Iran: Why are protests no longer peaceful?
Analysis by Shereshevskiy

ANALYTICS  01 February 2023 - 14:47

There are times when peaceful protest is effective. A small town with strong municipal autonomy and a relatively cohesive local community that is unfamiliar with the high level of property stratification is ideal. Such small communities, consisting of independent producers, small traders, and farms adjacent to the city, were the foundation of the medieval world and the birthplace of local self-government; they can still be found in some parts of Western Europe and the United States today.

When a group of residents wants to draw attention to their problem, they can go to the square and spread out posters or stage a picket line. This is less of a confrontation with the local community and more of an attempt to persuade it of something. For example, the city has sewerage problems, farmers need additional assistance, and several women want to draw attention to the family violence problem. Their peaceful actions are reasonable and likely to succeed. After all, the rest of the city's residents are not their enemies, rather they simply do not fully realise the scale of other people's difficulties.

However, there are many situations where peaceful protests are ridiculous. For example, what kind of peaceful protest can we talk about in Iran? In this country, you can simply be shot or beaten to death, sent to prison for years for trying to shout a few political slogans or because you put on a headscarf incorrectly. Mass protests have been taking place in Iran since September last year. About 500 people have already been killed for participating in them, and about 14,000 have been arrested. Several arrested were executed.

This is because a bunch of people, for example, members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and other groups have seized all the power and the country's main wealth. They don't want to share power and wealth with anyone. They have planted their relatives everywhere and are stealing huge funds from state-owned companies. Large private businesses in Iran are usually also related to them, and do the same, surviving on government orders and subsidies. Having become millionaires, members of the corrupt elite who are robbing the country are ready to kill anyone who does not agree with them for their privileges.

To kill, they use mercenaries, Basij, recruited from poor families of poorly educated people, to whom they pay well boosting their ideology. No sermons of peace, brotherhood and universal love have and can have an impact on them. On the contrary, the powerlessness of some victims, especially women, only provokes them, reinforcing sadistic tendencies.

According to sociologists, the Iranian ruling group is now isolated from most social groups and classes and has lost the trust of 60-70 per cent of citizens. National minorities are protesting against discrimination and humiliation based on their nationality (lack of full-fledged free education systems in local languages, withdrawal of funds to the capital from the regions). Workers are on strike in protest against rising prices and deteriorating working conditions. Some national minority political groups have already begun to use force methods. Some workers abandoned efforts to form legal peaceful trade unions in favour of the idea of illegally elected workers' councils, which would lead strikes under the control of workers' meetings before taking over factories and plants by force, overcoming police resistance. Outraged by the suppression of their rights and police violence, university students and ordinary local residents sometimes resort to force, throwing Molotov cocktails at police.

This movement is sometimes violent because communicating with Iran's ruling group in another language is pointless. I'm sure they'll tell you about Gandhi and his allegedly successful project to liberate India from the British. This is a common and unfounded urban legend. The last peaceful civil disobedience campaign, led by Mahatma Gandhi in 1942, was recognized as a failure by him and was terminated at his request. On August 15, 1947, India gained independence from the British for a completely different reason.

A year before that, in 1946, there was an uprising of the Indian British fleet. The Royal Indian Navy Mutiny was an uprising by Indian naval officers, soldiers, policemen and civilians against British rule in India. This movement quickly spread and found support throughout British India, from Karachi to Calcutta, and eventually reached more than 20,000 sailors on 78 ships and in shore establishments. The performance of the Indian navy was suppressed with the help of... Gandhi and his associates - the leadership of Indian nationalists. They used their authority to persuade the rebels to stop.

Nevertheless, British Prime Minister Clement Attlee acknowledged that the entire Indian army had become unreliable after these events. In addition, the naval uprisings served as a starting point for new protests - perhaps the most powerful workers' strikes in the history of India with millions of participants, which escalated into clashes with the police, and peasant uprisings with elements of guerrilla warfare. Gandhi had nothing to do with this spontaneous, largely violent movement. On the contrary, he constantly called on society to exclusively peaceful actions - many simply did not listen to him anymore.

It was after these events, on February 20, 1947, that British Prime Minister Attlee announced that his cabinet intended to transfer power in India into the hands of the national government no later than June 30, 1948.

In 1967, former British High Commissioner John Freeman said that the 1946 mutiny caused the British to fear another large-scale mutiny, similar to the Sepoy rebellion of 1857, by 2.5 million Indian soldiers who were veterans of the Second World War. Let us add that by that time the British had built a powerful military industry and railways on the territory of India...

Great Britain, which itself was exhausted by the Second World War, in a terrible dream did not want a new war with a 500-million-strong India and its huge veteran corps. That is why it agreed to the independence of India, which this country gained on August 15, 1947.

Nonviolent speeches are excellent for persuading a generally non-hostile community that they should pay attention to certain issues. However, this method has almost nothing to do with the situation of fighting ferocious forces, such as colonialists or people capable of killing women for incorrectly wearing a headscarf.

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