How revisiting America’s independence from the British Crown leads us to the independence of the Iranian polity from the Shiite utopia.
*Rola Zamzameh
On March 5, 1770, John Adams, who would later become one of the most pivotal Founding Fathers of the United States, took a risky step that provoked the fury of his compatriots: he agreed to defend eight British soldiers accused in the “Boston Massacre.” Despite his libertarian inclinations, Adams believed that the right to legal counsel and the rule of law must not be sacrificed to political passions. Five years later, however, the situation fundamentally changed.
In April 1775, when the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord and the British Army spilled the blood of farmers and local volunteers, Adams’s legal patience reached a strategic end. In May 1775, at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, he addressed conservative delegates who still clung to the “Olive Branch Petition” and hopes of reconciliation with George III. In a resolute tone, Adams declared: “Blood has been spilled…”
His meaning was clear: when a government turns its weapons on its own citizens, the social contract is reduced to ashes. Adams argued that the time for compromise or reform had passed, and that spilled blood marked an irreversible boundary between colonial rule and the right to self-determination. With this uncompromising logic, he not only chose Thomas Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence, but also rallied eleven other colonies to stand with Massachusetts. In July 1776, they declared a complete rupture from the British Crown, ushering in a long war that, through George Washington’s military genius and French financial and military support, transformed the dream of independence into a geopolitical reality.
In January 2026, as the world prepares to commemorate the 250th anniversary of American independence and celebrate its ideals of liberty, John Adams’s logic of the point of no return echoes powerfully in Iran’s political landscape. Two and a half centuries after that decisive speech, the Iranian nation confronts a grim reality. A criminal sect that has occupied Iran for 47 years, after decades of repression and bloodshed, from 2009 to January 2018, November 2019, and the Mahsa movement of 2022, has finally dropped its mask and committed a crime nearly unprecedented in modern history.
Following the nationwide protests of January, the Islamic Republic’s killing machine, in an act of sheer madness, slaughtered more than thirty thousand Iranians in over four hundred cities in just two days. This level of naked violence leaves no room for doubt. As John Adams cried out 250 years ago: “Blood has been spilled…” When a government so recklessly floods the streets of hundreds of cities with the blood of its own people, the social contract is permanently voided. Iran has crossed the point of no return. This is no longer about reform or dialogue; it is about Iran’s independence and the reclamation of the homeland from its occupiers.
At this historic juncture, the Iranian people, seeking to move beyond the Shiite utopia, have turned to a logic reminiscent of Eastern Europe’s experience in the twentieth century. Just as Václav Havel, in The Power of the Powerless, spoke of constructing a “parallel polis” against centralized power, Iranians today are laying the foundations of a law-based polity by declaring psychological and civic independence from the ruling system.
Here, Hannah Arendt’s thought becomes the bridge between civic resistance and the founding of freedom. Arendt teaches us that liberation from tyranny is only the first step; what completes a revolution is the constitution of freedom in the public realm. For Arendt, freedom is possible only within a polity governed by law, a space where law exists not to suppress, but to safeguard human plurality and the right to life. The Iranian nation has come to understand that ending the reign of terror requires reclaiming the public sphere and rebuilding it around law. In the Shiite utopia, death is the sole instrument of governance, and human beings are sacrificed without restraint at the altar of ideology. This utopia operates on precisely the logic articulated by Shigalyov, the revolutionary theorist in Dostoevsky’s Demons: if one hundred million must be killed to achieve the ideological goal, so be it.
In contrast, today’s demand in Iran’s streets is an explicitly affirmative one: the return of life to Iran. This is where popular slogans move beyond pure negation and arrive at a historical re-reading. In search of a symbol of modernization and national sovereignty experienced before the 47-year occupation, protesters have turned back to the institution of monarchy. In the collective imagination, the Pahlavi dynasty is not a nostalgic memory, but a tangible symbol of a polity in which law replaced fatwa and development replaced destruction. Thus, references to monarchy in today’s slogans are not reactionary gestures, but strategic responses aimed at reclaiming normal life, a transition from a death-driven ideology to a secular political order in which the state is not the custodian of a compulsory paradise, but the guarantor of citizens’ earthly rights.
This is our only path to salvation: an eternal return to Iran and unity under its millennia-old national banner, the Lion and Sun, regardless of political affiliation. We must not place our faith in those who preach otherworldly hopes and sacrifice life to promises of the afterlife. When ruling power sanctifies death, returning to national roots and identity-forming institutions becomes the highest form of resistance. No suffering can or will force us into mourning in submission or compel us to testify against life itself. We must call the Iranian human being back to life in this world. Together, we must join in this eternal return to the Iranian polity, beyond ideological good and evil, beyond false notions of right and wrong, and beyond everything that binds us, and rebuild life, day by day, upon the ruins of this religious despotism.
The future belongs to us, a future no longer shaped in dark chambers or behind closed doors, but forged in free streets and ultimately expressed at the ballot box. On that great day, the Iranian nation will choose between two national options, a republic or a constitutional monarchy, the new form of its polity. This will not merely be a political choice, but a celebration of the return of national will and the end of the era of occupation and the Shiite utopia: the day when law, born of citizens’ votes, becomes the eternal guarantor of life and freedom in the seven-thousand-year-old land of Greater Iran.
*Rola Zamzameh: Senior diplomatic journalist at the European Institutions.
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