I explore how the recent US intervention in Venezuela has sent shockwaves through the Iranian regime, proving that in our modern era, no struggle for freedom is truly isolated.
Is the chaos in Tehran truly an isolated economic revolt?
I have been watching the footage coming out of Iran—the tear gas, the chants, the desperation—and it is tempting to see it as a story about inflation. After all, when the price of bread rises, the people rise. But if you look closer at the timeline, something else emerges. The protests began in earnest just as the news of Nicolas Maduro’s capture was breaking. It forces us to ask: are we seeing a hunger riot, or a realization that the monsters are mortal? As Simone Weil once observed regarding the nature of force and those who wield it:
Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.
– Simone Weil
The regime in Tehran has been intoxicated by its own perceived invulnerability for decades. But the sight of a fellow ‘strongman’ in handcuffs has sobered them up, and the people on the street can smell the fear.
Does the capture of Maduro signal the end of sovereign immunity for the Axis?
There is a psychological dimension to tyranny that we often overlook. It relies on the illusion of permanence. When the United States reached into Venezuela and plucked Maduro from power, that illusion cracked in Tehran. You can hear it in the defensive tone of the Supreme Leader; you can see it in the frantic promises of stipends by President Pezeshkian. They know that the rules have changed. The illusion of isolation is the tyrant’s greatest weapon, and it has just been shattered. The protesters are not just reacting to the rial’s collapse; they are reacting to the sudden fragility of their oppressors. It reminds me of the insight from Václav Havel on the power of the powerless:
The moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, ‘The emperor is naked!’—when a single player breaks the rules, the whole game is exposed.
– Václav Havel
Maduro was the player removed from the board, and now the game in Iran stands exposed.
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What is the cost of this new global interconnectedness?
We have to accept that the world has become a single, nervous organism. A shock in the Americas causes a tremor in Asia. For you and me, this means we can no longer afford to be indifferent to ‘foreign’ affairs, because there is no such thing anymore. The courage of the Iranian protestor is being fueled by the collapse of a Venezuelan dictator. It is a terrifying and hopeful realization: we are all bound together in this mess. The walls that used to separate our struggles have fallen down, leaving us standing in a single, vast arena of conflict. The question is no longer what is happening ‘over there,’ but how ‘over there’ is shaping our reality right here.