In addition to heroic warrior feats, the Shahnameh, or “Book of Kings”recounts the experiences of the peoples of the ancient empire that extended from Middle East to Asia Minor and the Caucasus. In that classic of Persian literature written in the X for Ferdowsi, the celebrated “Lord of the Word”, describes how women who lost children or husbands in wars and intrigues showed their pain and complaint: cutting locks of hair.
That ancient tradition is what is moving the world these days. Today’s Iranian women remove their Islamic veils and cut locks as a sign of rebellion. In the Islamic tradition, female hair should be long, That is why cutting it is a denunciation against the regime that subjects women to medieval and absurd laws.
The world witnesses an imposing rebellion that began in grief over the murder of a young wearing the hijab “badly placed”, and led to an insurrection against the prevailing theocracy. Young people joined this rebellion, while a group of intellectuals translated it into a manifesto calling for the rationality of Rule of law, pluralism, freedom and equality between people of different genders. The manifesto calls for replacing the Islamic Republic for the Republic to dry, that is, by a lay state.
Iranians face a fierce crackdown that already adds hundreds of dead, to conquer what only liberal democracy can guarantee. Meanwhile, in the countries where that system was born, politics suppurates authoritarian messianism. In the West, being anti-system is opposing liberal democracy, which is the order in which the laws make citizens equal, without a leader being able to stand for on top of them.
With that system, the United States defeated Nazi-fascist totalitarianism and helped Europe build the demo-liberal order with which it built a flexible and pragmatic capitalism that raised the standard of living well above that achieved in centrally planned collectivism.
Those were the main weapons with which the Western bloc won the Cold War. Liberal democracy and flexible capitalism were the formula for economic and social development. Liberal democracy, in alliance with capitalism that maneuvers between market freedom and Keynesianism when necessary, also guarantees respect for minorities and the institutionality that prevents a leader from seizing power.
That system is being challenged by the anti-system right and left. Despite the mass crimes committed by Marxist and Nazi-fascist totalitarianism, the uncertainties of this time of vertiginous transformations and the decline of the ruling classes produce authoritarian ebbs.
In Spain, the neo-Marxist reflux called Podemos lost strength, but Catalan and Basque separatist nationalisms remain, with Esquerra Republicana and the extremist Bildu, recycled from Herri Batasuna, the former political arm of ETA. The alliance established by Pedro Sánchez, permanent with Podemos and eventually with the separatists, it strengthened the resurgence of the current version of Francoism: Vox.
Francoism was the personal incarnation of “Falangism”, the ideology that was shaped in the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera and which his son José Antonio gave body to doctrine, combining extreme nationalism with fundamentalist Catholicism.
That ideology had been orphaned when Alianza Popular, led by former Francoist minister Manuel Fraga Iribarne, began to democratize and ended up embracing liberal democracy by becoming the Popular Party. But In these decades that fester authoritarianism in an anti-system format, the ultra-conservative party appeared which gained strength as the opposite pole of Podemos and anti-Castilian nationalism.
Vox exuded a homophobic, misogynistic, xenophobic and arrogant conservatism which reveals him as heir to the Spanish version of the corporatist, ultra-religious and anti-liberal nationalism that Franco commanded.
“Let’s go back to ’36” repeats the chorus of a confusing and obtuse song that was sung in the last act of Vox. The party authorities said that it does not incite the coup, but rather accuses the current government of wanting to return to the chaotic republicanism that led to the Civil War. But that explanation is absurd.
If that were the intention, the chorus would say “we are going to return to 31”, since 1931 is the year in which the Second Republic began, replacing the monarchy headed by Alfonso XIII. That turbulent democratic period was closed in 1939 for Franco’s victory in the Civil War that he had started in 1936.
Vox in Spain, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, The always powerful French far-right and conservative ultra-nationalisms such as the one embodied by the Hungarian Viktor Orban and the Russian Vladimir Putin, are overwhelming the center-rights and attacking the liberal democracies. Leaderships like those of Trump and Bolsonarowhich devastate the center-right leaders because they bring ultra-conservatives out of the closet.
The phenomenon is that many people who perceived themselves as center-right discovered their extreme political instincts due to the ideological excitement produced by the ebb of authoritarian conservatism, injecting euphoria and contempt in society. That recycled fascism that is no longer statist or corporatist like its 20th century molds, is silent in the face of the war that Putin imposed on Ukraine and also in the face of the brutal repression of women and young people who challenge the Iranian regime. The authoritarian left in Latin America is also complicit with the Russian leader and the Persian theocracy, but Iranian women continue to challenge the religious regime.
They know that repression can triumph again, as in 1999 when he crushed the protests against the closure of the reformist newspaper Salam and against the sabotage of the religious leadership of the government of the moderate Mohamed Khatami. They also know that repression will cause thousands of deaths, as in 2009-2010 when Basij paramilitary commandos fired on crowds protesting against the fraud that stole reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi’s victory. But they are still on the streets, trying to replace Ayatollah Khamenei with a system like the one that is weakening in its Western cradle.
