Note: The 1979 Revolution; The Challenge of Reason, Science, and the Customs of Iranian Society and the World

The 1979 Revolution and the political system that emerged from it are on the verge of entering their fortieth year. The Islamic Republic should have matured beyond its childhood, adolescence, and youth. Today's situation can no longer be attributed to the Qajar and Pahlavi regimes, nor can it evade responsibility under the guise of being revolutionary. In fact, the regime's propaganda apparatus has been constantly presenting the achievements of the system in the context of the protests of December and the protests against compulsory hijab in February 2018. The summary of these achievements is the challenge of reason, science, and the customs of Iranian society and the global community. The most significant achievements of establishing the Islamic Republic over the past four decades have been the formation of a perpetually rebellious government (under the misleading title of 'revolutionary'), transforming the country into an abnormal state in the global community, and turning society into a chaotic, disordered, and tumultuous one. No society, even with strong civil institutions and traditions, can remain orderly for four decades under a rebellious government that denies and violates all international laws and its own internally constructed laws, especially when civil institutions and traditions were weak and unstable at the time of the formation of this government. The powerful machinery of the government (with control over oil revenues, mines, forests, administrative, military, and religious bureaucracy) has created the illusion for officials that they can manipulate society in any way they wish and produce a model human being in an assembly line, but society resisted, resulting in greater chaos and disorder. The religious government has not only been rebellious in international and domestic arenas by violating all regulations and procedures, creating tensions, military interventions, and repression but has also sought to disrupt social processes and governmental institutions as much as possible, thereby rendering them abnormal. The role of revolutionary institutions that have had a dominant hand in managing affairs has been to institutionalize disorder. After four decades, the government is still at war with society on dozens of fronts and in hundreds of trenches: dervishes, evangelical Christians, Sunnis, homosexuals, non-rent-seeking writers and artists, and even some of the rent-seekers among them, youth, girls and women, ethnic minorities, workers, students, and dozens of other groups and strata. In each of these fronts, there are dozens of thematic trenches of struggle, such as women's fight against compulsory hijab, gender segregation, gender discrimination, and discriminatory family laws. The result of this multi-front war and hundreds of trenches has been the erosion of society and the further disruption of conditions. Iranian society in these four decades has changed like all societies, but its changes have not occurred under the conditions of a normal society. A normal society is not stagnant and unchanging. A normal society changes, but its changes follow normal procedures through non-violent protests protected by the government, dialogue between conflicting parties, information campaigns and legislation, civil institutions (professional, functional, and sectoral), elections, free media, and collective policymaking. Not only is there no institution in Iran to resolve disputes, but the government itself has been a source of increasing baseless and unfounded conflicts. Abnormal foreign relations The behavior of the Islamic Republic in the international arena has been so rebellious that when analysts see officials speaking about negotiations, dialogue, de-escalation, and respect for the embassies of other countries (and a few days later an embassy is attacked), they can only explain these 'strange' behaviors with terms like 'normalization efforts.' It is difficult for people to believe such statements. A foreign policy run by military officials with the goal of 'the arrival of the U.S. President to serve the Supreme Leader for the Shiitization' (as stated by the commander of the Basij) will yield nothing but permanent tension. The Islamic Republic does not recognize international waters, does not ensure the security of embassies, and the regime's leaders defend attacks on embassies; UN Security Council resolutions are 'pieces of paper' to them, and treaties signed by the Iranian government are violated daily. The settling of accounts with the Shiite Lebanese hotel and the payment of all their damages (up to furniture) after the war with Israel, while housing earthquake victims from Kermanshah in tents during winter, is abnormal. Abnormal culture For four decades, there has been no culture, media, or information dissemination in Iran. Everything that exists is propaganda and public opinion engineering, and developments and events must be sought between the lines of cultural engineering. The monopolistic state radio and television, pre-publication censorship of books, filtering millions of websites, closing newspapers and magazines, and shutting down polling institutions are all abnormal. A state film, theater, and music festival is not normal because it is meant to showcase the propaganda works of 'the regime's soldiers' produced with public resources to a segment close to the government. These are so abnormal that when you explain the essence of the matter to citizens of other countries, they do not believe it. Who would believe that in 2018, when you want to publish a book, you must submit a copy to the 'Truth Department,' which takes months to read it and then tells you to 'remove these parts'; you negotiate with them to get some discounts, and ultimately publish your book with hundreds of words, several chapters, or dozens of pages removed? The fact that some readers, musicians, actors, and directors must live in exile to continue their work is abnormal. Women sleeping in Iranian films with headscarves, women sitting under hairdryers in these films with headscarves, and the removal of kisses from people's lives are abnormal. The Islamic Republic provides engineered statistics to international organizations and then feeds the same statistics back to society. Abnormal politics The Guardian Council, the Assembly of Experts consisting of clerics, and the Supreme Leader himself (for life, unaccountable, and above the law) in our time are abnormal and are maintained only by the force of the Revolutionary Guards' weapons. The Committee of Article 10 of Political Parties, about three hundred parties with paper licenses, bus protests, dirty money in elections, creating files for each political activist with 300,000 personnel, seasonal and electoral coalitions that constantly change names, slogans, and images, the arrest of thousands of protesters within a few days, and military personnel who take off their uniforms during elections to become politicians are abnormal. Those who demand logic in these processes and institutions and ask hard questions ultimately find themselves facing punishment. An abnormal society Beating a worker for protesting unpaid wages, a thirsty and hungry person for drinking water and eating food during Ramadan, headless mannequins, cutting off hands and fingers of individuals with guillotines and meat grinders for any reason, selling public assets at low prices to individuals who take low-interest loans, the inner and outer workings of offices, executing individuals in front of children and teenagers, child laborers and garbage collectors, and marriages of girls aged 9 to 15 are abnormal and heartbreaking. Brain drain, a flood of immigration, issuing over two million warnings annually for compulsory hijab violations, the very existence of morality police, a sixty-fold increase in the number of prisoners over forty years, gender segregation from elementary school to university, and banning women from entering sports arenas are abnormal. Even the fight against corruption in Iran is abnormal. The founders and administrators of an institution that claims to fight corruption (Transparency and Justice Watch) are themselves rent-seekers and plunderers of public resources. In an abnormal society (according to security and police officials and the government's propaganda apparatus), individuals without any mental illness or disorder, when confronted by Basij members, harm and kill themselves, pour acid on their heads, throw themselves off bridges, go under police vehicles and kill themselves, and when arrested, take pills to die or use plastic bags to 'cut their spinal cords in the method of sunlight-moonlight' (it is unclear how). And even if we assume all these claims are true: such events only occur in a disordered and chaotic society. Abnormal economy The government's dollar sales, the Revolutionary Guards' docks, and the smuggling of tens of billions of dollars worth of goods by guards and security personnel, border trading, embezzlements of several trillion tomans, the key to the Development Fund being in the hands of the Supreme Leader, providing subsidies to 76 million people, 80 percent of the country's resources being in the hands of the government, 40 million people relying on government support, and providing 150 trillion tomans in bank loans to those who do not intend to repay them are abnormal. Allocating billions of dollars from national resources to military interventions in other countries and also allocating billions of dollars to build tombs for Shiite Imams, mosques, seminaries, and religious ceremonies while unemployment and poverty are rampant and infrastructure is collapsing is abnormal. The monopoly of resources and businesses by three empires: the leadership apparatus, the Revolutionary Guards, and state-owned companies is abnormal. Abnormal religion Using mosques and shrines as bases for the Basij and turning them into temporary detention centers during political protests, building mosques by municipalities and state institutions and military forces, having more Shiite clerics than Sunni clerics in Egypt and Saudi Arabia (with a Sunni population ten times that of Shiites) and religious studies students in the Vatican, injecting 20,000 clerics into schools to create jobs for them, paying stipends to clerics from public resources, pouring municipal funds into religious committees, mandating Quran education for children while prohibiting foreign language education for them, and ultimately investing more in religious studies students than in training mathematicians, physicists, and chemists is abnormal. Annually allocating tens of trillions of tomans of government, state, and public resources to religious institutions is abnormal. The normal and abnormal trends In the above statements, I have only referred to dozens of examples of thousands of abnormalities in Iranian society after the revolution. The Islamic Republic is the source of all these abnormal and strange matters. Discrimination, humiliation, waste, and fraud are still abnormal for the majority of people in Iran, and in this regard, they occasionally catch the government's attention. However, with the regime's persistent efforts in lies, rumors, conspiracy theories, and corruption in Iran, they are no longer abnormal. If this government remains in power for another forty years, it is possible that fraud, humiliation, and discrimination will also become normal matters for most people. Everything that the regime emerging from the 1979 Revolution represents is contrary to international and domestic norms and customs. Those who want to save their country and know that the country and the political regime are not the same must first strive to return society to its normal state. Piece by piece, the ideas and behaviors represented by the Islamic Republic will clash with this normalization.