As though stuck in an almost endless loop, Iran once again finds itself facing a wave of mass protests. These cases of mobilization are not taking place within a vacuum. They are rooted in severe material deterioration, including currency collapse, inflation, shortages, and declining purchasing power – conditions that have been deliberately intensified by U.S. sanctions.
Far from being a neutral or “targeted” policy, these sanctions function as a form of economic warfare. They restrict Iran’s access to international banking systems, deter third-party trade through secondary sanctions, and choke vital imports (including medicines and industrial components). The result is the transfer of pressure directly onto the civilian population rather than the political elite.
For all the “humanitarian” concerns raised about “mullahs oppressing the real Persians,” it appears the American Zionist policy-makers would readily sacrifice Iran’s population of 90+ million for the sake of potentially seeing its geopolitical goals achieved.
Unsurprisingly, the Iranian state has responded in a forceful manner, invoking the need to preserve order and civic stability. Iranian authorities have long argued that ostensibly “spontaneous” protest movements are routinely amplified, steered, or weaponized by foreign intelligence services, especially Mossad. These suspicions are reinforced when even senior U.S. officials openly frame unrest in Iran in this way, such as with Mike Pompeo, who served as U.S. Secretary of State under Donald Trump and has publicly asserted the involvement of Mossad agents.
Pompeo is not a neutral bureaucrat. He is a self-declared evangelical Christian of the dominionist strain. This is a worldview that blends American exceptionalism, apocalyptic theology, and a belief in U.S.-Israeli alignment as being divinely ordained. It is one of the worst examples of the completely made-up hybrid Judeo-Christian identity.
That said, the caricature presented of the Iranian leadership (dismissively labeled “mullahs”), as uniformly bloodthirsty or indiscriminately repressive, obscures important nuances. In at least one documented instance, a protester had deployed an improvised flamethrower against police forces, an act that, in most states, would be classified as attempted lethal violence, the kind that would typically be met with lethal force. Yet, the individual appears to have been apprehended and treated with a degree of procedural restraint that is sharply at odds with how similar transgressions are dealt with in many Western democracies under “anti-terror” legislation.
Given that the American–Israeli political agenda toward Iran is almost invariably coupled with an anti-Islamic discourse and a romanticized fetishization of pre-Islamic Persia, some basic historical questions arise: How did the pre-Islamic Persian empires actually deal with dissent and rebellion? Were the kings of the Achaemenid Empire, the Parthian Empire, or the Sasanian Empire enlightened proto-liberals and Lockean before Locke? Were they carefully safeguarding individual freedoms, bodily autonomy, feminist emancipation, and LGBTQ+ self-expression?
Darius I
We can start with the reign of Darius I, whose accession to the Achaemenid throne (522–520 BCE) occurred amid near-total imperial disintegration. Far from inheriting a stable realm, Darius seized power during a moment of cascading revolts across Media, Babylon, Elam, Persia, and beyond. His response was neither “conciliatory” nor “reformist.” It was openly terroristic and exemplary, designed to reassert imperial authority through fear as much as force. Our primary source for these events is the Behistun Inscription, a monumental trilingual text carved into rock.
In the inscription, Darius describes the public execution of rebel leaders, often accompanied by systematic mutilation (the cutting off of noses, ears, and tongues) before death. Impalement and crucifixion are explicitly mentioned, as is the display of corpses as warnings to the population. Punishment was not always restricted to the guilty party. In some cases, the families of rebels were also punished, reinforcing the principle of collective liability. These measures were not excesses. They were instruments of governance, meant to reestablish cosmic and political order through the deliberately very visible use of violence.
Specific cases underline the point. Gaumata, the so-called Magus who claimed the throne, was captured and executed once Darius consolidated power. Phraortes of Media, who led a major uprising, was mutilated and crucified after defeat. In Babylon, Nidintu-Bel was executed following his failed revolt. Darius famously boasts of having crushed nineteen rebellions in a single year.
In fact, Darius’s personal involvement in the administration of punishment was not perceived by himself or his court as arbitrary cruelty. It was explicitly rationalized through Zoroastrian cosmology, which provided the moral and metaphysical grammar of Achaemenid rule. For Darius, violence was not a mere political instrument. It was a religious duty. We read in P. O. Skjærvø’s “The Achaemenids and the Avesta,” included as a chapter in Birth of the Persian Empire, Volume I, pp. 70–71 (edited by Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart and published by I. B. Tauris in 2005):
Thus the king fulfills his duties to Ahura Mazda by upholding his law and pursuing and punishing those who do not, who are liars and rebels or foreigners who worship the wrong gods, and his advice to other kings is to behave in the same manner. The king, in fact, participates directly in the punishment of Ahura Mazda’s and his own opponents by seizing them with his hands and mutilating or killing them personally.
Darius at Behistun (DB 4.33–36)
*dahyāva imā tayā hamāçiyā abava drauga-diš *hamāçiyā akunauš tayā imāyi kāra adurujiyāsa
pasāva-diš auramazdā manā dastayā akunauš yadā mām kāma avadā-diš [akunavam]
These lands that became rebellious, the Lie made them rebellious, so that these (men) lied to the people.
Then Ahura Mazda delivered them into my hands. As was my wish, thus I treated them …
Darius at Behistun (DB 1.82–83)
hauv āçina basta ānayātā abiy māṃ adam-šim avājanam
That Āçina was led bound to me. I killed him.
Darius at Behistun (DB 2.73)
fravaṛtiš gaṛbaiyā ānayātā abiy māṃ
adam-šaiy utā nāham utā gāuš utā çašma hāzanam frājanam uta-šaiy čašma avājam
Fravarti was seized (and) led to me.
I cut off his nose, ears, and tongue, and I gouged out one eye of his.
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Ionian Revolt
The Ionian Revolt (499–493 BCE) presents one of the clearest examples of how the Achaemenid Empire, often portrayed as administratively tolerant and politically flexible, responded to rebellion with systematic and exemplary violence. The revolt involved a coalition of Greek cities in Asia Minor, including Miletus, Ephesus, and others, who rose against Persian rule under Achaemenid satraps. Though the rebellion initially achieved symbolic success (including the burning of Sardis), its suppression revealed the empire’s core logic when confronted with sustained defiance.
Once the revolt was crushed under Darius I, the punishment was not limited to restoring order or replacing officials. The most infamous case was Miletus, the intellectual and economic heart of Ionia. According to Herodotus, Miletus was razed, its temples destroyed, its population either slaughtered, enslaved, or deported deep into the empire. He reported the following in his Histories 6.19.1:
At the time of which I speak these things came upon the Milesians, since most of the men were killed by the Persians, who are long-haired, and the women and children were dealt with as slaves; and the temple at Didyma, with the sacred building and the sanctuary of the Oracle, was first plundered and then burnt.
The consequences extended far beyond Miletus itself. Across Ionia, rebellious cities were stripped of political autonomy, their local governments dismantled, and their leaders executed or replaced with figures loyal to Persian authority. Land was redistributed, tribute reassessed, and populations relocated – all measures designed to break the social and economic foundations of resistance. Herodotus is explicit that Persian policy aimed for deterrence: the suffering inflicted on Ionia was meant to serve as a warning to other subject peoples contemplating revolt.
What is especially revealing is how this episode parallels later responses to rebellion elsewhere in the empire, including the Babylonian revolts under Xerxes I. In Babylon, as was the case with Ionia, rebellion provoked structural punishment rather than negotiation. It saw the executions of elites, dismantling of religious and political institutions, and the deliberate downgrading of cities that had once enjoyed privileged status. The pattern is consistent. Whether Greek or Mesopotamian, coastal or metropolitan, revolt was treated as an existential threat to imperial order, and it was answered with measures intended to permanently stamp out any sparks of future resistance.
Herodotus himself underscores the psychological dimension of this strategy. The Persians, he notes, understood terror as governance. The destruction of cities, mass deportations, and public executions were not “unfortunate byproducts of war.” they were didactic acts, staged to discipline the imperial periphery.
It is also worth stressing a final irony that is almost never addressed. Ionia is conventionally described as the cradle of Greek civilization. It was the birthplace of early philosophy, historiography, and scientific speculation. It was home to figures like Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus, and to cities such as Miletus, which later Greek and modern Western traditions alike canonize as foundational. Greek civilization, in turn, is endlessly celebrated as the “mother” of Western civilization. By the logic that is so frequently weaponized by contemporary regime-change rhetoric, where pre-Islamic is automatically portrayed as civilizationally superior, one might expect Ionia to be treated with an almost sacred level of reverence.
And yet, when Ionia rebelled, pre-Islamic Persia did not hesitate at all to erase it. Its cities were destroyed. Its population was enslaved or deported. Its autonomy was extinguished. The very empire that is nostalgically invoked today as supposedly having been tolerant, pluralistic, and enlightened was responsible for quite literally crushing the so-called womb of Western civilization when it ceased being obedient.
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Anti-Christian Crusades
The irony is compounded when one recalls that today’s calls for “regime change” in Iran frequently emanate from Judeo-Christian political milieus, which frame themselves as the natural allies of religious freedom. Yet, one of the most severe episodes of religious repression in pre-Islamic Iran had occurred under a Zoroastrian monarch confronting Christianity as a perceived political threat. Under Shapur II (r. 309–379 CE), the Sasanian Empire waged a sustained campaign against internal dissent, and it fused political loyalty, religious orthodoxy, and imperial security into a single logic of repression.
Shapur II ruled during a period of intense geopolitical rivalry with the Roman Empire, which by the fourth century had become increasingly Christian. This external context is crucial. Christianity inside Persia was no longer viewed as a marginal sect. It was seen as a potential fifth column, bound by religious allegiance to Rome. As a result, religious difference was reinterpreted as political treason. Shapur’s response was not limited or symbolic. It was systematic and brutal. Contemporary and near-contemporary Christian sources describe mass executions, widespread torture, and the use of forced labor against suspected dissidents. Entire Christian communities were targeted, clergy were singled out, and property was confiscated to weaken institutional cohesion.
The persecution intensified after rebellions and during renewed Romano-Persian wars. Christians who were accused of espionage or disloyalty were executed in large numbers. Syriac and Armenian Christian chronicles speak of thousands of martyrs who were killed not for overt rebellion but for their refusal to conform to imperial religious expectations or to renounce perceived Roman sympathies. Bishops, priests, monks, and laypeople alike were subjected to exemplary punishment, intended to deter both political dissent and religious nonconformity. Historians speak of up to 100,000 victims, which includes sexual violence against women.
Anti-Christian sentiment did not disappear with episodic persecutions. It hardened into a durable feature of Sasanian statecraft and shaped imperial policy for centuries. Christianity, increasingly aligned (politically, culturally, and theologically) with the Roman (Byzantine) Empire, was persistently framed by the Sasanian Empire as an internal security threat rather than a tolerated faith. This logic found one of its most violent culminations during the Persian conquest of Jerusalem in 614 CE, under Khosrow II. This is a date worth emphasizing, since it was barely two decades before the Islamic conquests. During this campaign, Sasanian forces, exploiting deep local resentments produced by Byzantine Christian rule, allied with Jewish groups hostile to the Christian administration of the city. Jewish historian Max Dimont, in his Indestructible Jews: An Action-packed Journey Through 4000 Years of History (1971), documents the following about this early episode of “Judeo-Christian solidarity”:
Kavadh’s son, Chosru I (531–579), greatest of Sassanid rulers, forgave the Jews their insurrection, codified Sassanid law, instituted just taxation, promoted commerce and industry, and set a commendable example for religious tolerance by including Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian women in his integrated harem of 3,000 wives and concubines. His grandson, Chosru II (592–628), prepared for the fall of the empire by a series of brilliant victories. Christians, previously detested, were now declared subversive agents of a Christianized Roman Empire. Chosru declared a holy war against all Christendom, and enlisted 26,000 Jewish volunteers, chafing to avenge the Byzantine slaughter of 10,000 Jews in Palestine. Chosru entered Jerusalem in 614, sacked the city, slaughtered 60,000 Christians, sold another 30,000 into slavery, burned most of the churches, including the Holy Sepulchre, and carried off the True Cross as a trophy. The Church of Nativity alone escaped his wrath, because a mural there portrayed the Three Wise Men costumed as Persians. By 619 Egypt and most of Byzantium were Sassanid provinces.
…perhaps this is what Mike Pompeo wants?
Proto-Liberals?
I thought we could end with what is perhaps the most revealing episode of internal repression in pre-Islamic Iran: the social-religious movement led by Mazdak, which directly challenged the political, economic, and religious foundations of the Sasanian Empire. Mazdakism was not a marginal heresy. It was a radical mass movement that combined theology with social revolution. Its doctrines (communal ownership of property, the rejection of extreme wealth inequality, and even the abolition of exclusive marital rights, essentially “wife-sharing”) were explicitly aimed at dismantling aristocratic privilege and clerical power. In this sense, Mazdakism bears striking similarities to modern revolutionary ideologies, including communism. Perhaps the contemporary Iranians who revolt against the regime for ideological (and not socioeconomic) reasons might even share some defining traits of Mazdakism, even those that are morally ambiguous.
The reckoning came under Khosrow I (r. 531–579 CE), often remembered in Western and Iranian nationalist historiography as a philosopher-king and enlightened administrator. One of Khosrow’s first major acts was the total eradication of the Mazdakite movement. Mazdak himself and his followers were rounded up and massacred in what sources describe as a carefully staged purge. Later Persian and Arabic chronicles recount mass executions on a staggering scale. Some accounts describe Mazdakites being buried alive, others speak of inverted executions, in which victims were hung head-down or planted feet-first into the ground, transforming punishment into ritualized spectacle.
Thus, however critical one may be of the Islamic Republic, rightly or wrongly, it is simply not true that “the mullahs” have been uniquely or historically unmatched in their treatment of ideological dissent. Measured against Iran’s own pre-Islamic past (constantly fetishized by the Judeo-Christians and secular liberals), the comparison is almost embarrassing.
The contemporary state has harassed, jailed, and repressed left-liberal and secular opponents, but it certainly hasn’t physically eradicated them as a class. There has been no ritualized mass slaughter; no attempt to erase an entire ideological current from existence.
By contrast, that is exactly what Pre-Islamic Persia did to its own “radicals,” who were not “managed,” reeducated, or contained. Instead, they were massacred, publicly and systematically, until the movement ceased to exist entirely.
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