Karl Marx famously wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that history repeats itself—“the first time as tragedy, the second as farce” (“das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce”). His meditation on the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1848—first the overthrow of the monarchy, then the rise of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte—was not only a comment on political recurrence. It was a philosophical appeal to causality: the idea that every effect springs from a cause, and that history, like physics, is governed by chain reactions of human ambition, error, and betrayal.

Viewed through that lens, Iran’s modern history is painfully instructive. The 1979 revolution—ultimately captured by theocratic despotism—began as a genuine uprising, a collective cry against a monarchy that had curdled into modern tyranny. The Pahlavi regime, with its SAVAK apparatus trained in the dark arts of surveillance and torture, sowed the seeds of its own collapse. The brutality and arrogance of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s rule created the vacuum into which Khomeini and his clerical cohort surged, unleashing a reign of terror that endures to this day.

Now, Iran again stands on the precipice of change. And as the old saying goes, when the stars come out, so do the bats. But this time, history doesn’t merely repeat—it regurgitates. What it brings up is not a coherent narrative but a toxic admixture of revisionism, opportunism, and betrayal.

Enter Reza Pahlavi, the exiled self-proclaimed crown prince, a man who has never known the dignity of labor nor the burden of accountability. One is tempted to ask: “7-Eleven, did you call?”—for he has not held an honest day’s job in his life. His sudden reappearance on the political stage, cloaked in the language of reform and national unity, is less a return than a resurrection of a failed past. His so-called, and now dormant, National Council of Iran (NCI) bears no resemblance to the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), whose very name signals an unyielding opposition to the clerical regime. While the NCRI, as the R insists, has paid in blood and exile for its resistance, the NCI found strange bedfellows among the very architects of repression—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and their ilk.

Also reemerging is Parviz Sabeti, the former high-ranking SAVAK official whose legacy is stained with the blood of Iran’s youth. His defense—that he could not have been a torturer because he was trained in law—is as hollow as it is grotesque. History offers grim parallels: Hans Frank, too, was a lawyer before becoming the Nazi governor of occupied Poland. Legal training is no inoculation against moral depravity. Sabeti’s return is further darkened by the involvement of his daughter, now advising a front organization linked to Reza Pahlavi—an unsettling continuity that threads past atrocities to present ambitions. The long arm of the law may, at last, be closing around his neck.

And yet, amid this theater of recurrence, there is a sliver of clarity. History’s regurgitations—vile as they are—distill distinctions. They separate opportunists from patriots, the counterfeit from the genuine. Those who have endured the regime’s dungeons, who were forged in the crucible of torture, rape, and execution, understand that freedom is never bestowed by dynasties or foreign patrons. It is earned—through sacrifice, resistance, and an unbreakable commitment to justice.

Iran’s liberation will not be paved with the ill-gotten gold of the Pahlavis. It will be written in the blood and tears of those who insist “never again.”