As the Mullahs Become the Masters of the Game

By Mahfuz Mundadu

The empire has always loved myths. Myths are cheaper than justice and lighter and easier than self-reflection. One of its most treasured myths was technological innocence. The belief that satellites float above history. That connectivity is neutral. That silicon, launched from California, somehow escapes the power equation that defines the world below.

Then Iran reminded the empire of something Fanon would have enjoyed pointing out. Tools do not liberate by themselves. They obey whoever understands them best. Starlink went silent. Not with the drama of collapse, but with the quiet humiliation of physics submitting to its perfect living master. Screens froze. Signals dissolved into static. Tens of thousands of terminals smuggled in as instruments of digital exploitation became ornaments of imperial overconfidence.

According to reports from IranWire, echoed by TechRadar, the disruption followed a pattern that should trouble every serious student of power. First partial interference. Then escalating denial. Then total paralysis. More than 99.99 percent of Starlink traffic inside Iran effectively sent packing. The “unblockable internet” met a people who refused to accept slogans as science.

Fanon warned us that colonial domination does not only occupy land. It occupies minds. For years, the West tricked the world to believe that technology had replaced religion, that impunity had dissolved sovereignty, that resistance could be downloaded like an app. Starlink was not just a service. It was and still is imperialism hovering in orbit.

Iran answered with counter-ideology grounded in equations and algorithms. Low-Earth Orbit satellites, for all their branding, still transmit through Ku and Ka bands. These bands attenuate. They can be saturated. They can be denied. Iran reportedly deployed synchronized electronic warfare systems that exploited uplink vulnerabilities, terminal coordination limits, and spectrum congestion across dense constellations. No miracles. No mysticism. Just disciplined engineering garnished with dogged determination.

In that moment, the colonized world laughed. Quietly. Bitterly. Because it had seen this arrogance before. Walter Rodney taught us that underdevelopment is not absence of development. It is design and deliberate. Iran’s technological capacity did not emerge despite sanctions. It emerged because of them. Cut off from Western supply chains, Iranian engineers were forced to look inward. To understand fundamentals. To master denial instead of consumption. While Silicon Valley optimized for valuation and user engagement, Iran optimized for resilience.

Less spectacle. More leverage. The empire’s response has been predictably patronizing. This is temporary. Starlink will adapt. Iran cannot sustain this. The mullahs must have borrowed Chinese tricks or Russian toys, typical of the imperialist mentality that learning were a crime if and when practiced with no permission from the Yankees. This reaction exposes the real wound. Not the signal loss, but the insult. The insult that those once dismissed as backward clerics could command electromagnetic space better than those who wrote the white papers. 

Starlink was sold as humanitarian, apolitical, benevolent. A gift to the oppressed. Fanon would have smiled at the irony. Colonial tools always arrive wearing the mask of salvation. They only reveal their politics when self-determination rares its head. Infrastructure is never neutral. It merely pretends until challenged. The deeper panic lies beyond Iran. For years, Western defense doctrine assumed satellite connectivity as the final backbone of modern warfare. Missiles might fall. Fiber might snap. Power grids might fail. But low earth orbit constellations would preserve command, coordination, and narrative dominance.

Iran has now spoken with soliloquising lullaby, not perambulations. Not a simulation. Not a conference panel. A field demonstration. This does not mean the struggle is over. Empires adapt, adopt and adjust. Countermeasures will follow. Frequencies will shift. The contest will continue. But the psychological terrain has changed. The determined mind has cracked the colonial myth.

The internet did not free itself from power. It returned to it. As the mullahs become the masters of the game, what truly collapsed was not Starlink’s signal. It was the fantasy that domination could be outsourced to technology and maintained without resistance.

Rodney reminded us that development is political. Fanon reminded us that liberation is violent not only in arms, but in ideas. Iran’s act was not merely technical. It was symbolic. A refusal to accept that the sky belongs permanently and exclusively to someone else. The empire believed history had ended in orbit. Iran reminded it that history still listens to those who understand best of the two worlds: 

Mulk and Malakuut. Physics and Metaphysics.