Hezb-e Bād: The Party of the Wind and the Coalition of the Vengeful

‘To a nation unaware of its own history, nothing can be told but the tale of erasure and decay’, wrote the Iranian poet Aref Qazvini in one ghazal. His poetry collection was once confiscated and banned under the Pahlavi dynasty. He died in exile. 

The 404 (or the Dey) uprising left many of us dizzy with conflicting thoughts and emotions. The massacre in January, followed by the US-Israeli war on Iran, was paralysing, to say the least. Before we had a chance to mourn those killed by the Islamic Republic, we were forced to watch more people die under the banner of ‘humanitarian intervention’ as ‘help’ arrived to annihilate not just the state but ‘a nation of hate and terror’, to use Donald Trump’s words.1

Over the course of 40 days, Trump went from ‘Help is on the way’ to ‘hell is coming to the Iranian people’; from ‘regime change’ to ‘we never wanted regime change’ to ‘we already had regime change’; from ‘Iran’s map will likely change’ to ‘Iran’s army is destroyed’; from ‘open the fucking strait, you crazy bastards’ to ‘every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow’; from ‘a civilisation will end tonight, never to be brought back again’ to ‘we have a workable ceasefire deal’.

As we now know, a ceasefire is rarely a ceasefire when Israel is involved. So much has lost meaning that we have lost count. Saying something is a war crime or a violation of international law has become a joke. Parts of the Iranian diaspora, while declaring their love for Iran, danced to the sound of bombs as graves were dug up to bury those lying under the rubble. Meanwhile, music that glorified resistance against the US-backed Iraq War in Iran, like Majid Entezami’s ‘Epic of Khoramshahr’, have been appropriated to praise the US–Israel’s illegal invasion of Iran. Songs belonging to the Iranian Left have been claimed by those calling for the death of all leftists. Anti-monarchy music, like Saeed Sultanpour’s ‘The Blood of Arghavans’, has turned into pro-monarchy publicity material. History has collapsed into vibes and aesthetics – you don’t need to be Iranian to be unsurprised by this. 

Linguistic violence and denunciation rituals have reached a staggering level of unbelievability. Critical thinking is relentlessly bullied and mocked as complicity. Offering the slightest nuance is seized upon as a betrayal to be punished. Academic research is read like a criminal record, while name-calling has become the air we breathe. 

‘The Left Never Understood’ is the new national anthem sung by pretty much everyone including parts of the Left. Being a ‘57-er’ has become one of the most popular slurs, especially among the youth. The number 57 refers to the year of the revolution, 1357 (1979), and everyone who fought for it. Attacking leftists is, of course, a safe sport, or as we say in Farsi ‘divar-e kutah-tar nist’ (no other wall is shorter).

These days, talking even to family and friends feels terrifying, let alone talking to strangers. One wrong word can slam a door shut in your face. Before you finish a sentence, it’s already been stamped, filed, and a verdict issued. Depending on where you stand, you are either a bomb-beggar or an Islamic Republic mouthpiece – there is no middle left. Regardless of what you say– whether pro- or anti-war – you are accused of being an agent, collaborator, traitor, and so on.

Silence has become the most effective political stance in shutting down any anti-war voices, while pro-war voices are eagerly given platforms by the mainstream media. Hiding behind abstract poetry won’t save you either. Each line is pulled apart and translated in opposite directions depending on which side is reading. The blood of those massacred in January, weaponised in February, and carried like ammunition to justify military intervention, disappeared from the headlines when parents began searching for the bodies of their children under the rubble. The ‘No to Execution’ campaign and the fight for internet access also got buried beneath the ruins. Grief, rage, and desperation became an exceptionally fertile ground for manipulation, silencing, and smear campaigns. 

But none of this is new. I remember how, after the Green Movement, those of us who joined the protests and tasted the tear gas and electric batons were later called (as a slur) ‘reformists’; when we spoke against sanctions, we were called Islamic Republic apologists; when we condemned executions, we were the CIA; when we named genocide, we were Hamas; when prisoners were released after the fall of Assad and we allowed ourselves a brief moment of joy, we were Zionists; when we wrote against the 12-day war, we were Islamic Republic propagandists; when we spoke of massacres inside Iran, we were imperialists; when we warned against foreign meddling, we were IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) operatives. 

Today, it hardly matters where you stand – Left, Right, Centre, or nowhere at all – if you don’t say ‘Javid Shah’ (long live the King), you are called a ‘chapul’ (a slur for lefties) by the Iranian monarchists/Pahlavi supporters.

In January, Pahlavi managed to gather a handful of celebrities (converted overnight into loud and eager activists). His supporters drafted lists of enemies, mostly anyone they call lefties, threatening them, while shutting down those quieter voices who asked what comes the day after the ‘fall’, or who pointed out that Pahlavi has no real programme beyond a regression dressed up as ‘transition’. 

In 1979, the Islamic Republic promised heaven on earth to workers, to the poor, to minorities, before delivering repression. With Reza Pahlavi, there isn’t even a pretence of things improving. His transition plan already promises hell on earth for minorities, while claiming absolute authority – power held in his hands alone. His ‘plan’ feels less like a political vision and more like revenge on the people who once expelled his father. But beyond the opportunists promoting Pahlavi with their deliberate blind spots, many also joined the chorus with an ‘anything but this’ position. 

Years ago, I used to ask my mother this question over and over, as if the repetition could somehow solve the puzzle: how did some of my aunts who were so free, so unruly, so against the hijab before the revolution, become guardians of morality policing every girl in the family? Where did the metamorphosis happen? In which room? On which afternoon? How? Why? Her response never made any sense to me. But in January 2026, the answer slapped me in the face. I saw it happen before my own eyes, mouth open in disbelief.

The speed with which some leftist friends began waving the Pahlavi flag was shocking, if not horrifying. Some justified the move in the name of respecting ‘the voice of the people’, while failing to clarify when exactly they heard the voice of 92 million. ‘They were never really on the Left to begin with’, a friend said. ‘They were always Hezb-e Bād (the Party of the Wind) turning whichever direction it blows.’ 

In the past few months, we have watched men who built entire careers in partnering with the Islamic Republic – profiting from and protecting its institutions, moving comfortably within its bureaucratic corridors – suddenly reintroduce themselves as staunch Pahlavi followers. We have watched celebrities and footballers, like Ali Karimi, who used to appear at state religious ceremonies, shaking hands with men whose signatures ended the lives of political prisoners, now rehearse the language of liberation while organising ominous campaigns against the Left and against Muslims in support of Pahlavi. 

We have watched Bahareh Hedayat, a women’s rights activist, now a declared monarchist, publicly insult Mir Hossein Mousavi, the leader of the Green Movement – the man whose solidarity with the people cost him nearly two decades of house arrest. Her letter to him, heavy with contempt and ridicule, came in response to his statement calling for guns to be laid down, for the rulers to step aside, and for a constitutional referendum to be held. 

We have seen artists who have long collaborated with and profited from the Islamic Republic return as aggressive monarchists, shifting to juicier funds in Israel and Germany, while quietly policing who is or is not saying ‘Javid Shah’, measuring allegiance on arbitrary scales. We have seen those who claim to fight for freedom articulate their political vision for Iran in the chant: ‘This is the final battle – SAVAK will return.’ We have seen many who sing the revolutionary songs of 1979 insult that same revolution, reducing it to a foreign plot, denying it ever was a people’s movement. We have seen a not-too-distant history being revised in real time as if those who lived it aren’t still alive. Could memory itself be disciplined into silence? ‘Yes’, my mother says, without saying it loud. 

Wind followers never stand anywhere long enough to be held accountable. Their political position bends whichever way the ideological wind blows. They are defined not by belief or principle, but their speed of adaptation. They become more aggressive when switching camps: it’s a way of erasing previous affiliations – publicly and loudly. Aggression becomes proof of their conversion, while complexity threatens them: it goes against simplified narratives, demands responsibility, and ties us to consequences. 

Some shift with the wind to survive, others to belong, others to remain visible, others for wealth, position, power. Not every shift is automatically a betrayal of the previous camp. Not every shift is a change of beliefs or positions; the executioners of one regime switch sides only to become executioners of another.

Name-calling here becomes a border checkpoint for entry into a new camp. Public purification performances and safe, meaningless, both-sided statements are used as a defence mechanism. The absurd level of online thuggery seems to suggest that we are not quite ready to accept the plurality of voices, dreams, and visions of different groups and ethnicities inside Iran. It is here, in this battle, in our differences, in the hesitations and silences, that the far-right has found its opening, seizing ‘dard-e moshtarak’ (the common pain) to mobilise people, not through a shared dream for the future but through contempt. Dreams require patience; contempt is immediate. And when in a state of emergency, immediacy is always more convincing. 

Rage at the present authoritarianism has flung the door open to another, not yet in power, but one that mirrors, and even perpetuates, what it claims to reject. To question what comes after the ‘fall’ is branded as defending what already exists. To express doubt is seen as loyalty to the status quo. 

‘We have given blood’ has always been a political silencer of dissent. Some say the Left is to blame, that it failed to organise, failed to offer an alternative, failed to prepare for this moment. But the Right is not as organised as it professes to be. What it has mastered and calls ‘uniting’ is nothing but a mobilisation of hatred – a coalition of the vengeful. 

Pahlavi supporters are not only contemptuously attacking the Left; they are swallowing it, hijacking the music, the symbols, the grief, the language of resistance and wearing them like costume jewellery. At a Free Iran protest in Vancouver, a monarchist woman was handed the microphone to declare, ‘I have sworn to become Hind, the liver-eater and to tear open your chests and eat your livers raw myself.’2 The crowd did not flinch. One celebrity, Shahin Najafi, said: ‘When they say democracy, we only say Javid Shah’; another man, known as Behnam Zapata, proudly stated: ‘We will shed more blood than the Islamic Republic.’ One Pahlavi supporter, Farshad Ashur, publicly and gleefully admitted to killing a woman. This comes just weeks after Dr. Masood Masjoody, a mathematician, was assassinated in Vancouver by two Pahlavi supporters.3

There seems to be  an appetite for devouring the enemy; a hunger, a cannibalistic pleasure even, in the declarations of monarchist groups who can’t be bothered to conceal their lust for blood. Even Yasmine Pahlavi, Reza Pahlavi’s wife, continues to advocate for the death of all leftists.

In January, when the wind began blowing toward Pahlavi, wind followers arrived from everywhere – Left, Right, Centre – united not by a vision or programme but only by what they despise. What was blown away in this storm were quieter voices with no media, other coalitions, other shared political imaginaries built not on vengeance but love – for freedom, for life, for the living – and against the forces of annihilation, both inside Iran and outside, against the imperial projects that destroy in order to dominate and call it peace. These voices were not missing but very much stifled by both a Western media hungry for war, spectacle, clean binaries of good and evil, and by Hezb-e Bād, busy policing language and grief, deciding who is or isn’t allowed to speak, who does or doesn’t deserve our grief. 

The Iranian war crowd, the seekers of white saviours, some of those shouting ‘I’m Persian; I’m not a Muslim’, have outsourced liberation to Israel, turning blood and suffering into currency, a down payment for the bombs promising peace in the Middle East. ‘They are hallucinating,’ a friend commented, ‘unable to distinguish between peace and rest-in-peace.’ 

Now that the ‘freedom bombs’ failed to perform as some fantasised, parts of the Pahlavist wind-followers are quietly shifting direction once again. While some are beginning to realise that the outsourced military operation of ‘regime change’ was from the outset nothing more than a de-development project, others continue to endorse the escalation of military violence with open enthusiasm.

Many of us have been mortified watching Iranians dancing to the sound of bombs from the safety of the West. In an interview by The Grayzone, some confidently called the killing of the Minab schoolgirls ‘worth it’, and a woman called for the bombing to continue while admitting she would never go back to Iran because America is now her home.4

For Suzanne Césaire, the zombie is not the enemy but the emptied subject, one whose spirit has been stolen and replaced by borrowed desires, repeating the violence of empire as if it were its own.5 The loudest voices advocating for war and fratricide often appear as if possessed ghosts detached from their history and humanity. You cannot argue with ghosts, but you can try preserving your own sanity. We must remain ‘permanently lucid,’ Césaire reminds us, so that when the ‘great camouflage’ falls, there is still something left, something human – still thinking, still intact – to build again.