“I get into enough trouble with the ‘good people,’ so whatever. I will just say it: Iran’s revolution is an act of decolonization.”
So wrote Iranian-born musician Mahan Esfahani recently. He is not provoking. He is diagnosing. A world-class harpsichordist who lives today in Central Europe, Esfahani understands what happens when language is captured and reality follows. What should deeply disturb the Western conscience barely registers at all.
Mass protests in the streets of Tehran
He begins with a fact that should shake the Western world. Iran’s regime has cut off telephone and internet access, enabling killings day and night in near total darkness. No livestreams, no hashtags, no campus panels. Just bodies in the streets of people who have nothing more to lose.
Esfahani says something unfashionable and therefore urgent. Claiming that “this religion is as bad as any other religion” is not enlightened. It is false. Religions are not interchangeable ideologies. Some seek private belief. Others seek total power. Esfahani describes the current Iranian uprising as an act of decolonization, because what is being resisted today is not merely a regime but a system of religious domination enforced through fear, violence and systematic cultural erasure.
Europe has forgotten what Iran was before 1979. Under the Pahlavi monarchy, a broken country was rebuilt. Culture revived. Universities expanded. Students were sent abroad. Wealth invested in development. Iran stood among nations. It had open relations with the West and a close relationship with Israel. After the Second World War, when Jews were expelled from Egypt, Syria and Iraq, the Shah personally paid ransoms so they could escape and make aliyah. History is less fashionable than slogans.
Esfahani’s teacher was Zuzana Růžičková, the great Czech harpsichordist and Holocaust survivor who rebuilt her life through music. She did not theorize evil. She survived it. Music saved her. Music saved him. That is why he recognizes the pattern when ideology replaces culture and fear replaces thought.
Recently, the United Arab Emirates quietly stopped funding students wishing to study at leading universities in the United Kingdom. Not for economic reasons. Out of fear of ideological coercion and intimidation on campus. When academic institutions withdraw, the shift is already advanced.
Meanwhile, Europe chants that Israel is a colonial state, a narrative engineered and exported by the same Iranian regime that shoots protesters in the dark. While Israel is accused, Europe itself is being quietly colonized.
Hadar Galron Europe still imagines colonialism as ships and flags. Today’s swords are algorithms, academic jargon, moral intimidation and strategic silence. They all serve the same end game. When these tools succeed, they leave theory and become power, enforcement and finally streets that fill with the bodies of those who refuse to obey. Iran already knows what that looks like. Europe is still pretending it is a metaphor.
Freedom can be lost in the name of liberation. Colonization can arrive disguised as justice. Civilisations collapse not when attacked, but when they applaud the wrong words and mistake the chant for music. And when that happens, it is always the same moment in history. It is the day the music dies.
Music remembers what chants erase.