Only self-awareness transforms static and corrupt masses into a dynamic and creative cantor, which fosters great genius and gives rise to great leaps, which in turn become the springboard for the emergence of civilization, culture and great heroes.– Ali Shariati The genocide in Palestine and the war against Iran are creating new spatial and temporal forms that will shape the history of our region in the coming months. In historiography, the concepts of space and time are neither scientific nor transcendental, but relational, as was thought deeply by Leibniz. Historians come to historiography with a concern for the constitution of “the span” that precedes history and activates it from below – the capability of relations and actions which is the invisible pandemonium that stirs the earth above. We have to commence with what is apparent, namely, the cracks on the surface of the world opening towards the span beneath.Last June, the US and Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear installations was in violation of the principles of human co-existence, and a crime according to international law and was condemned by three dozen United Nations special rapporteurs:These attacks violate the most fundamental rules of world order since 1945 – the prohibition on the aggressive use of military force and the duties to respect sovereignty and not to coercively intervene in another country […] The responsible U.S. political and military leaders may also be liable for the international crime of aggression.The ongoing war against Iran waged by the US and Israel, too, is in violation of several international laws and conventions for safety, as well as being utterly immoral. Netanyahu, who is partnering the US in this aggression, is an indicted war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court. According to the ICC, Netanyahu, has committed the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts from at least October 8, 2023 until at least May 20, 2024. He is also undergoing trial for corruption charges – breach of trust, fraud, bribery – within Israel, and has been using the genocide against the Palestinian people to postpone his trial. Israel can get away with all of it because of the very fact that any legitimate retaliation will result in a ‘western’ aggression led by the USA. However, this “West” is also in rapid decline: the proxy war against Russia has exhausted the arsenals and strained the economies of many EU countries; educational institutions are failing to provide a classical education while remaining resistant to developing new capabilities or engaging with advances in science and technology; populations are ageing; and political elites are growing increasingly distant from public concerns. One leadership after another has shown itself to be in decline – in both acumen and probity.US President Donald Trump is no less decorated; he is a convicted felon, for “falsifying business records”. The Trump family and the US administration are indistinguishable and are approaching the conflicts of the world with a view to extortion, bribery and embezzlement. The parallel monetary system controlled by this family (“Donald Trump has turned the Oval Office into the world’s most corrupt crypto startup operation, minting staggering personal fortunes for him and his family in less than a year”) is also seeking to control the fate of the world as a fiefdom through the the ‘board of peace’. Trump is also battling the released, unreleased and unredacted portions of the ‘Epstein files’. Many of these trends were incrementally developed in India through the ‘Gujarat model’, which involved corporations like Adani and Ambani growing in correlation with the increase of the power of the RSS through the BJP, in the enterprise of nationalism as pure business. These corporations are today the equivalent of the former ‘Russian oligarchs’ in malice and avarice, who have begun hosting the visiting leaders of foreign countries, which is undermining the state of India. Similar to Trump, ambiguous financial entities are also operating in India. Through the destruction of education, educators, and the universities the RSS mafia famiglia has accomplished the creation of a people without memories at the plane of history. The enslavement of India is underway one TV news show at a time. It must become obvious to the WhatsApp communities of Indians that the Modi government’s alignment under Israel and the US in the genocide in Palestine and the war against Iran is truly the alignment of the lowest potential of humanity – illiteracy, avarice, corruption of all kinds, apathy to all and, in effect, a certain hatred to the idea and the people of India. The age of IranBut we all still ought to wonder, how much work it may have taken to erase Iran from the memory of Indians! To denounce and condemn the illegal and immoral act of war against a third world nation – Iran – with clear malice to destroy it and its people should require neither historical knowledge nor acquaintance with the concepts which determine historical processes. Yet, ignorance, lies, and misinformation are being deployed to justify the destruction of Iran. This should alarm us because soon it could be India. Nehru wrote, “Among the many people and races who have come in contact with Indians and influenced India’s life and culture, the oldest and most persistent have been the Iranians.” India and Iran under different names shared civilisational systems – Elamite and the post Harappan – territories under different ruling systems like the Achaemenid, Kushan, and Mughal. The map of the subcontinent, cleverly drawn by colonial powers, produced the distance between the two regions through Pakistan, which is itself the victim of the very same map, although of another order of victimhood altogether. But as a traveller who came from an ancient land said, these are the ruins from which no pride shall be derived. The ease of movement of the tongues and arts are made possible by the knots of history and pre-history; that is, the spatial and temporal relations which expand and shrink the power of action available to a people at a given time – the span – are achieved through the power of discernment about which ruins should be razed and which should be left alone. The revolution begun by MossadeghIran, before the revolution of 1979, was ruled by monarchies of different shades. The dynasty of Pahlavi was founded by a soldier who went on to become the warlord Reza Khan, took power through a coup, and then called himself Reza Shah. Reza Khan created an image of Iran based on the ‘Aryan’ doctrine and empires of the region which were also suitable at that time in forging a comfortable relationship with Europe, which had been explicitly ‘Aryanising’ itself. His son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi took the throne in 1941. The Pahlavi rule was ruthless and corrupt, creating a new aristocracy and bourgeois class around itself (whose descendants lament the loss of the good times) while inflicting mass torture and imprisonment on the people and transferring the national resources as private wealth to America and other ‘western’ countries. Mossadegh. Photo: International News Photos – This photograph was made publicly available in the United States on August 5, 1951 as a Press Photo without a visible copyright notice. A scanned copy can be found at worthpoint.com, Public Domain.The first attempt to end monarchical rule and the subservience to ‘western’ powers, and to declare the sovereignty of the Iranian people over their land, forests, water, and natural resources was led by Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh too came from a family of privileges, as it was and is common in our regions of the world, but he was called the “Patriot of Persia”. Here patriotism has a distinct sense – the love of one’s country is founded on the love of all the people and the assertion that the resources available to a country are for the wellbeing of all its people. Mossadegh nationalised Iranian oil on March 15, 1951, and the coup attempts began in England. Although Mossadegh was a great scholar and intellectual, who admired and looked up to Nehru and M. K. Gandhi (whom he would emulate in his prison life), his was not the politico-historical artfulness of Nehru and the cunning of Gandhi. Instead, he proceeded with passion. In October 1952, Mossadegh called Britain an enemy and cut off diplomatic relations with it. Much like Israel today, but purely motivated by profit, Britain insisted with the US assist in a coup in Iran. America relented later under the Eisenhower presidency, and Operation Ajax was launched. On August 16, 1953, the Shah formally dismissed Mossadegh and nominated the CIA’s choice, General Fazlollah Zahedi, as Prime Minister. The decrees were dictated by Donald Wilber, the CIA architect of the plan. Soon, massive protests, engineered by the U.S., took place across the city to assist the coup.After a sham trial, which Mossadegh mocked during its proceedings, he was kept under house arrest until his death in 1967, “thus planting the seeds of the Islamic revolution”, to be led later by the very factions who conspired against him with the Shah (See Nasser Momayesi, “Iran’s Struggle for Democracy”, International Journal on World Peace, Vol XVII, No 4, December 2000). Even ‘western’ obituaries had to acknowledge his distinct patriotism, albeit as “eccentric”. The tendency towards sovereignty, freedom, and the control of the resources of the people for the people – the patriotic tendency of Mossadegh – was found to be at war with the ‘western’ tendency to enslave, impoverish, and amass the profit from the resources of the people. The war of these two tendencies led to the Iranian revolution of 1979. The Islamic character of the revolution – emphasised by Michel Foucault – is based on two different causes. The revolution had several forces, including Marxist organisations, liberal parties such as National Front and the Liberation Movement of Iran, and those which sustained the Mossadegh project, that were rendered weak as the revolutionary process advanced. Both the confrontation between Mossadegh’s project and that of the clergy, and the attempted reconciliations between the two can be found in the works of Ali Shariati, “strongly influenced by Mossadeq’s [sic] doctrine” and theology [See Mehdi Abedi, ‘Ali Shariati: The Architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution of Iran’, Iranian Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1986]. The temporality and spatiality of Islam, which is more recent and at times disposed to opposing dynastic forms of power, was opposed to ‘Aryan’ and imperial temporalities and the spatial relations, including older imperial territories which threatened the neighbouring powers, including the USSR. Soon after the revolution, the US and its vassal states began to sanction Iran (an unending process) and armed Saddam Hussein especially with chemical weapons to be used against post-revolutionary Iran. West Germany’s role in providing these chemicals, technologies and other weaponry takes on an eerie sense in light of the present chancellor Merz’s statement – “Iran should not be protected by international law”. On September 22, 1980, Iraq invaded Iran as a ‘western’ militia. The use of chemical weapons continues to have effects – “Iran sustained 387 attacks, during which in excess of 100 000 troops and a significant number of civilians were poisoned”. The war lasted eight years and killed 1,000,000 people, mostly Iranians. This became the condition for what Kamran Baradaran has termed the “stasis of Iran”.There is much more to be said about the life of post-revolutionary Iran, but this suffices to understand the paranoia founded in the reality of its state organs, especially towards ‘the west’. Paranoia over women’s freedoms and their opened hair is incomprehensible; it captures the series of promises made in the middle of the revolution broken by the clergy. The last real confrontation between the Mossadegh tendency and the Islamic clergy which had opposed him took place in 1997 when the democrat Mohammad Khatami became the president of Iran with a majority that humiliated the clergy, after which an era of assassination of intellectuals and journalists began, especially the friend of Mossadegh, Dariush Forouhar and his wife Parvaneh Forouhar. As the Iranian missile cities and research centres are sent to deeper and deeper burrows to protect them from ‘western’ bombs, the state offices and institutions themselves are buried under layers of camouflage and decoys. Such a system of rule also created those who were entrusted to the burrows of power and were provided with special powers, leading to corruption in an atmosphere of resources limited through sanctions and embargoes. At the same time, the Mossadegh-tendency of democratic patriotism – the reality of patriotism as the well-being of all – remains active in the recent protests, outweighing the notes of support for the tyrant’s son, the clown enslaved to Trumpist America urging it to mass murder the people of Iran. Mossadegh haunts the protests by women for their freedom and by the people for daily bread in Iran, and in turn his spectre is hunted by militias and foreign intelligence agents – “every Mossad agent walking beside them”. Without the sanctions, embargoes and the Israeli will to balkanise or create puppet regimes in the region of Iran, the people of Iran would have long ago created their own democratic model, which would have certainly insisted on the right of the people to the resources, the land, and their own freedoms. ‘A new reality for the Middle East’The present war on Iran is not just about oil. Instead, it is the birth of the first stage of a new epoch of history; of openly racialised and technologised control of the resources of the third world by white nationalisms (‘the west’); new colonisation through the destruction of educational institutions, induced civil wars, regional wars and intimidation; and, centralised control of finance and access to information. The genocide in Palestine, the destruction of Lebanon, the crowning of the former most wanted Al Qaeda terrorist as the leader of Syria, and the intended destruction of Iran aim “to forge a new reality for the Middle East”. This new reality is continuous with the old reality, and yet it is going to be profoundly different. People take part in a demonstration organized by GM Friends of Palestine at Manchester Cathedral, in Manchester, England, Saturday, Oct. 4 2025. Photo: AP/PTI.The UK, and the US through its vassal states, had divided and ruled West Asia (the ‘middle east’) since the end of the World War I. With the exception of Iran, the states of West Asia host US military bases. The oppressed people, especially women, living in these client states of the desert have often demanded democracy, and been crushed brutally by the puppet dictators. Israel had been controlling these desert puppets on behalf of America. As Merz characterised it, Israel is doing “dirty work (Drecksarbeit) for us”. The desert puppets fear loss of power and their lives of excesses, while the US and its vassals fear the appearance of new Mossadeghs who will nationalise oil and forge new relations with the world. However, America is declining fast, and its debt today stands close to $ 39 trillion, revealing a mostly financialised economy that might become a house of cards. Most European nations are not too far off, which is why the European leaders applauded Marco Rubio’s imperialist and supremacist vision:“The great Western empires had entered terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come […] we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilisation, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.”In this context, Israel appears to be perceiving a final opportunity “to forge a new reality for the Middle East” in which it is not just the sole military power to strike anyone at will (which it does anyway) but also to control the flow of oil and other goods through the Abraham accord and the middle east corridor. In other words, the new emperor of the ancient silk routes. Hence, India is appearing to be coerced into serving this new imperium, which will also be able to control Europe in the longer term. However, these projects are likely to collapse as soon as newer fronts of war open in the world.There are those in India who support the return of the Shah. The ‘liberation of women’ by the ‘west’ resulted in their sexual enslavement in Iraq, Syria, Sudan, and Libya. The very repressive systems in all these countries were maintained as per the orders of the ‘western’ powers, and as per the borders drawn by them. When the leaders of these countries found themselves wanting of autonomy and took measures which caused concern for the ‘west’, but mostly for Israel, they were devastated. The form of countries and states is not about to vanish, and politics – foreign and domestic – takes place only in this form, so that the democracy of the world can proceed only from this actuality. The people can determine the well-being of all, especially the liberty of women, only within the geographic terrains marked and patrolled as its borders. Within it, if its institutions – schools, courts, police, university, parliament, bureaucracy—are not secure from external infiltration and sabotage, the conditions for beginning a struggle for more and more freedoms determined by the imagination of the people cannot take place. Without these conditions we are all wares in the slave markets of the west. Any Indian, who cares for the well-being of all Indians should study the decline of our institutions and society in the last decade. We should wonder: what are we being prepared for through the decay of our education, news, streets, and dignity? Who is behind those who seek the destruction of the future of our children through the destruction of syllabi, schools, universities, the lessons in expletives, the replacement of academic discourses with trolling, goons and riot police? India and Iran todayThe assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei by Israel and the US is creating its own spatial and temporal relations to the present and opening a new span. The assassination of a head of state, who also happened to be the high marja of Islam, is an unprecedented event which will have unpredictable and long-lasting effects. This event is already forging a relation with the death of Hussein, the assassination of anti-colonial leaders such as Thomas Sankara, and atemporal domain of eschatology. Spatially, it is also connecting a disparate people from Indonesia to Dagestan, mostly Muslims but not just Shia, and even the irreligious. One can easily imagine the heads of governments in the third world feeling that it could be them tomorrow.In India, there is unintelligent mockery of the Muslims (which is occasioning a new phase of Islamophobia) and others who expressed their sorrows, which denies something fundamental about our species – we live beyond the time of borders drawn yesterday, we mourn what has not been realised, and seize that which lies unrealised in any ruin anywhere. Russians had once cried for Raj Kapoor, Indonesians for Michael Jackson, Iranians for Jacques Derrida, and the Palestinians for Pope Francis. A country that does not have the wisdom and the depth of temporal conception is like a puff of cotton in the rain. India had played a significant role in two movements of world history in the 20th century, from which the impetus for BRICS came about: 1) the anti-colonial struggle (the RSS had no role in it) which explains the historic continuity of support for the Palestinian struggle by the Congress party and the communist parties in India; 2) non-aligned movement (led by Tito, Nasser, Nehru, Kwame Nkrumah, and Sukarno) during which the US found India and its adoption of socialism to be a threat, which led to “the United States Central Intelligence Agency [to give] “substantial sums of money to right-wing parties” including the “Jan Sangh”, the previous incarnation of the BJP. The culture of cowardice and servility to white supremacism of all shades is ingrained in the mafia famiglia and is now being inculcated in the rest of India through TV news shows. Today, when the government stays silent about the assassination of the head of state of Iran and this illegal war, while embracing the wanted war criminal two days before the illegal war, India appears the weakest in its history. In the opening of this new span of the world, we will end up with the most despised (Israel, for the genocide in Palestine) and those who killed the most number of humans on earth (the United States of America). This must not and does not mean that the people of India stand with the convicted felon from America and the corrupt fugitive war criminal from Israel. But we cannot just be “obeying orders” when extraordinary crimes are being committed against a people. Instead, as one of the poorest countries of the world with persistent social inequalities, we should commit to stand with and for oppressed people everywhere. The empathy that we feel in these moments with the exploited, the oppressed, and in Iran’s case, the mass-murdered is not only internationalism and humaneness. Therefore, when the rulers and their enablers are gagged by secrets yet to be revealed, the people should begin to speak the loudest on behalf of India, and also the people of the world. We too are, of course, being eaten from within and without. But not too long ago it is we who sent away the empire without night into its night. As we have often shown, when the white nationalists come, we – the people of India – will be right here, waiting to give them their final farewell. Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi are philosophers based in the subcontinent and authors of Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics, Hurst UK (2024).