"This You Can Believe"

I’m here on the West Coast where the constant refrain seems to be: Wow, it’s so cold! It is, of course, in the 60s Fahrenheit during the day and in the 50s at night, which, again of course, means people are wearing floor length Canada Goose coats, shuffling their feet as if it’s below freezing, and overall acting like they live in the Northeast in the month of February. All in all, amusing, confusing, and a wonderful reminder that so much of life really is just relative. Even how temps feel against our skin, let alone what a revolution is and who is a traitor.

What’s Happening:

1. On December 12, 2022, a second young man, Majidreza Rahnavard, was executed in Iran in connection with the ongoing protests. Much like Mohsen Shekari, he was charged with moharebeh, battling against god, god here represented by the Basij militia. Or, put more simply, he was accused of stabbing to death two Basijis and injuring 4 others. There are videos of him and photos of this young man from the northeast city of Mashhad, the shrine city of Mashhad, in custody. In one (in all?) his bright orange jersey stands out as does his arm in a sling, as does his blindfold, as does his halting mumbled response to the off camera man who wields questions as if instruments of torture. There is a video of Rahnavard, all 22 years old, seemingly before he is taken out to be hanged. It doesn’t matter what he says, to me at least, though the Twitterati keep celebrating the fact that he says don’t read the Quran on my grave (which, as is the Twitterati’s wont, they seem to have misunderstood). What matters is the two men, standing on each side wearing black from head to toe including black balaclava masks, waiting to take him outside into the dark of a dawn that is waiting to happen. Rahnavard was hanged from a yellow crane while rows of men, their faces except for their eyes covered from each other and from us, lined up to watch. Unlike Shekari whose execution appears to have happened like a dirty secret whispered quickly, this was a photographed and filmed hanging of a young man staged, it feels, to quench the bloodthirst of these other men. And I keep thinking of the perfect complement of a blindfolded hanging for an audience of only eyes.

2. So much of what we read/care about/see in Iran today is previous trends on steroids. It’s good to be reminded that Iran has one of the highest execution rates in the world, that they disproportionately execute the Baluch in the east of the country, and that a large percentage of the executions are on drug-related charges.

3. Speaking of long standing patterns, the IRI has been releasing people arrested over the past weeks, putting people on death row then taking them off, and as ever, arresting a whole new set of people. One Telegram channel that covers university student activism and charts the arrests has taken to calling them “kidnappings” for the ways in which the students are picked off the streets and taken away. The most prominent arrests in this past week has been of Mohammad Ali Kamfirouzi, the lawyer of several of the better known detainees of the past 3 months such as the journalists Nilufar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi who were arrested in relation to their reporting on the death of Mahsa Amini back in September.

4. For those deep in the weeds of Iranian oppositional discourse, the letter written by Bahareh Hedayat, a women’s right activist who has been in and out of prison for over a decade and was rearrested in October of this year and jailed in the infamous section 209 of Evin, became an important talking point. In this day and age of course, nothing seems to last longer than the time it takes for a twitter storm to form. But her letter seems to have gotten traction and at least in my circles has been mentioned often, though, when I think about it, rarely analyzed. Its analysis requires its own space. Suffice to say that not only does she break with the reformist movement (or more accurately delegitimizes that movement), she also re-reads the Green movement (of which she was a prominent part) as not an outgrowth of the reform movement in Iran but as the vanguard of it. Specifically she writes: “It was us [her generation—she was born in 1981—who took to the streets in 2009] who narrated the movement and its demands. Mir-Hossein [Mousavi who along with his wife Zahra Rahnavard have been under house arrest since 2009] and the reformists came behind us.” While it’s been clear that there is no place in most activists and armchair activists’ mind for the idea of reforming the current system vs. overthrowing it, the fact that someone of Bahareh Hedayat’s position announces and denounces it so clearly from inside Evin is one of the factors for why the letter keeps getting mentioned in the tea leaf reading circles.

Meanwhile:

1. I think the story currently swirling around Hossein Ronaghi and his blacklisting is such a perfect little anecdote for why it’s close to impossible to have any nuanced understanding of the situation in and around Iran. Ronaghi is 4 years younger than Bahareh Hedayat. He was also politically born in the events of 2009. He has also been in and out of prison since. He was released at the end of November after a 64 day hunger strike. But if you google his name today, a mere 3 weeks or so after his release, the third item you see is a tweet he sent in English two days ago. It says: “These are some of the individuals that play a role in suppressing Iranian women and executing the protesters. These arw [sic] the external arms of the Islamic Republic.” The list includes a disproportionate number of Iranian-American/British female journalists, including several women who have been under severe social media attack since September (and some even before) for allegedly whitewashing the Islamic Republic. Here whitewashing means have written/reported on the nuances of Iran’s political system and/or have public anti-war positions. His blacklist also included Christian Amanpour, a name I mention just to give a sense of what the list looked like. If that makes no sense to most of you reading this, then consider yourselves lucky. A human rights activist in Iran, someone who unlike many others in “opposition” outside of Iran has actually paid a price for his activism, comes out of prison and blacklists a huge number of journalists and other figures outside of Iran. The only silver lining here is that it took even the staunchest supporters of the current black/white Iranian opposition discourse by surprise. So there’s some redlines left. I will hold on to that sliver of hope.

2. A recent Vox article called Why the protests in Iran are so hard to understand sheds some light or perhaps may give you some tools to make sense (is the word sense?) of the difficulty of understanding the landscape of what we can call “the current Iranian protests” from outside of the country. Even though for any social media follower of Iran today it’s clear that the level of disinformation and the intensity of trolling is extremely high, it boggled my mind to read: “‘I’ve not seen something of this scale before,” Marc Owen Jones, a professor and author of Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East, told me. Some 330 million tweets on the Mahsa Amini hashtag in Persian were sent — in one month, he said. “By way of comparison, #BlackLivesMatter over eight years got about 83 million. And since February, the word #Ukraine has been mentioned 240 million times,” he added.”

And Finally:

No Telly talk today. But I’d like to end by thanking my wonderful friend who upon seeing the title of this newsletter and reading about why it’s called “These are the true things” sent me the link to an Aretha Franklin song. It’s a beautiful song and evidence that my mom is also a queen of soul (skip to 1:16 if you don’t have the patience to wait!):

These are some of the true things for today. Until soon!