A country of ignorant, obese bottom-feeders devoid of culture, incapable of building anything other than hideous strip malls, is in the process of destroying a magnificent millennial city teeming with art, culture, and ten million of the most educated inhabitants on earth.
—Irate French citizen on X1
At the beginning of the US-Israeli war on Iran, a meme comparing the academic degrees of cabinet members of the warring governments of Iran and the US went viral on social media. My criticisms of the current Iranian government notwithstanding, I found the contrast instructive. Abbas Araghchi, foreign minister of Iran, holds a PhD from the University of Kent, where his dissertation was supervised by the famous Marxist scholar David McLellan. Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, who was executed by Israel, held a bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematics and a PhD in Western philosophy from the University of Tehran, with a focus on Kant, on whom he published several books. The education minister, Alireza Kazemi, holds a PhD in the philosophy of science.
None of the most recent key figures in Trump’s current cabinet (Rubio, Bessent, Hegseth, Kennedy, Bondi, or Lutnick) hold PhDs. The US is probably the only G7 country to have an anti-vax lawyer without a medical degree serving as the secretary of Health and Human Services. On the other hand, these luminaries do have something in common that many ordinary Americans lack: a membership in or a strong connection to the Epstein class. Frankly, I think we all deserve front-row seats to a conversation between the Kantian philosopher Larijani and Pete Hegseth.
Are the educational achievements of the Iranian officials exceptional, or is there something systemic about the presence of intellectuals in postcolonial governments in the Global South?
Intellectuals, or at least highly educated people, were often at the helm of decolonization struggles in Asia and Africa. Many were educated in the West, where they encountered the hypocrisies of empire firsthand. Their student years in European cities exposed them to how ideals such as equality, the universal franchise, and liberty—none of which had any place in the colony—were flaunted as the guiding political philosophies of metropolitan governments.
Figures like Jawaharlal Nehru in India and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam drew on their exposure to liberal, socialist, and anti‑imperial philosophies to argue that colonized peoples were entitled to the same political sovereignty as Europeans. These intellectuals often came from traditional elite groups with enough privilege to access Western education. They enjoyed a certain class status and were often outraged to be subjected to the humiliations of colonial rule like any ordinary peasant. As leaders of nascent nationalist projects, men such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya used their training in anthropology, political theory, and economics to craft modern movements that could challenge colonial authority on ideological and organizational grounds. To come back to Iran, the finance minister in the early 1950s, Ali Amini—although regarded as a traitor to the Mosaddegh government—was the country’s representative at the famous anti-colonial Bandung Conference of 1955. Amini had a PhD in economics from the University of Paris.
This first generation of anti-colonial nationalist activists shaped a powerful, transnational corpus of decolonial ideas, blending Western liberalism, socialism, and indigenous philosophies. From this unique political imbrication, they managed to build political programs that resonated locally and that articulated peasant and worker grievances within broader critiques of empire. Their fluency in the language and institutions of colonial power made them effective negotiators internationally, while their intellectual credibility helped forge new national identities at home.
It is worth asking why Enlightenment-era revolutions in Europe, with notable exceptions, were led by wealthy, upper-class men, while in postwar Asia and Africa anti-colonial revolutions were theorized and organized by the intelligentsia. I grapple with this question in my first book, The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (2005). Sifting through land-ownership and property-rights records, I became convinced that the Bengali intelligentsia (the bhadralok) led the nineteenth century nation-building project because of the political vacuum created by an economically weak national bourgeoisie.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the colonial state forcibly stunted India’s indigenous industrial class by legal and extralegal means. In the early twentieth century, this class began to slowly cohere, for complex geopolitical reasons. Rather than challenge the colonial economy, they were eager to maintain their fragile commercial gains within it. Members of this new industrialist class, like the Tatas and the Birlas, only backed the nationalists once it became clear to them that decolonization was in the cards. In contrast, the intelligentsia—salaried, educated professionals—had little by way of material investment in the economy and could express themselves in far more radical anti-colonial terms.
To lead a mass movement, however, these Western-educated intellectuals needed to express their political project in vernacular languages. As the British Marxist Tom Nairn famously put it, “The new middle class intelligentsia of nationalism had to invite the masses into history; and the invitation card had to be written in a language they understood.”2 Enter the anti-colonial public intellectual.
Most leaders of these anti-colonial movements had access to or outright ownership of a newspaper or press. Nehru founded the National Herald newspaper in 1938 for the express purpose of building the nationalist movement. Similarly, the primary objective of the Associated Journals Limited, incorporated in 1937 as a public limited company, was to publish newspapers advocating for decolonization. Founded by Nehru, the company was established with the support of approximately five thousand other nationalists, who became its initial shareholders. The foundation published journals in both English and Indian languages. Ho Chi Minh was a prolific journalist and founder of what can be called Vietnam’s revolutionary press. In his lifetime he established more than nine newspapers, among them the famous Thanh Nien (1925) and Le Paria (1921). When in France, he published strongly worded pieces in the Communist newspaper L’Humanité about the inhuman treatment of the Vietnamese by the French. Likewise in Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah founded and edited several newspapers, most notably the Accra Evening News (1948) and the socialist weekly The Spark (1963).
Whether or not Benedict Anderson was right that the national form is modular and can thus move across space and time, we of the global majority countries have far less temporal distance from our founding nationalist movements compared to Europeans and Americans.3 The continuing neocolonial logics of European and US regimes further shorten that distance, while layering the past with fragments of present-day shrapnel. If Hegseth spends more time in the gym and on Fox than writing op-eds for the New York Times, it is in part because there is a gaping abyss between him and Thomas Jefferson, insofar as Hegseth displays a criminal absence of any intelligence about the human condition. In postcolonial Iranian history, the temporal gap between Ali Amini and Abbas Araghchi is far smaller. Hence, in Araghchi’s rhetorical flourishes as a public intellectual, he can reveal the wonders of his ancient, historic land and show the world the need for its defense, while Hegseth sounds like a lonely teenager in a dank basement with an provocative Reddit handle—something like #bonemashing.
“Un pays de bouffeurs de caoutchouc ignares obèses dépourvus de culture, incapable de construire autre chose que d’horribles strip-malls est en train de détruire une magnifique ville millénaire pleine d’art, de culture et de 10 millions d’habitants parmi les plus éduqués sur terre” →. My translation.
Tom Nairn, “The Modern Janus,” New Left Review, no. 94 (November–December 1975).
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983).