The Spellbound

The country stands on the precipice of an unprecedented, historic confrontation. The noose of sanctions and economic pressure has tightened to its most devastating extent. In the skies, neighboring states—under mounting external pressure—have imposed sweeping, unprecedented restrictions on Iran-related flights. At sea, Emmanuel Macron and France have pledged continuous cooperation with the United States to dominate maritime corridors and give hostile coalitions free rein against Iran. A rare and ominous international consensus is underway to bring the nation to its knees. At this critical juncture, the president heads to New York and the United Nations headquarters to defend national interests and ease pressure. Yet on the domestic front, the scene is painfully discordant and baffling: hardliners have unsheathed their swords, seizing every opportunity to insult, smear, and undermine the elected government. If the nation is engulfed in a full-scale hybrid war—where survival fundamentally demands cohesion and solidarity—what exactly is this clique pursuing in the midst of this turmoil?

To understand this phenomenon, one need only look across Iran’s borders at the behavior of segments of the Iranian diaspora during recent escalations. Their posture astonished domestic and international observers alike: an intense loathing of their homeland pursued at the cost of its total destruction. Things reached a point where, to general bewilderment, some even whitewashed and theorized catastrophic scenarios like the nuclear bombing of Iran as a supposed "salvation." Commentators described this collective behavior as a form of "mass psychosis." It was as if certain foreign-based networks had so thoroughly colonized their minds that all capacity for critical reasoning, reality-testing, and independent agency had vanished, reducing them to obedient zombies—robots programmed solely to cheer for the destruction of their ancestral home.

Today, observing the overt and aggressive vitriol directed at the government from within the country, it appears the virus of this very psychosis and zombification has infected another faction inside our borders: a self-righteous group completely blind to geopolitical realities and existential national threats. The crucial question is: how can these hardliners attack the highest executive official of the land with utter impunity, without the slightest concern for legal repercussions or the threat of fueling domestic chaos—which is precisely what rival foreign think tanks desire? Where do they take their cues from, and to which corridors of power are they anchored that grant them such an unshakeable sense of immunity?

Faced with such brazen breaches of national security, what has the judiciary done? Nothing. It seems the judicial apparatus has fallen under the same spell. At a time when decisive action is desperately needed against those sabotaging societal psychological security, the judiciary stands frozen, passive, and immobile like a stone statue before this aggressive minority. Mass psychosis is not confined to street radicals; the paralysis of institutions charged with upholding the rule of law is itself a glaring symptom of this bewitchment.

From the standpoint of political sociology, this dynamic fits squarely within the theories of "echo chambers" and "group polarization." When a group confines itself within a hermetic ideological bubble, its tether to reality snaps, giving way to profound cognitive rigidity. They become blind to national interests, the imminent shadow of war, and the economic destitution of ordinary citizens; all that matters is prevailing in tribal feuds and safeguarding ideological purity.

History is replete with such destructive tragedies. The concept of the "fifth column" emerged during the Spanish Civil War, when General Franco declared that alongside the four military columns marching on Madrid, a fifth column within the city was actively working to trigger internal collapse. Often, members of a fifth column are not even on an enemy's payroll; driven by sheer dogma and radicalism, they unwittingly drive forward the psychological and military machinery of the adversary.

The nation finds itself in a volatile state where the flames of conflict could erupt unexpectedly from any quarter with devastating force. At this fateful hour, spellbound domestic extremists and media-drugged external diaspora factions have effectively become two blades of the same pair of shears, cutting away at the roots of national cohesion and resilience. Until the state, and particularly the judiciary, breaks this spell of passivity and firmly confronts this domestic engine of division and hatred, the dark shadow of the bewitched will linger over this land. Woe to the day we awaken from this trance only to find the enemy already knocking at the gates.