Abstract

One year after the installation of Hassan Rouhani as the seventh president of the Islamic Republic through a tightly stage-managed electoral process long criticised as an exercise in regime legitimation rather than popular sovereignty (Suren-Pahlav, 2005), a more disquieting question must be confronted without euphemism: how does a nation widely regarded as highly educated, intelligent and politically conscious continue to participate in political rituals whose parameters are pre-defined by unelected clerical authority (Suren-Pahlav, 2011), and to invest hope in factional oscillations that leave the architecture of power untouched? This article rejects culturalist explanations and instead turns to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s analysis of ‘stupidity’ in Letters and Papers from Prison as a moral sociology of compliance under authoritarian conditions (Bonhoeffer, 2010).

 

Bonhoeffer’s contention that ‘stupidity’ constitutes a social and moral deformation rather than an intellectual deficit, produced under the ‘overwhelming impact’ of concentrated political or religious power (Bonhoeffer, 2010), provides a conceptual framework through which the epistemic closure of the Islamic Republic can be interrogated. The article advances a structural comparison between National Socialist Germany and the contemporary Iranian theocracy, not as rhetorical equivalence, but as an analytical exercise in identifying the conditions under which moral judgement is displaced by slogans, coercion converges with sacralised authority, and participation in managed elections is reframed as patriotic duty. In both contexts, the fusion of ideological absolutism with institutional control renders dissent not merely unlawful but morally suspect, and recruits educated strata into forms of compliance that appear rational within a distorted normative order (Green, 1999; Lovin, 1984).

 

The persistence of belief in reformist salvation, despite repeated evidence of structural continuity, is thus interpreted not as naïvety but as the internalisation of heteronomy, whereby inner independence is surrendered and political agency reduced to ritual affirmation. In this reading, the spectacle of reform versus conservative contestation functions as a mechanism of controlled pluralism, sustaining the illusion of choice while foreclosing sovereignty (Suren-Pahlav, 2011). Following Bonhoeffer’s insistence that ‘only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity’ (Bonhoeffer, 2010), the article concludes that appeals to incremental reform within the regime’s constitutional confines cannot restore responsible judgement or democratic agency. What is required is structural rupture and the reconstitution of a constitutional order grounded in accountable governance, separation of powers and national sovereignty, rather than theological guardianship.

 

 

Introduction

The passage commonly circulated as Bonhoeffer’s ‘theory of stupidity’ is frequently invoked as a diagnostic for contemporary political life, yet it is routinely detached from its historical setting and, in popular retellings, from its argumentative purpose. A popular précis presents Bonhoeffer as concluding that ‘stupid people are more dangerous than evil ones’ because argument and coercion fail against those who will not hear reasons. The claim is recognisably Bonhoeffer’s, but the mode of circulation is not neutral. When a text is repeatedly excerpted, lightly edited, and redeployed as an all-purpose denunciation, the concept at its centre risks becoming an insult masquerading as analysis. The task, therefore, is not to adjudicate whether Bonhoeffer ‘was right’ in the abstract, but to recover what the category is doing within his wartime diagnosis of moral collapse under authoritarian conditions.

 

This section situates ‘On Stupidity’ within Bonhoeffer’s ‘After Ten Years’, a reflective text composed at the turn of 1942–1943 and later included in Letters and Papers from Prison (Bonhoeffer, 2010). On this reading, ‘stupidity’ is not a judgement about cognitive capacity but a moral and social deformation in which persons relinquish inner independence under the pressure of rising power. This framing clarifies why Bonhoeffer treats the condition as resistant to ordinary practices of persuasion, and why he links its overcoming to ‘liberation’ rather than instruction. The point is diagnostic rather than merely denunciatory: ‘stupidity’ names a form of heteronomy that can be produced through the affective economies of fear, belonging, and conformity, even where agents retain technical competence and rhetorical fluency.

 

Bonhoeffer wrote from within the German church struggle and the anti-Nazi resistance, not as an observer of a distant crisis. He opposed efforts to co-opt Protestant churches, became associated with the Confessing Church, and later participated in resistance networks that the regime treated as treasonous. Arrested by the Gestapo in April 1943, he was executed by hanging at Flossenbürg concentration camp on 9 April 1945. Biographical scholarship emphasises both the complexity of his political entanglements and the difficulty of reducing his life to a single usable exemplar for later moral campaigns (Bethge, 2000; Marsh, 2014). That caution matters here because, in recent Anglophone public discourse, ‘On Stupidity’ has become a polemical resource, often deployed in ways that reproduce the very pathologies of slogan and faction that the passage seeks to expose.

 

‘After Ten Years’ and the grammar of moral disorientation

‘On Stupidity’ appears within ‘After Ten Years’, a cluster of brief reflections written at the turn of 1942–1943, when Bonhoeffer assessed what a decade of National Socialist rule had done to moral perception, civic courage, and the capacity for responsible action (Bonhoeffer, 2010). The broader text is preoccupied with how evil presents itself under conditions of propaganda and coercion. Bonhoeffer describes a context in which ‘the huge masquerade of evil’ confuses inherited ethical categories and renders conventional moral postures unreliable (Bonhoeffer, 2010). In that setting, neither principled fanaticism nor conscientious scruple guarantees clarity; indeed, each can become a trap if it substitutes moral self-preservation for responsibility in concrete circumstances. The question, for Bonhoeffer, is not whether one can remain personally ‘untainted’, but whether one can act responsibly when every available stance is liable to be exploited by a regime that weaponises the appearance of moral necessity.

 

‘On Stupidity’ should be read as one element of this larger argument. It is not an excursus on human nature in general. It is a description of a political-moral mechanism by which power recruits compliance and disables resistance, especially among those who consider themselves educated or culturally sophisticated. The scandal that animates the passage is precisely that a ‘country of poets and thinkers’ could become socially complicit in organised cruelty. That is why Bonhoeffer refuses to treat the phenomenon as a simple deficit of intelligence. If the catastrophe were merely a matter of ignorance, it could be addressed by information. His contention is that something more corrosive is at work.

 

 

‘Stupidity’ as moral heteronomy rather than cognitive deficit

Bonhoeffer’s best-known formulation is deliberately provocative: ‘Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice’ (Bonhoeffer, 2010, p. 9). The danger, however, is not that ‘stupid’ persons are uniquely irrational. It is that the conditions that produce ‘stupidity’ disrupt the ordinary routes by which moral communities contest wrongdoing. Bonhoeffer remarks that one can, at least in principle, protest against evil, expose it, and, if necessary, restrain it by force. Against ‘stupidity’, by contrast, ‘we are defenceless’ (Bonhoeffer, 2010, p. 9). The point is epistemic and moral: reasons ‘fall on deaf ears’ because the person addressed no longer inhabits the shared norms of argument in which reasons can count as reasons.

 

This is why Bonhoeffer insists that the condition is ‘not an intellectual defect’ (Bonhoeffer, 2010, p. 9). People of ‘remarkably agile intellect’ can be ‘stupid’, while those of limited intellectual gifts may be ‘anything but stupid’ (Bonhoeffer, 2010, p. 9). The distinction is crucial for any responsible contemporary use of the passage. Bonhoeffer is not licensing contempt for the uneducated, nor offering a taxonomy of intelligence. He is diagnosing a moral abdication in which persons surrender their capacity to judge, then defend that surrender with the affective armour of self-satisfaction and irritability.

 

The German term in play is often noted as Dummheit, which has been translated in different editions as ‘stupidity’ or ‘folly’. In the American reception traced by Stephen R. Haynes, for example, public citations of the passage sometimes reproduce earlier renderings that speak of ‘folly’ and ‘no defence’ against it, while later popular uses gravitate towards ‘stupidity’ as the more arresting label. The translation question matters less as a lexical debate than as a reminder that Bonhoeffer is describing a moral stupor produced under specific social pressures. Whether one prefers ‘folly’ or ‘stupidity’, the referent is a form of induced heteronomy: judgement is displaced by something external, then experienced as if it were one’s own conviction.

 

 

Power, slogans, and the sociology of ‘infection’

Bonhoeffer’s most analytically suggestive claim is sociological. ‘Under certain circumstances’, he writes, people ‘are made stupid or rather, they allow this to happen to them’ (Bonhoeffer, 2010, p. 9). The phrasing holds together coercion and consent. Individuals are acted upon, but they also participate in their own dispossession, whether through fear, opportunism, habituation, or the seductions of belonging. Bonhoeffer further observes that the defect appears less frequently among those who live in solitude than among those absorbed into groups, suggesting that the phenomenon is ‘less a psychological than a sociological problem’ (Bonhoeffer, 2010, p. 9). The issue is not that groups are intrinsically irrational. It is that certain forms of mass mobilisation make intellectual independence costly and mimic moral certainty through collective reinforcement.

 

Bonhoeffer then connects this to the dynamics of rising power: ‘every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity’ (Bonhoeffer, 2010, p. 9). The metaphor of infection is chosen to signal transmissibility. Power does not merely silence dissent through violence; it propagates dispositions that make dissent appear unintelligible or traitorous. The mechanism is not, Bonhoeffer argues, that intellect suddenly fails. Rather, under the ‘overwhelming impact’ of rising power, humans are deprived of ‘inner independence’ and give up an autonomous position towards events (Bonhoeffer, 2010, p. 9). The person who appears stubborn is, in fact, not independent. In conversation, one seems to encounter not a self but ‘slogans’ and ‘catchwords’ that have ‘taken possession’ of them (Bonhoeffer, 2010). What has been lost is not the capacity to process information, but the freedom to evaluate it without the mediation of sanctioned language.

 

This account helps explain a distinctive feature of authoritarian political culture: its capacity to produce compliant agents who experience themselves as morally serious. When slogans replace judgement, the person’s affective life becomes politically functional. Irritation substitutes for argument; aggressiveness for scrutiny. Bonhoeffer’s description of the ‘stupid person’ becoming dangerous ‘by going on the attack’ is not a claim about temperament in general; it is an account of how challenged certainty, lacking the resources of reasoned defence, is maintained through hostility (Bonhoeffer, 2010, p. 9). In such contexts, moral language becomes performative. One demonstrates loyalty by repeating the right phrases, condemning the right enemies, and refusing the wrong questions.

 

 

Why persuasion fails and what ‘liberation’ implies

Bonhoeffer’s bleakest line is often quoted as if it were advice to abandon argument in favour of coercion. That reading is too quick. When Bonhoeffer says that ‘never again’ will one attempt to persuade the ‘stupid person’ with reasons because it is ‘senseless and dangerous’, he is describing a situation in which argument is not merely ineffective but can be weaponised against the arguer (Bonhoeffer, 2010, p. 9). In a propagandised environment, the exchange of reasons is easily recoded as evidence of disloyalty or elitism. Argument becomes a pretext for punishment, and facts become tokens in a struggle for status rather than vehicles of shared inquiry.

 

This is the setting for Bonhoeffer’s claim that ‘only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity’ (Bonhoeffer, 2010). The contrast is methodological and political. Instruction presupposes that the addressee can stand at some distance from the social forces shaping their beliefs. Bonhoeffer’s diagnosis denies that presupposition. If slogans have ‘taken possession’ of the person, then more information merely becomes additional material to be sorted into authorised and unauthorised categories. Liberation, by contrast, names the restoration of agency. It is both internal and external. Bonhoeffer suggests that internal liberation becomes possible ‘only when external liberation has preceded it’, implying that institutions of coercion and misinformation must be disrupted before persons can recover independence of judgement (Bonhoeffer, 2010). In other words, the remedy is not better content delivered into the same corrupted channels, but a change in the conditions that make responsibility practicable.

 

This aspect of the argument resists a consoling pedagogy in which political failure is attributed to ignorance and solved by ‘education’. Bonhoeffer’s analysis is harsher. It suggests that a society can be saturated with information and still lose the moral capacities required to use it responsibly. When that happens, the problem is not primarily epistemic but ethical: the erosion of responsibility through fear, conformity, and the pleasures of collective certainty.

 

 

‘External liberation’, self-reliance and the conditions of resistance

If Bonhoeffer is correct that ‘liberation’, not instruction, is required to overcome the moral stupor he describes, the distinction between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ liberation becomes crucial. His analysis of ‘stupidity’ has already indicated that persons are rendered heteronomous by the overwhelming impact of power, losing the ‘inner independence’ that would allow them to judge events without deferring to sanctioned slogans (Bonhoeffer, 2010). The claim that internal liberation is, in most cases, possible only where external liberation has gone ahead of it should therefore be read as a thesis about social conditions rather than merely about individual insight. External liberation refers to the transformation of the concrete circumstances, institutional arrangements, and material dependencies that sustain the quasi-viral spread of ideological captivity. It names a prior alteration of the world in which agents find themselves, without which appeals to conscience risk remaining purely notional.

 

In Bonhoeffer’s own context, ‘external liberation’ clearly cannot be reduced to psychological encouragement or to private withdrawal from contaminated public discourse. It denotes changes in the structures through which the regime maintained its hold: legal frameworks, surveillance apparatus, propagandist media, party institutions, and those ecclesial bodies that had been co-opted into providing religious legitimation for political violence (Bonhoeffer, 2010; Green, 1999). Green’s reconstruction of Bonhoeffer’s ‘theology of sociality’ underscores the point that the human person is constituted in and through relations, so that the deformation of those relations by totalitarian power necessarily distorts moral perception and agency. External liberation, on this reading, is the re-ordering of the social field that makes responsible judgement and truthful speech conceivable at all, rather than a benevolent add-on to an already intact moral subject.

 

The emphasis on external conditions also aligns Bonhoeffer’s reflections with wider currents of liberation theology, although he wrote before that term emerged. De Gruchy’s work on Bonhoeffer and South Africa, for example, receives Bonhoeffer as a thinker whose ecclesiology and ethics press Christians to confront political arrangements that institutionalise injustice, rather than to retreat into a privatised spiritual sphere (de Gruchy, 1984). In that tradition, liberation is never only the emancipation of consciousness; it is also the dismantling or transformation of those political, legal, and economic structures that enshrine domination. External liberation thus includes the creation of spaces in which truth-telling is possible without immediate annihilation, the interruption of propaganda cycles, and the weakening of those systems of reward and punishment that habituate populations into compliance.

 

At the same time, Bonhoeffer’s language resists a paternalist picture in which liberation is something done to passive victims by morally superior agents. His account of discipleship and moral leadership insists that responsible action is costly, risky, and rarely cleanly separable from complicity in existing structures (Kelly and Nelson, 2003). External liberation in that key is not the bestowal of freedom from above, but the outcome of practices in which those who are entangled in oppressive systems begin to withdraw their co-operation, form alternative communities of judgement, and take collective risks to interrupt the routines of domination. Kelly and Nelson’s analysis of Bonhoeffer’s spirituality emphasises precisely this interplay between inner resolve and outward action: the cultivation of a conscience that is willing to bear guilt for the sake of others, and the consequent refusal to remain merely a spectator of injustice.

 

Bonhoeffer’s insistence on the priority of external liberation therefore should not be mistaken for a quietist counsel to ‘wait’ for favourable conditions. Rather, it functions as a critique of any strategy that imagines ideological captivity can be dissolved by argument alone, while leaving intact the institutions that reward conformity and punish dissent. In the terms of political ethics, it is a reminder that appeals to rational deliberation presuppose minimally just background conditions. Lovin’s account of Bonhoeffer’s social ethics similarly stresses that Christian participation in public life cannot bracket questions of institutional design: the possibilities of moral discourse depend on how law, economy, and civic culture are ordered (Lovin, 1984). External liberation is thus the socio-political work of reconfiguring those orders so that responsible disagreement, critical scrutiny of power, and non-violent resistance become sustainable practices rather than heroic exceptions.

 

When this framework is brought to bear on settings in which authoritarian power cloaks itself in religious language and staged electoral rituals, external liberation acquires a further nuance. In such contexts, ideology is not simply a set of false propositions lodged in individual minds. It is a comprehensive environment: a network of media, clerical authorities, legal sanctions, and economic dependencies that together generate what appears to be a single plausible world. To describe the resulting conformity as ‘stupidity’ in Bonhoeffer’s sense is to say that persons have been drawn into a socially produced form of moral blindness that can be reversed only by altering that environment. For populations habituated to think of themselves as powerless consumers of state narratives, external liberation will often begin as a move away from passive dependency: the self-reliant refusal to treat official discourse as the sole horizon of political imagination, and the construction of alternative channels of information, solidarity, and critique. In this respect, Bonhoeffer’s analysis anticipates later sociologies of compliance that locate the possibility of resistance not in heroic isolated individuals, but in the emergence of counter-publics and counter-institutions able to loosen the grip of the ‘social virus’ of ideology on everyday life.

 

 

Contemporary reception and the ethics of citation

The afterlife of ‘On Stupidity’ illustrates Bonhoeffer’s own concern about slogans. In recent years, the passage has been widely redeployed within American political conflict as a diagnosis of opponents, particularly during and after the Trump presidency (Haynes, 2024). Haynes documents how citations of ‘After Ten Years’ increased markedly from mid-2017 and how ‘On Stupidity’ was applied to contemporary factions with minimal commentary, sometimes reproduced in full as an editorial statement rather than analysed as a historically situated argument. That pattern of use is instructive. The text is treated as a moral verdict that absolves the citer from self-implication. Yet Bonhoeffer’s description of slogan possession and aggressive certainty should unsettle any reader who is tempted to use the passage as a rhetorical cudgel.

 

There is, therefore, an ethical discipline required in citing Bonhoeffer. First, one should avoid reading ‘stupidity’ as a synonym for disagreeable politics. Bonhoeffer is describing a deformation of moral agency under pressure, not a stable identity category that conveniently maps onto one’s adversaries. Second, one should avoid collapsing his argument into a general anti-populist sneer. His concern is not ‘the masses’ as such, but the ways in which power, including religious power, recruits compliance by disabling responsible judgement (Bonhoeffer, 2010). Third, one should resist the temptation to treat the passage as timeless social psychology divorced from concrete political structures. Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on external liberation indicates that he is thinking institutionally, not merely dispositionally.

 

 

Conclusion

To invoke Bonhoeffer in the Iranian context is not to indulge in an easy historical analogy, nor to collapse the specificity of National Socialism into a lazy universal template, but to insist that the moral sociology he discerned under conditions of totalitarian capture illuminates with unsettling clarity the architecture of compliance within the Islamic Republic, where coercive force, theological legitimation and ritualised electoral theatre converge to produce not mere fear, but a disciplined incapacity for judgement (Bonhoeffer, 2010). If ‘stupidity’ in Bonhoeffer’s sense names the surrender of inner independence under the intoxicating pressure of rising power, then what we confront in Iran is not a deficit of intelligence within a historically literate and culturally sophisticated nation, but the slow sedimentation of heteronomy as civic habit, reproduced through Friday sermons, state media, securitised universities and the repetitive choreography of elections designed to simulate consent while foreclosing sovereignty.

 

The regime’s durability does not rest solely on repression, though repression remains constitutive; it rests equally on the production of epistemic closure, in which slogans replace argument, factional theatre substitutes for pluralism, and political participation is reduced to managed affirmation of outcomes determined in advance. Under such conditions, to debate within the script provided by power is already to concede the grammar of one’s own subordination, for the very categories through which critique might be articulated have been colonised by the state’s performative religiosity and its self-mythologising narrative of resistance and victimhood. Bonhoeffer’s warning that reasons ‘fall on deaf ears’ when persons have been socially dispossessed of judgement is therefore not a counsel of despair, but a diagnosis of why incremental reformism, detached from structural transformation, becomes complicit in stabilising the system it claims to moderate (Bonhoeffer, 2010).

 

The comparison with Germany in the 1930s must be handled with conceptual rigour rather than rhetorical excess; yet the structural parallels are not fanciful. In both cases, a regime fused political authority with an overarching worldview that rendered dissent not merely illegal but morally suspect, while cultivating the impression that participation in its rituals constituted patriotic duty. In both cases, educated strata were not immune, because the mechanism at work was not ignorance but the social reconfiguration of loyalty, fear and aspiration. As Green argues in his account of Bonhoeffer’s sociality, the deformation of communal relations distorts moral perception at its root, so that what appears as prudence or realism may in fact be accommodation to injustice (Green, 1999). When this deformation is reinforced by religious vocabulary, the resulting compliance acquires the aura of piety.

 

For those who persist in investing hope in cyclical elections engineered within the parameters of clerical oversight, the uncomfortable implication is that participation per se does not equal agency, and that symbolic gestures of choice cannot substitute for the institutional conditions of sovereignty. A polity cannot be restored through the repetition of rituals that presuppose its absence. If Bonhoeffer is correct that only ‘liberation’, not instruction, can overcome the moral stupor produced by authoritarian power, then the task before Iranians is not to refine arguments within the regime’s discursive enclosure, but to dismantle the conditions that render autonomous judgement structurally futile (Bonhoeffer, 2010). Lovin’s analysis of public ethics underscores that responsible action presupposes institutions capable of sustaining accountable deliberation; where such institutions are systematically neutralised, ethical appeals alone cannot regenerate political freedom (Lovin, 1984).

 

This conclusion demands clarity about ends as well as means. The alternative to a totalitarian-theocratic state is not an abstract ‘change’ but the reconstruction of a constitutional order in which sovereignty is genuinely national, law is superior to faction, and religion is disentangled from coercive governance. Whether articulated through a reformed parliamentary monarchy or another democratic settlement rooted in historical continuity and popular mandate, the decisive criterion is the restoration of institutional pluralism, separation of powers, and the inviolability of civil rights. De Gruchy’s reception of Bonhoeffer in the South African struggle reminds us that liberation entails structural transformation, not cosmetic adjustment of ruling elites (de Gruchy, 1984).

 

When the fog of reformist rhetoric dissipates, one must therefore state without euphemism that a regime which monopolises violence, curates permissible candidates, and sacralises its own authority cannot be gradually persuaded into relinquishing its foundational premises. It must be confronted, resisted and ultimately replaced by a constitutional order that derives legitimacy from the free will of its citizens rather than from divine fiat mediated through unelected guardians. To shrink from this conclusion in the name of tactical moderation is to mistake prudence for virtue and to ignore the moral asymmetry between a population seeking accountable governance and a state determined to preserve its own theological absolutism.

 

Bonhoeffer wrote as one who recognised too late the scale of the catastrophe engulfing his country. To read him seriously in the Iranian context is to refuse the comfort of partial critique and to insist that liberation, if it is to be more than a metaphor, requires the withdrawal of moral, symbolic and practical consent from a system that thrives on the very compliance it engineers. The question is not whether Iranians are capable of judgement, but whether they will reclaim it in conditions designed to make such reclamation costly. History offers no guarantees, yet it offers a warning: when a people habituates itself to managed illusion, the eventual reckoning is rarely gentle.

 

 

References

• Bethge, E. (2000) Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography. Revised and edited by V. J. Barnett. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

• Bonhoeffer, D. (2010) Letters and Papers from Prison. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 8. English edition edited by J. W. de Gruchy, I. Best, L. E. Dahill, R. Krauss, and N. Lukens. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

• de Gruchy, J.W. (1984) Bonhoeffer and South Africa: Theology in Dialogue. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

• Green, C.J. (1999) Bonhoeffer: A Theology of Sociality. Revised edition. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

• Kelly, G.B. and Nelson, F.B. (2003) The Cost of Moral Leadership: The Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge: Eerdmans.

• Lovin, R.W. (1984) Christian Faith and Public Choices: The Social Ethics of Barth, Brunner, and Bonhoeffer. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press.

• Marsh, C. (2014) Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2005) ‘The Islamic Regime’s Electoral Circus: Why No Iranian Should Lend It Legitimacy’, suren-pahlav.com (08 June). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/islamic-regime-electoral-circus-why-no-iranian-should-lend-it-legitimacy.html [Accessed: 14 June 2014].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2011) ‘Reformism and the Green Movement: Factional Constructs in the Islamic Regime’s Strategy of 'False Opposition'’, suren-pahlav.com (22 February). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/the-reformist-movement-a-false-opposition-strategy-of-iran-s-totalitarian-theocratic-regime.html [Accessed: 14 June 2014].