The only thing Voltaire was wrong about when he affirmed that “fanaticism is a monster that dares to say that it is the son of religion”, is that it is not that it “dares” to say it: fanaticism “is” the son of religion. That the word derives from fanum, the name of the temple in pre-Roman times, certifies the direct relationship between religion and fanaticism. By the way, not every religious is a fanatic, but, like the dogmatic ideologies, which are secular extensions of religion, fanaticism is an obtuse and violent secretion of absolute convictions. That is why the absurdity of the complicit silence of the Latin American authoritarian left with the misogynistic and homophobic crimes of the Iranian theocracy is reached.
Like Nazism, Stalinism, North Korean communism and so many other examples from the ideological field, theocracies are delusional and totalitarian regimes. That is why it also has absurd instruments to rule over people’s privacy. Theocracies on both shores of the Persian Gulf have “vice officers” or “morality police.” In Saudi Arabia and other Sunni kingdoms, people can be arrested for kissing in a square, and women always get the worst of it. The same thing happens in the Persian Shia regime. in Iran, the Gasht-e Ershad (vice police) patrol the streets and he takes to “reeducation centers” the women he considers immodestly dressed or made up.
Mahsa Amini was 22 years old with a lock of hair escaping from her hijab when she was arrested in Tehran. Because of the hair that brushed her forehead, her agents accused her of wearing the Islamic veil incorrectly. The lunatic hijab law establishes that, from before the age of ten, women must completely hide their hair. They must also hide their arms and legs in loose clothing, because if they outline their bodies they are considered immoral.
The Gasht-e Ershad’s attacks on women they consider insufficiently covered, enable misogynists, fanatics and violent in general, to hit them and yell “bitch” at them in the middle of the street. And the agents of the state allow these public lynchings. It is common to see men beating or insulting women in Iranian cities before the impassive gaze of policemen who do nothing to stop the cowardly aggression.
Witnesses to the arrest of Mahsa Amina They reported that she was beaten since they put her on the police cell phone. At the Kasra Hospital, where she died, she had arrived in agony. The general outrage at this new crime of dictatorial obscurantism sparked the first protests in Iranian Kurdistan, where the young woman came from. They soon multiplied throughout the country and the regime responded as it always does: with repression.
Until now, repression has always triumphed over protest movements. In 1999, crowds protesting against the closure of the reformist newspaper Salam were attacked by riot police in the streets, while the Basij shock forces stormed the universities to beat up the students who organized the marches. That wave of protests targeted the religious leadership of the regime. From that top of the State, the closure of Salam, the newspaper that belonged to the reformist movement whose leaders included none other than Mohammed Khatami, who at that time was the president of the country, had been implemented through the censorship units of the Judiciary. .
In other words, not even the president elected in 1997 could prevent the repressive arms of the Shia clergy from attacking the protesters who defended his government. He, too, could not prevent them from acting with brutality until they suffocated the protest, leaving dozens dead and wounded, the prisons full of demonstrators and close to a hundred disappeared. The demonstrations defended the newspaper that supported the reformist president, but he could do nothing to stop the repression that bloodied those six days of protest. A social rebellion that, for the first time since the triumph of the Khomeinist revolutionhad shaken religious power and its authoritarian structure.
The Basij paramilitaries, who since the creation of the Ayatollah Khomeini They use green canes to beat breaking bones and skulls of protesters, were once again at the forefront in the repression of the massive demonstrations in 2009 against the fraud in favor of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. When the vote count began to show the victory of the opposition candidate Mir Hossein Musaví, the theft of votes was perpetrated that allowed the greatest exponent of retrograde populism led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to continue in the presidency.
The other candidates, Mohsen Rezai and Mehdí Karrubi, also denounced the fraud. The protests spread and generated acts of violence, but these outbursts, which were a consequence and not a cause, in no way justified the repression in which the Basij, in addition to using their sticks, fired firearms at the crowds. Those protests that began in June 2009 were only defeated by the repression in February 2010. The upheaval was so great that it went down in history as “la Fitna”, Arabic word that alludes to the civil war within Islam.
The Basij always end up imposing their brutality about the will to change. That is why Khomeini created them as soon as he took power. It is possible that also on this occasion the will to change of large sectors of the population will once again be suffocated by repression. But the fact that in the middle classes there is such a spirit of rebellion against religious authoritarianism that now a young woman has been murdered for wearing the hijab wrong, points to a different outcome as possible.
Shah Reza Pahlavi, who had taken office at just 22 years old when the British removed his father, Reza Khan, from the throne because he sympathized with the Nazis, put down hundreds of protests with blood and fire against the process of forced secularization which he called “revolution”. white”. But there was a wave of rebellions that the repression could not quell and knocked it down. Perhaps, like that monarch who ruled for almost three decades, the repressive Iranian theocracy will also end up being swept away by a wave of indignation caused by his crimes.
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