In a Crisis the True Facts Are Whatever Other People Say They Are
On morality police, the 16th of Azar, facts in times of crisis, and horses that are slow
Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise has been made into a film by Noah Baumbach so it’s around in popular culture these days. It’s not my favorite of his novels. Underworld is, a novel that I read in two days in a dorm room in Istanbul in the summer of 1998 while nursing a broken heart (presented to the world as a cold I couldn’t shake. I had the red noise and puffy eyes to prove it. But that’s a story for another time.) In White Noise, DeLillo writes: “In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are. No one's knowledge is less secure than your own.”
If you even remotely follow the news on Iran, you would have seen on everywhere from social media to the New York Times, variations on the headline that Iran has abolished its “moral police” followed by revisions, corrections, and accusations of nefarious plots to derail the movement. The issue is, as ever, entangled in a wide number of other things so let’s do some unentangling below:
What happened? On Saturday December 3rd, Iranian news outlets reported that in a meeting with the prosecutor general, Mohammad Jafar Montazeri about what was called “recent riots/unrest,” he was asked “why was the gasht-e ershad shut down?” (The term gasht-e ershad literally means “guidance patrol” but particularly since the beginning of the protests in Iran in September 2022, it’s been translated as morality police.) In response Montazeri, who is part of the judiciary and not the police force said: “The guidance patrol has nothing to do with the judiciary. Wherever it was created in the past, it’s there that has shut it down. Of course the judiciary will continue its supervision over behaviors on the societal level.”
This was initially picked up and spread by news agencies and SO MANY social media commentators as a reversal of Iran’s veiling policies due to grassroots pressure. Then there was pushback by, again, MANY social media commentators saying the news reports were wrong: This is not a reversal of policy on veiling, Montazeri is not a spokesperson for the police force, the body that had created the guidance patrol in the first place, that it’s been a while since the guidance patrol had even been out, etc. Then seemingly out of nowhere, social media commentators (on Twitter more specifically) began saying this was a plot by the government to distract from the struggle and the planned strikes (see below) scheduled for this week.
What/does it matter? It matters on some level. A year ago it would have been unimaginable that the prosecutor general in Iran, a high ranking member of the judiciary, which often/always operates at the center of Iran’s repressive actions towards any kind of dissent—journalists, protestors, workers, academics, you name it—would get a question like this, let along answer it. A subject (harassment of women by the state over veiling) that would have seemed to be a redline 6 months ago is now openly discussed in Iran’s controlled and censored press. That’s definitely an outcome of the kind of brave and sustained pressure the government (and the state) has been facing since the death of Mahsa Amini and the ensuing protests. On some level, it’s truly remarkable. But that is its meaning. It is neither a signaling of the end of veiling nor an acknowledgement of concessions or other meanings ascribed to it in the English language press. Is it a ploy to distract from the real struggle in Iran? Post hoc ergo propter hoc (pretty much the only Latin phrase I know thanks to The West Wing.)
Things to Look Out for This Week:
In the Persian calendar, the 16th of Azar is “university students day.” On that day, December 7, in 1953, shortly after the CIA coup that overthrew the popular prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, 3 Tehran University students were killed by the Shah’s police forces. The students were part of a larger protest against the resumption of relations between Iran and Great Britain, and also then US vice president, Richard Nixon’s visit to Iran. Since then just even the term 16th of Azar has become a stand-in for student activism. It carries great symbolic meaning for university students and a tuned-in society at large. Shortly after the revolution, one of the streets abutting Tehran University was named 16th of Azar to commemorate the crucial role university students played in the revolution. In 2009, during the protests that came to be called the Green Movement, there were widespread protests by university students on December 7th. Today is December 5th, the 14th of Azar in the Persian calendar.
Season two of Slow Horses is back on Apple TV. If you’re a fan of espionage novels, check out the books by Mick Herron. I first came across them in London while foraging in Foyles bookstore looking for an espionage novel to take with me on vacation. The problem was it felt like I’d read all the ones I wanted to read and didn’t want to read the ones I hadn’t read. A common dilemma I am sure. The lovely guy working there pulled out Slow Horses, the first volume, and said: I think you’ll like this. And so I took it and I read it and I liked it, though it would be a lie if I said my mind was blown. It actually took reading the second volume, Dead Lions, for me to realize how much I do like these novels. Not on the level of Le Carre…you never love the way you love your first love, but on the level of these are excellent books to devour. The TV adaptation in some ways elevates them mainly because of Gary Oldman and Kristen Scott Thomas. In some ways, in polishing the extremely jagged edges of the book’s Roddy Ho to make him more palatable to a TV audience (I’m assuming?), the adaptation takes away some of what makes the books standout, namely that you kind of don’t really like or want to meet any of the stories’ supposed heroes. And that’s really the point. Nonetheless, you should watch it if you like the genre. It’s fun. It’s breezy. And we all need some breezy fun in this world of ours once in a while.
These are some of the true things for today. Until soon!