is interpreted as weakness or betrayal.

Gradually, a vocabulary of suspicion appears: traitor, agent, middle player (وسط‌باز), naive observer, enemy sympathiser.

This dynamic is familiar in many revolutionary environments. What is striking is how easily the same pattern appears among movements that define themselves as the antithesis of the system they oppose. Dialogue becomes almost impossible when loyalty to the movement must constantly be demonstrated.

3. Martyrdom and the Politics of Body Counts

Another shared pattern lies in the way loss and sacrifice are used within political rhetoric.

Deaths become arguments. Casualty numbers become proof of moral legitimacy. The memory of victims is invoked to strengthen the righteousness of a cause or to silence dissenting voices.

Yet there is something deeply tragic in this dynamic. Human loss — something that should deepen humility and compassion — becomes absorbed into a narrative competition over moral authority.

4. The Refusal to See One’s Role in the Dynamic

In highly polarised conflicts, each side often sees violence as something produced entirely by the other.

Yet conflicts are rarely so simple. When thousands of people die in protests, repression, or war, it is usually the result of complex chains of escalation, reaction, and counter-reaction. Recognising this complexity does not mean equalising responsibility. It simply means acknowledging that political actors may also be participating — sometimes unknowingly — in the dynamics that lead to tragedy.

When every side insists that it bears no responsibility whatsoever, something deeper than political disagreement is revealed. Such a stance can point to a kind of narrowing, where the field of awareness becomes so constrained that the intrinsic value of each human life begins to fade from view.

In that narrowed state of consciousness, the suffering of individuals can gradually disappear behind the abstraction of “the struggle.” Lives become symbols, tragedies become statistics, and the uniqueness of each human story fades into the background of a larger narrative about victory, resistance, or liberation. When a conflict is framed almost entirely in these terms, the moral imagination begins to contract. The question shifts from what is happening to human beings to which side is advancing and which side is losing.

Those who shape and repeat such framings—political leaders, media voices, activists, and commentators—often do so out of genuine conviction. Yet in doing so they also participate, sometimes unknowingly, in sustaining an atmosphere where this narrowing becomes normal. The language of permanent struggle, of total victory and absolute enemies, slowly pulls the collective conversation toward a lower and more reactive state of awareness.

Within such an atmosphere, empathy becomes more difficult, reflection appears like weakness, and the complexity of human experience is pushed aside in favor of simpler, harsher narratives. The tragedy is that a vocabulary originally meant to mobilize people against injustice can, if left unquestioned, begin to obscure the very humanity it seeks to defend.

5. The Search for a Saviour

Another recurring pattern is the longing for a central heroic figure.

Rather than imagining a society built through distributed responsibility, patient institution-building, and civic maturity, many revolutionary narratives gravitate toward the idea that a single person will emerge to unify the nation and guide it into a new era.

History offers many examples of this dynamic. During the upheavals of the late 1970s, the revolutionary imagination placed enormous hope in figures such as Ruhollah Khomeini, who was widely seen as a moral guide capable of restoring justice and dignity.

This tendency toward saviour-centred politics appears repeatedly in societies experiencing deep turmoil. It reflects both longing and exhaustion — the desire that someone, somewhere, might finally resolve the chaos on behalf of us.

6. Power as “Prevailing-Over” Rather Than “Understanding-With”

Another deeper similarity lies in how power itself is imagined.

In many revolutionary narratives, power means the capacity to prevail over obstacles and enemies. Strength is measured by dominance, by the ability to defeat opposition and impose a new order. This understanding of power has become deeply embedded in modern political thinking. Obstacles are seen as things to crush, overcome, or eliminate. The language itself often carries an almost mechanical quality: problems must be broken, systems must be toppled, enemies must be destroyed.

Yet some observers of modern culture, including thinkers like Stephen Jenkinson, have pointed out that this obsession with “prevailing over” may actually reflect a limiting of imagination. When every challenge is framed as something to defeat, other possibilities disappear from view. Another form of power exists — one that works through understanding with, rather than prevailing over. It emerges through dialogue, patience, cultural maturation, and the gradual expansion of awareness within a society.

These forms of transformation rarely appear dramatic. They unfold through education, storytelling, reflection, and the slow rebuilding of trust between people. But because they lack the spectacle of victory, they are often dismissed as weak or impractical during revolutionary moments.

7. “These Are Special Times”

In moments of upheaval, another familiar argument appears: these are exceptional times.

Because the moment is so urgent, the usual methods — dialogue, patience, cultural work, listening — are dismissed as naive or irrelevant. They belong to normal circumstances, the argument goes, not to moments of existential struggle.

In many ways, the Islamic Republic has maintained this narrative of emergency for decades. Since its founding, it has often framed the country as being in a permanent confrontation with global imperial forces, using the language of resistance and siege to justify the narrowing of political and cultural space. For nearly half a century, this sense of perpetual urgency has helped push aside deeper cultural work, reflection, and open dialogue within society.

What is striking is that the revolutionary rhetoric surrounding the Pahlavi movement increasingly mirrors the same pattern. The language of exceptional crisis appears again — this time from the opposite camp — suggesting that the moment is too urgent for patience, healing, or slow social transformation.

In this way, the same emotional vocabulary continues to dominate the political field.

8. Collective Trauma: The Blind Spot

Perhaps the most consistently absent thread in both narratives is any serious attention to collective trauma.

Modern research in fields such as Trauma Studies suggests that societies carry emotional memories of humiliation, violence, and loss across generations. These wounds quietly shape political behaviour, often fuelling cycles of anger, revenge, and distrust. Seen from this perspective, the growing number of people drawn to war-driven revolutionary rhetoric may not simply be responding to rational political arguments.

Something deeper may be taking place. In societies carrying unresolved trauma, people often experience an inner sense of wounded dignity, frustration, and hollowness. A language of confrontation can suddenly feel meaningful because it gives emotional expression to feelings that have long remained unspoken.

The rhetoric of struggle can therefore become more than politics. It becomes a way of mobilising unresolved pain, transforming it into a powerful collective force. In this sense, the appeal of such war-oriented narratives may say less about their practical wisdom as political solutions, and more about their ability to resonate with unhealed emotional landscapes within a society.

Looking Beneath the Surface

The purpose of this article is not to argue that one political strategy is simply better than another. Rather, it is to illuminate something more subtle: a shared state of consciousness that may lie beneath opposing movements. If that underlying state remains unchanged, political change may simply reproduce familiar patterns under new banners.

This insight echoes a thought often attributed to Albert Einstein — that no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. Whether or not those were his exact words, the observation carries a quiet weight worth sitting with. If there is truth in it, then the deepest transformation a society might seek is not merely a change of rulers or systems, but an evolution in how it perceives itself, its wounds, and its possibilities. An evolution in its ways of thinking, its emotional vocabulary and moral postures.

Such a shift may begin quietly. It may begin when people loosen their identification with rigid ideological camps, when the emotional muscles of permanent struggle relax slightly, and when familiar realities are seen with fresh and curious eyes.

Another state of consciousness may already be available — one that allows a society to look at itself not only as a battlefield, but as a living community capable of learning, remembering, and, in time, healing together. Not through the victory of one side over another, but through the slow, unglamorous work of becoming more fully human.