The Twin Wisdoms

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Members of the Iranian diaspora in Perth, Australia, holding a solidarity rally on 10 January 2026 against the Islamic Republic | Source: Wikimedia Commons | Credit: Gnangarra Listen to this essay: I have watched the Iranian diaspora move deeper into an information war that rewards certainty over truth. In that war, social media does...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Photographer: Parastoo Maleki – Unsplash A narrative essay drawn from a dialogue between Hossein Hamdieh and Daryoush Mohammad Poor The Polarised Mirror In the spring of 2026, Iran and the United States were engaged in careful, tentative diplomatic contacts—first talks in Islamabad, Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir travelling to Tehr...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast On Crossing Borders, Hearing Bombs, and the Stubborn Normality of a Nation at War Based on a first-hand wartime account from Iran by Kazeroun (@mkazeroun) on X “The evidence for a nation’s endurance is not found in its monuments but in the behaviour of its people when the monuments are burning.” The Decision to Go I travelled to Iran...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Introduction In my previous assessments of Reza Pahlavi’s political project, published on this blog during the 2026 US–Iran conflict, I employed polemical and emotionally charged language—characterizing Pahlavi as driven by a personal “vendetta with a flag” and deploying the postcolonial epithet “comprador intellectual” to describe h...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast On Dutch Collaboration, Iranian Compradors, and the Price of Borrowed Salvation Still from Black Book (Zwartboek, 2006), dir. Paul Verhoeven. Rachel Stein, a Jewish resistance operative, navigates a world where collaborators and liberators wear indistinguishable faces. Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book (2006) opens a wound the Dutch spent...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Photographer/Creator: Levi Meir Clancy / Source: Unsplash The loudest war drums in the diaspora are often beaten by people with no skin in the game at all. No mother in Tehran waiting through blackouts. No brother in Isfahan tracking sirens. No daughter in Shiraz sleeping under glass that could shatter at dawn. Yet they speak with th...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Credit: © ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Live News On the Comprador Character in the Iranian Diaspora and the Collapse of Borrowed Salvation A Character Type, Not a Person Every imperial project produces its own native chorus—voices from the colonised world who sing the coloniser’s hymn in an accent the metropole finds authentic and theref...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Alain ROLLAND © European Union 2023, Licensed under CC BY 4.0 Reza Pahlavi wants his throne back, and he is willing to see Iran broken to get it. For more than four decades, from the safety of American exile, the last scion of the Pahlavi dynasty has waged a campaign of dynastic restoration disguised as democratic liberation — courti...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Hamid Dabashi on Sovereignty, Selfhood, and the End of Western Validation Based on a conversation between Hossein Hamdieh and Hamid Dabashi The Day After the Ceasefire On the Wednesday after the ceasefire was announced, Hossein Hamdieh sat in a repurposed factory near Azadi Square in Tehran—a building that had once housed industrial...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Chah Kouran Caravanserai, a Qajar era brick building visible from the road while driving. This is a response to a comment by Kayvan Hosseini , a brilliant and intelligent journalist at BBC Persian, whose interventions are generally sharp, disciplined, and to the point. Precisely for that reason, his recent formulation merits serious...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast AP Photo / via The Intercept On Reza Pahlavi, the Monarchist Fallacy, and the Corruption of Logic A ceasefire has come into effect between the United States, Israel, and Iran. For most rational observers, this is a moment of cautious relief—a pause in a war that has already claimed nearly two thousand lives and wounded tens of thousa...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Photo by Jerry “Woody” / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0 The Iranian diaspora keeps sending its people to the barricades. The people at the barricades keep dying. The diaspora keeps forgetting. In Quebec, every licence plate bears three words: Je me souviens —I remember. Not celebration, but defiance against erasure. Que...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Credit: Georgia Tech Internet Intelligence Lab – IODA (Internet Outage Detection and Analysis), Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis Iran’s internet shutdowns during the 2025-2026 conflict have been the longest on record—38 consecutive days of near-total digital darkness. The opposition narrative is predictable: this...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast The severed B1 Bridge — the tallest in the Middle East — after US-Israeli airstrikes, April 2, 2026. (Photo: NBC News) Lapis Aetatem Complicitatis — The Complicity of Wishing a Nation into Rubble One of the enduring arguments of a segment of the Iranian diaspora in favour of the illegal invasion of Iran has always been a single quest...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Supporters of Iran’s last crown prince, now key opposition figure, Reza Pahlavi hold a banner reading “He is coming – Make Iran Great Again” and depicting a portrait of Reza Pahlavi during a march for Iran in Paris on March 7, 2026, amid the ongoing war in the Middle East. (Photo by Lou BENOIST / AFP via Getty...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Image credit: Photo by Iranian Red Crescent / UPI A Witness Account from the Interior of a Nation at War By Ali Abdi, revised narrative by Daryoush Mohammad Poor “The truth is that the beginning of this path lies not outside us, but within us.” — Ali Abdi ◆ ◆ ◆ I. The Landscape of the First Days It is the first days of Fa...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Image credit: Source: Unsplash On Disillusionment and the Refusal to Close the Door This piece is the product of my reflections on a voice message from a friend, a friend undergoing cancer treatment. But it captures something of what we are all going through—a particular species of exhaustion that transcends any single struggle, any...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast UN Secretary-General António Guterres receives the Ataturk International Peace Prize from President Erdogan of Türkiye in Ankara. Responding to Critics with Analysis, Not Ideology The critics demand evidence, baselines, cost accounting, enforcement mechanisms. Fair enough. Here are the direct answers that prove the ceasefire argument...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Image credit: Majid Asgaripour / WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS Why an Immediate Ceasefire Is the Only Viable Option The most plausible trajectory of the US-Israel war with Iran is not rapid victory but a grinding stalemate with growing escalation risks. Early expectations in Washington assumed that superior air power, inte...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Image credit: Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash A Diagnostic Framework for Identifying Logical Fallacies in the Rhetoric of Humanitarian Intervention For S. S. and M. M. who steered the direction of this essay into a more constructive one. Introduction There is a genre of argumentation—increasingly prominent in debates over...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Image credit: Center for Human Rights in Iran On the Destruction of Humanities in Iran — First by the Republic, Now by Those Who Claim to Oppose It One of the defining legacies of Ali Khamenei — the second supreme leader of the Islamic Republic — was his obsessive, decades-long campaign against the humanities and social sciences. Muc...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Image credit: Chris Randall / New Haven Independent — Anti-war demonstrators rally in downtown New Haven, March 1, 2026. Hacking War with the Only Weapon We Have Left For S. S. who planted the seed of this essay in my mind. The Ominous Timing of War It is ominous—and it should unsettle every thinking person—that both times Iran came...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Image credit: picture alliance / ZUMAPRESS.com | V. Valcic. Source: Qantara.de (Deutsche Welle) The Slogan That Should Alarm Everyone There is a slogan circulating with increasing confidence among a visible segment of the Iranian monarchist diaspora — chanted at rallies, printed on banners, amplified across social media with the ferv...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Calligraphy: Daryoush Mohammad Poor It is now pretty established that the most dominant voice on the social media belongs to an increasingly visible faction of the supports of monarchy restoration. They most prominent quality is vulgarity in language, speech, behaviour and actions. These are all abundantly recored in voice and video....

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Something broke in Iran after 2009 — not in the corridors of power, where repression merely recalibrated, but in the interior of a society that had maintained a fragile compact with the state. The Green Movement did not fail because it was crushed. It failed because the crushing proved, beyond evasion, that the Islamic Republic regar...