Prof. John Mearsheimer: Dismantling Iran, The Four Part Strategy (Iran Open Thread)
Prof John Mearsheimer argues that Western media misrepresents events in Iran as an organic, popular uprising against a mismanaged regime. Instead, they claim the unrest follows a familiar U.S.–Israeli four-step regime-change playbook. Economic warfare: The U.S. imposes sanctions that deliberately damage Iran’s economy, creating widespread hardship. Protests then arise largely in response to these externally induced economic conditions. Fueling protests: The U.S. and Israel allegedly encourage, organize, and support mass protests, citing evidence such as Israeli media reports, statements by U.S. officials, Mossad involvement, and the use of Starlink terminals by protesters after Iran shut down the internet. Disinformation campaign: Western audiences are told the protests are purely internal and democratic, while messaging inside Iran is designed to convince people the regime is collapsing and momentum is unstoppable. Military intervention (planned but not executed): Once the regime appears near collapse, U.S. and Israeli military force would be used to strike infrastructure and elites to finish it off. According to the speaker, this strategy has failed because protests have sharply declined and the Iranian government’s crackdown has largely succeeded. Israeli commentators and even President Trump’s shifting rhetoric are cited as acknowledgments of failure. The concern now, they argue, is that Trump—having expected the regime to be on its last legs—may consider military force to “rescue” a collapsing strategy, despite reduced U.S. combat power in the region and Iran’s stated intention to retaliate directly against U.S. and Israeli targets.
India’s Eastern Face: Where Civilisation Dissolves Instead of Ending
Hard Edges and Soft Ones
India is unusual among civilisations in that most of its edges are real. They can be pointed to on a map and felt underfoot. The northwest is closed by the Hindu Kush, a wall that both protected and punctured India through invasion. The north is sealed by the Himalayas, which turned the subcontinent inward for millennia. The south ends cleanly in the Indian Ocean, a hard geographic edge that also became India’s great outward highway. These are faces with sharp contours.
India is bounded in the northwest by mountains, in the north by ice, in the south by water, and in the east by diffusion.
The east is different. It does not end. It thins.
A Boundary That Does Not Behave Like One
Geographically, there is a boundary. The Indo-Burman ranges run from Arunachal through Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, and down into Burma. They are real mountains, thick with forest, rain, and disease. But they are not high enough, cold enough, or empty enough to function like the Himalayas. They slow movement without stopping it. They divide ecologies more than peoples.
This matters because civilisation follows ecology before it follows flags.
Where India Becomes Something Else, Gradually
Continue reading India’s Eastern Face: Where Civilisation Dissolves Instead of Ending
South Asia Is an Ugly Postcolonial Euphemism
There is something faintly ridiculous about how often educated people insist on using the term South Asia as if it were a neutral, hygienic improvement on an older and supposedly “problematic” word. It is neither neutral nor an improvement. It is a bureaucratic euphemism invented to manage post-Partition discomfort, and it collapses the civilizational reality of the region rather than clarifying it.
The Indian subcontinent has had a name for millennia. It was called India because it lay beyond the Indus. Greeks used it. Persians used it. Arabs used it. Medieval Muslims, early modern Europeans, and the British all used it. The word survived because it described a geographic and civilizational unit, not because it flattered any modern state. The fact that the Republic of India later adopted the name does not retroactively invalidate its older meaning. Belgium did not abolish the word “Europe,” and Serbia’s existence does not make “European” offensive.
South Asia, by contrast, is not an ancient term misused by a nation-state. It is a late–Cold War academic construction, popularised by American area studies departments that were uncomfortable saying “India” once India no longer meant a single polity. It is a word designed to avoid an argument, not to resolve one. Like “Middle East,” it describes nothing from within the region itself. No one historically lived in “South Asia.” No one spoke “South Asian.” No one cooked “South Asian food.” Continue reading South Asia Is an Ugly Postcolonial Euphemism
Greenland, Trump, and the Comfort of White Intermediaries
What people are missing in the Greenland debate is not a technicality of citizenship or electoral legality. It is the structure of power that keeps repeating itself across the settler-colonial West.
This is not really about whether the Greenlandic Prime Minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, can lawfully hold office.
Of course he can. He has a Danish father and a mother born and raised in Greenland, and he meets every formal requirement. That point is trivial, and focusing on it is a way of dodging the real issue. The real question is why, across every settler-colonial society; Indigenous welfare and political destiny are so reliably mediated by white-presenting figures, even when those societies are overwhelmingly Indigenous in population.
Greenland is 90 percent Inuit. Yet when power reaches its most visible, internationally legible form, it is once again carried by someone who presents as Danish, speaks the language of European governance fluently, and is immediately readable to Western capitals as “safe.” This is not accidental. It is structural. Continue reading Greenland, Trump, and the Comfort of White Intermediaries
Review: Hindoo Holiday by J.R. Ackerley
From my Substack:
J.R. Ackerley’s Hindoo Holiday–originally published in 1932–tells the story of the five months (December 1923-May 1924) he spent as secretary to Maharaja Vishwanath Singh of Chhaturpur (called “Chhokrapur” in the book). In his “Explanation”, Ackerley describes the Maharaja’s motivations for hiring a private secretary from England. He writes:
He wanted someone to love him–His Highness, I mean; that was his real need, I think. He alleged other reasons, of course–an English private secretary, a tutor for his son; for he wasn’t really a bit like the Roman Emperors, and had to make excuses.
As a matter of fact, he had a private secretary already, though an Indian one, and his son was only two years old; but no doubt he felt that the British Raj, in the person of the Political Agent who kept an eye on the State expenditure and other things, would prefer a label–any of the tidy buff labels that the official mind is trained to recognize and understand–to being told ‘I want someone to love me.’ But that, I believe, was his real reason nevertheless.
In his initial meeting with Ackerley, the Maharaja asks him if he has read certain books as he wants them explained to him. Ackerley writes:
His highness seemed very disappointed. I didn’t know what ‘Pragmatism’ meant, and had read practically none of the authors he named. I must read them at once, he said, for they were all very good authors indeed, and he wished me to explain them to him. He had them all in his library in the Palace; I must get them out and read them… (9)
Later, in the same conversation, the Maharaja wants Ackerley to settle the question of the existence of God. Ackerley writes:
‘Is there a God or is there no God?’ rapped out His Highness impatiently. ‘That is the question. That is what I want to know. Spencer says there is a God, Lewes says no. So you must read them, Mr. Ackerley, and tell me which of them is right (9)
This interaction immediately characterizes the Maharaja and sets the tone for the rest of the book. Continue reading Review: Hindoo Holiday by J.R. Ackerley
New DNA research paper sheds light on proto-Dravidian and Indus Valley Civilization genetics.
Disclaimer
Please note I am a dentist — not a geneticist — and I do not claim formal expertise in this field. I have a long-standing interest in history and look to archaeogenetics as one of the best tools available for addressing some of the most enduring questions about South Asian origins and identity.
Credit is due to the many researchers, bloggers, and science communicators who have made this field accessible — including Razib Khan (whom I haven’t met, though he happens to be a fellow Bengali), who’s writing first inspired me to engage deeply with these questions.
Continue reading New DNA research paper sheds light on proto-Dravidian and Indus Valley Civilization genetics.
Open Thread
1) “Dargahs Beyond Belief” by Shah Umair
2) “After Khaleda and Hasina: What lies ahead for Bangladesh and India?”
3) “Politics of History: Manu Pillai with Salil Tripathi”
4) Trump is ‘Chest Beating’ Over a Retreat| ‘The Opinions’ Podcast
Between Arab Conquest and Persian Conversion: The Sasanian Inheritance
The Clip That Explained a Civilisation
A short video of an Iranian woman is circulating on X. In it, she says Islam is not Iran’s native religion and was imposed on Zoroastrian Persians through torture, massacre, rape, and enslavement. The clip is amplified by familiar accelerants, including Tommy Robinson, and is now being treated as a one-line explanation for a fourteen-century transformation.
Almost immediately, a counter-narrative appears. It insists there is “not a single piece of evidence” for forced conversion in Persia; that Islamisation was slow; and that many Persians, especially Sasanian elites, moved toward the new order for political, fiscal, and social reasons. A further layer is added: nostalgia for the Sasanians is misplaced because late Sasanian society was rigid, unequal, and harsh, and early Muslim rule improved conditions for ordinary people. These are two different claims. They are routinely fused. History does not require that fusion.
Conquest Is Not Conversion Continue reading Between Arab Conquest and Persian Conversion: The Sasanian Inheritance
The Demise of Brown Pundits Is Much Exaggerated
Every few months someone asks whether Brown Pundits is “dying.” I understand the instinct. The internet is littered with abandoned blogs. Attention is fickle. Writers drift. The centre does not hold. And yet, when I actually look at the numbers, the mood often turns out to be wrong.
We had a real dip. In September and October we were running at roughly 55–65k monthly readers. Then we fell hard, to around 33k. This month, we have bounced back to roughly 53k. That is a 60% jump on the trough. A lot of it is mobile. A lot of it is casual readership rather than the old-school desktop cohort. But it is still real people arriving, reading, and sharing.
The geographical pattern is also telling. India and the United States remain the main pillars, as you would expect. But Bangladesh has surged in a way we did not anticipate. That matters because it suggests we are not only a niche diaspora salon. We are also being read inside the region, by people who do not need South Asia explained to them. Continue reading The Demise of Brown Pundits Is Much Exaggerated