AP Photo/Middle East Images
Iranians protest the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was detained by the morality police, in Tehran, October 1, 2022.
Shops were shuttered across Iran some six weeks ago after calls went out by activists for a three-day strike to commemorate the victims of a 2019 crackdown, known as “Aban-e khoonin,” or “Bloody November.” The stoppage was early evidence that the months of chaotic protests following the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police in Tehran were nowhere near over, but were instead finding new strength by linking past to present. “Aban continues,” read one announcement: This bloody November struggle continues.
Here was a new purpose for November, a month that for more than 40 years had officially been celebrated in Iran for the capture of the U.S. embassy in 1979, a major turning point in the consolidation of the Islamic Republic. Activists continued their revision of the revolutionary calendar earlier this month with a second work stoppage, timed to coincide with the annual remembrance of three student protesters killed during Vice President Nixon’s visit to Iran shortly after the 1953 coup. What we’re seeing today in Iran is nothing less than a renewed assault from below on the commemorative cycle of the Islamic Republic, the language and demands of ongoing protests inextricable from official memory and practice. Revolution, should it come again to Iran, will not be a rupture; it will be a remix, the past remastered for the present.
The grammar of their revolt, this generation’s revolt, comes from the nezam, or system, itself.
What stands out is the remarkable continuity of protest, the legacy of more than a century of democratic struggle, and failure. Young demonstrators gather in the same locations that their parents once did, in 1979, in 1999, in 2009. They join hands in Tehran, in Freedom Square and on Revolution Boulevard, places where form follows revolutionary function. Their cries of “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, we are together united,” “I will kill, I will kill, whoever kills my sister,” and “Death to the dictator” reach back verbatim to the winter of 1978, evoking the movement against the Shah’s regime to condemn the present one.
Many of today’s slogans riff on the native rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), none more than what became the emblematic rallying cry of 2022, “zan, zendegi, azadi” (“woman, life, freedom”), now a rival if not a replacement for the regime’s revolutionary banner, “istiqlal, azadi, jomhuri-e islami” (“independence, freedom, Islamic Republic”). Others are more direct. A young lady spray-paints “jomhuri-ye edami” (“execution republic”) across a neighborhood wall, a mockery of “jomhuri-ye eslami,” as well as a double-edged warning that the Islamic Republic is also on the block.
The grammar of their revolt, this generation’s revolt, comes from the nezam, or system, itself. It should come as no surprise that the slogans and spaces that constitute postrevolutionary Iran provide its citizens with a ready arsenal to use against a state and regime that continues to repeat the mistakes of its predecessor. The insertion of new meaning into existing repertoires of opposition is the logical extension of the IRI’s central message to its youngest members throughout history: Where there is injustice, they are told, protest. Revolt as your parents and grandparents did against the Shah.
That the youngest cohort of Iranians know their mantras and marks by heart is a measure of the regime’s pedagogical success, the consequences of a job well done. For the keepers of the Islamic Republic, revolution is a never-ending educational experience, a righteous lesson to be retold and re-enacted in schools and on the boulevards, revived and kept alive for the children and the grandchildren of the revolution who have no direct memory of Khomeini, the monarchy, or 1979.
What these educators failed to anticipate, however, is that each generation seeks its own origin story. For the rising cohort of “Gen Z” Iranians known in Persian as the dahe hashtadi, that story is the winter fuel crisis of 2019. If 1979 exists as a taught memory, then the protests that erupted in late November 2019 represent a lived trauma, an absolute calamity of violence and death. Over the course of a few short weeks, state agents killed at least 304 Iranians (the number may have been as high as 1,500), a scale and rate of mayhem unseen since the worst days of the revolutionary period.
The brutal suppression of peaceful demonstrators in 2019 marked a new and ominous turn in the political development of Iran, one without obvious remedy or end. The virtuous cycle of elections that unexpectedly defined the aftermath of the 2009 Green Movement was replaced by an accelerating cycle of protest, of demonstration and violent counterdemonstration, a path to ruin without the usual off-ramp of elections to restore the peace. Little has happened since to change this grim assessment. In too many ways, matters have only become worse.
Fierce states are almost never strong states, the deployment of bayonets being, as Talleyrand reminds us, useful for maintaining the throne, but not for sitting on it. But what of a fierce public? The headlong attacks on the authorities by demonstrators since September have been astonishing, unimaginable in 2009. They are met on the streets and in their neighborhoods with brutal, disproportionate response. Violence darkens the line separating state and society, and Iran may yet tip into rapid collapse, an absolute nightmare scenario of political change (see Libya, Syria).
To what end? Tired of constant factional fighting over the spent ideology of the Islamic regime, driven to distraction by the futility and fecklessness of the Iranian diaspora and its endless internecine battles, there is an overwhelming longing among many citizens in Iran for a new beginning of conciliation and cooperation, an Iran big enough to include all the banal joy and disappointment described in Shervin Hajipour’s viral hit “Baraye.” It is, above all, the desire for aramesh, or peace of mind, what Nahid Siamdoust describes as “an ordinary life, one that brings together the threads of justice and freedom in Iranian society for all.” Every turn of the screw, every funeral and midnight execution by the authorities, makes such an outcome less likely.
That the cost of peace will continue to be borne by the young appears inescapable. Years ago, a student in my Revolutions seminar pointed out that demonstrators don’t necessarily know that they are on a revolutionary path. Certainly, this is true for the earliest victims of revolution, the sparks of upheaval who died without knowing who they would become, whether it be Mahsa Amini in Tehran or Mohamed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid or George Floyd in Minneapolis. “My daddy changed the world,” Floyd’s daughter said to then-candidate Joe Biden at her father’s funeral. But wouldn’t it have been better for her to have her daddy alive and within reach? Wouldn’t she exchange the entire world to be with him again?
One thinks of the awful tragedy of Mahsa Amini, the bottomless pain felt by her family, the dismal image of her parents embracing outside of their daughter’s hospital room seared into the collective consciousness. Right next to her memory, there are the protests and demonstrations, what might yet be the next great revolution of Iran. The entire globe is talking about it. For Amini’s survivors, there is an even greater world, a world of grief so big that they can’t find a way out.
