History is filled with entire nations following leaders who were becoming increasingly delusional due to age or illness. The Iranian absolute ruler of today, Ali Khamenei, is now 85, and while he might be sharp as a tack, he could also be so deeply enmeshed in the messianic delusions of his own mentor, Ayatollah Khomeini, that he is unaware that Iran is now "naked to its enemies" -- which would be Israel and America, the little Satan and the Great Satan.

The last Empress of China was mad as a hatter, living in a fictional China that was presented for her by her courtiers, who pretended that China was still all-powerful, when in fact it had crumbled into its usual chaos of local warlords. Joe Biden is relatively sane, but he is showing the signs of Parkinson's disease, or at least that is a common medical guess. Biden shows his anger at Kamala, who overthrew him with the aid of Obama and probably Hillary, who is also showing signs of wear and tear.

As we know, George III -- the King who headed England at the time of the American Revolution -- poor George had periods of delusion that may have been due to something called porphyria. 

The most famous Russian opera -- a very great work -- is about the descent into madness of Boris Godunoff, a man who was offered the Tsar's crown, and who may never have actually been crowned, but he plausibly went mad. The Russian playwright Alexander Pushkin -- sometimes called the Russian Shakespeare -- wrote a great play about Boris, in which he is driven mad by guilt for having murdered the son of the previous Tsar, until, in the final act, he dies in torment. That play was put to music by Modest Mussorgsky, who was none too sane himself, but a great genius as a composer, maybe due to alcoholism, and Mussorgsky's music was made even more beautiful by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakoff. 

So madness has quite a history among absolute rulers. Josef Stalin was diagnosed as "a paranoid with a withered arm" by his personal physician named Bekhterev, who was poisoned by the NKVD the next day. 

Elected rulers certainly can be slightly barmy, but absolute rulers are worse, because they are surrounded by courtiers who are usually afraid to tell him or her to step down (for fear of the rage of the ruler), and it's always the courtiers who convince the absolute ruler that everything is hunky-dory until some conspiracy of courtiers decides that the fiction can't be sustained any longer, and the old boy or girl has got to go.

One reason to suspect the sanity of Iran's Supreme Guide is that he keeps denying the obvious defeats his regime has sustained at the hands of Israel. Given his age, it's not likely that Khamenei understands F-35i jet fighter planes that can fly from Israel to Iran in the dark of night, with a minimal radar signature, and today, when Israel has knocked out Iran's S-300 radar stations, those F35i's are almost completely invisible to Khomeini's goose-stepping IRGC soldiers, who, if they are smart, are already bugging out of Teheran by now.

According to official Iranian "news" channels, Khamenei is threatening more and more horrible revenge, every time his nation suffers more humiliating defeats. 

Is the old guy non compos mentis? Only his inner circle would know, and they are not telling. Still, it is likely that an 85-year-old "holy man" raised in a closed religious cult does not understand much about the real world. 

It is said that perhaps 90 percent of Iranian people hate and despise the regime, which continues to commit horrific punishments on innocent people. 

I've met many Iranian people, and liked them as intelligent and fun to know. There is an ancient history of friendship between ancient Persia and the Jews of that time. Until 1979, when Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski allowed the Shah to be overthrown, Iran was the most modern and practical nation in the Middle East, and the ordinary people have not changed under the medieval rule of holy tyrants. To an outsider it looks as if the regime is internally very weak, but their "morality police" is very cruel to its domestic opposition. 

If Khamenei is actually sane, his regime certainly is not. 

So we wish the people of Iran the best of luck in overthrowing their cursed Islamist master. Let their end come soon.

Image: seysd shahaboddin vajedi