Power in Young States, Authority in Old Ones

A military dictatorship governs by force, hierarchy, and command. Its legitimacy is procedural and immediate: order, security, survival. This form works where political memory is thin and inherited meaning is limited. Pakistan’s army did not overthrow an old order. It stepped into an empty one. Iran is structured differently. It is a civilisational state that has existed in recognisable form for roughly three thousand years. Power there has never been exercised through force alone. Authority has always been tied to ideas that predate any single regime.

Monarchy as Civilisation, Not Administration

When Iran was ruled by kings, monarchy was not merely a system of governance. It was cosmology. Kingship was linked to justice, order, and civilisation itself, from the Achaemenids through the Pahlavis. When monarchy collapsed, it did not collapse as a technical system. It collapsed as a civilisational institution. That distinction matters. Administrative failures can be replaced easily. Civilisational failures leave residue. This is why nostalgia for monarchy in Iran does not translate into simple restoration politics. The memory persists, but the form cannot simply be reinstalled. Iran moved on, but it moved on within its own historical grammar.

Shi‘ism and the Islamic Republic

Shi‘ism explains why the Islamic Republic functions differently from a generic theocracy. Clerics did not invent legitimacy in 1979. They organised an inheritance that already existed. Shi‘ism had been woven into Iranian identity for centuries, shaping law, ritual, memory, and authority. The state did not create religion. It administered a civilisational framework that was already legible to society. This is why Iran cannot be ruled by raw coercion without losing authority. Force alone has never been enough. Power must feel historical to endure.

Why a Military Takeover Would Fail

This is where fantasies about a clean military takeover by the IRGC go wrong. A purely military regime would feel thin and temporary. Force might hold, but legitimacy would not. Iran has never been governed by command alone. Its systems have always required symbolic depth. When that depth disappears, the state destabilises. This is not a moral argument. It is a structural one. Military rule is not a neutral option that can be dropped into any society.

China and the Problem of Self-Rule

China clarifies the same point. The Chinese Communist Party is not democratic in a procedural sense, yet it governs through ideology, bureaucracy, and historical narrative. It claims continuity, national destiny, and collective order. Whether one accepts that claim is secondary. What matters is that it structures authority. Self-rule is not synonymous with elections. Ancient states require legitimacy that is intelligible to history.

India and Civilisational Continuity

India exposes the same analytical error. There is a persistent claim that India did not exist before modern nationalism, as if civilisation begins with a passport. This is untenable. The Indus Valley civilisation is among the oldest on earth, comparable to Egypt and Mesopotamia. India is its inheritor, just as Iran is the inheritor of ancient Persian worlds. This does not make India or Iran virtuous. It makes them continuous.

Why Pakistan Is Different

Continuity is power. It allows societies to absorb autocracy, experiment with democracy, survive collapse, and regenerate authority without disintegrating. There is something old to stitch consensus around. Pakistan does not have this advantage. That is not an insult. It is a structural description. Pakistan is a young nation with a strong ideology and a shallow historical state tradition. Its political struggle has always been to manufacture coherence quickly. The army filled that role. Ideology attempted to compensate for time.

History Is Not Evenly Distributed

Iran will resolve its crisis according to its long memory, not according to modern templates. India does the same. Pakistan is still writing its memory. History is not evenly distributed, and governance reflects that inequality. Recognising this is not elitism. It is realism.

Continuing on, X.T.M says that “India’s post-Independence settlement created structural ambiguity” and cites four factors in particular:

• Upper-caste Hindu political dominance at the center
• Muslim demographic concentrations with limited elite integration
• A constitutional secularism that promised equality while leaving communal structures intact
• No acknowledgment that the Muslim League’s victory posed a legitimacy problem

I think his key insight is this: “The constitution guaranteed rights. It could not guarantee renewed political consent.”

The issue as I see it is that the Indian state took the most half-hearted, wishy-washy approach towards the problem of integration. It allowed Muslims to construct bastions of political power while at the same time dividing Hindus along caste and linguistic lines. It allowed criminal elements, many from a Muslim background, to dominate perhaps its most significant sector — the arts — and spread messages of the innate goodness of Indian Muslims and Pakistanis (which is only being suppressed due to both governments’ actions) and the need for peace between Hindus and Muslims, thereby constructing an illusory palace to beguile secularized urban Hindus, while behind the silver screen they fund terrorist attacks in India. The murder of Gulshan Kumar comes to mind as (seemingly) among the least of these crimes, but that he was killed outside a temple is like having salt poured into the wound and mud slung at one’s face. What to speak of 26/11 which has already been talked about, especially recently.

Again, as I mentioned previously, I don’t think the overwhelming issue is that Muslims were allowed to maintain particular political fiefdoms — it’s that Hindus were stymied from establishing systems of political power based on traditional models. When talking about ‘independence’, Moldbug (2008) in chapter 2 of An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives suggests that:

“One test we can apply for independence, which should be pretty conclusive, is that the structures of government in a genuinely independent country should tend to resemble the structures that existed before it was subjugated—rather than the structures of some other country on which it may happen to be, um, dependent. These structures should be especially unlikely to resemble structures in other newly independent countries, with which it presumably has nothing in common.”

Ignoring that the modern idea of statehood (with which some people seem to be rather obsessed) was attached — sometimes rather hastily — onto folk groups who still inhabited the first or second stages of Deleuzoguattarian social organization (1. the primitive territorial machine, 2. barbarian or imperial representation), if we think of the modern state as a kind of social technology, this renders the rebuttals Moldbug makes to to progressive sentiments in this part of An Open Letter about as logical as a complaint that electricians in the Gulf states don’t wire houses ‘Arabicly’ — sure, there might be differences in plug shape, voltage, wattage, etc. between houses in Dubai and D.C., but the general concept and purpose are the same. Electricians in Oman aren’t going to be spelling out “Allah” in copper anymore than their counterparts in Omaha are going to be connecting wires to say “Christ is King”.

That said, I do think there is some merit to his point in the Indian situation. Moldbug approvingly brings up the example of Botswana as one of only two truly independent post-colonial African countries and how its people elected as their first president Seretse Khama, who had been king of the Tswana people since the age of 4 and, much like the INC elites, was a British-educated lawyer by training. Similarly, his party, the Botswana Democratic Party, had been the predominant political power since their independence. Since Moldbug wrote An Open Letter back in 2008, the BDP’s dominance came to an end in 2024 after the largely left-leaning Umbrella for Democratic Change coalition took power. It could thus be argued that despite being heavily based on British poltical forms, the Botswanan state managed to maintain a particularly Batswanan character in a way that India either couldn’t or didn’t. The Indian republic tried to secure the loyalty of the leaders of the princely states and kingdoms of the subcontinent by replacing Britain as the source from which patronage would flow the form of the ‘privy purse’. Ironically, this is not unlike what Moldbug suggests in his blogpost ‘Method and apparatus for safe and effective regime change’ (September 13, 2007) when he talks about discharging and ‘lustrating’ former officials and employees of the American government — that is to say, forbidding them from taking up any official position in the new government. For the sake of brevity, I will use lustration to mean this forbiddance along with the actual removal from office and dissolution of titles.

In short we can sum up the Moldbuggian process of lustration in four short steps:

1. Repeal & replace all laws, regulations, policies, procedures, and personnel (“including all formally unofficial organizations that may in fact have become quasiofficial”!)
2. Create a public database which notes the identity of every former government employee
3. Offer these former officials a Persilschein — an unconditional amnesty for whatever they may have done earlier
4. Prohibit any former official from holding any position in the new government

Lastly, Moldbug suggests that these lustrated officials should:

“…receive any accrued pension benefits, preferably in a lump sum, so that there is no permanent relationship between them and the new government. If anything, these benefits should be increased, so that former officials—many of whom will be unsuitable for any productive employment—suffer no great or general hardship.”

Why does Moldbug consider these steps important? ‘Rebooting’ the government without total lustration is like only dipping your toe into the Rubicon: you’ve already committed treason against the Roman Republic — death is your due anyways, so you may as well go all the way and become the Divine Caesar. He also notes that by not lustrating you are simply ignoring human nature:

“Once your new government contains any employees of the old government, it’s very likely to end up containing most of them. In which case, why bother?”

He points to Poland as a good example of this principle:

“Poland is in the midst of a lustration controversy right now—many people who were successful and influential in Communist Poland have, perhaps unsurprisingly, become successful and influential again.”

In hindsight, we can see that the Indian state, and specifically the heirs of the INC failed on every single one of these fronts to lustrate the Indian government from the officials of the British era.

First, they never even removed all previous personnel (in the form of the Indian royals), much less all laws, regulations, policies, or procedures right from the start. Instead of a one-time payment and the severance of any future relationship, the Indian government offered the aristocrats of the principalities certain continuous privileges and allowances, among which was the privy purse. Then, instead of keeping this vow, the government in 1971 under Indira Gandhi abolished the already gradually shrinking privy purse and their titles as “Ruler”.

Second, as Moldbug pointed out, elites tend to recover from setbacks and rise back to their former status. In China, for example, Mao’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ led to the seizure and redistribution of land and other resources from wealthy landowners — along with a good deal of murder and slaughter. But, this ressentiment-fueled degringolade (to use a Moldbuggian word) seems not to have the permanent effects Mao and the other bandits seem to have desired. Rather:

“…a group of scholars based in America, Britain and China find that Mao’s social re-engineering had a less lasting impact than might be supposed. The grandchildren of the pre-Communist elite have largely regained the status their families once enjoyed. They are a lot more educated and wealthy than other households. Their values and attitudes also differ from the descendants of those who had lower social standing before 1949. They are less bothered by inequality, more entrepreneurial, more pro-market, and more inclined toward individualism and a belief in success through hard work.

…They found that by 2010 the incomes of descendants of the pre-Communist elite were 16-17% higher than those born into families that were underprivileged before 1949. They were also more likely to have completed secondary and tertiary education. They performed significantly better in maths tests.”

– ‘The families of China’s pre-Communist elite remain privileged’, The Economist, September 17, 2020

Instead of either eliminating the institution of Indian royalty in one fell swoop (through total lustration and lump sum remuneration) or formally enshrining them as ceremonial figureheads in the English way, the Indian republic instead the path of half-measures, letting them sup at the teat of state patronage for decades before trying to wean them off by strength.

Of course, we should not be taken aback to learn that the old aristocracy did not exactly let this go without raising a finger. While the republic’s judiciary were of the mind to reject the same initiative brought forth by it’s president one year earlier, Indira Gandhi, the prime minister, got it passed through the the legislature thus enshrining it into law as the 26th amendment to the republic’s constitution. This too-late republican overreach led to a score of former nobles taking up in politics, and while some might have failed their bids for election, others, like the Scindias, seem to have found success on both the Congressi and conservative-reactionary sides of Indian politics.