The Shiite totalitarian regime is swaying like a stilt in a strong wind. But it will be very difficult for Iran to become the modern state that the young people there yearn for.
In Eastern Europe, we carry in our collective unconscious the rudimentary trauma of the 20th century, i.e. the memory of communist totalitarianism and repression. Up until the 1970s, it was rough and with camps, and in the 1980s, it was supposedly more careful because of glasnost, perestroika, nuclear detente, etc.
After that, we in Bulgaria took advantage of the First World and Western democracy to the extent that absolutely no one really remembers the red dictate or the state's desire to be annihilated publicly and in any way. Everyone today thinks they have a "right to an opinion" and in this sense, despite the deep state and corrupt practices, we are an extremely liberal country. Although the state, deep or not, can obviously still "cook" you without any evidence, but that's a separate topic.
Where nothing is allowed
Now imagine not only a totalitarian, but also a theocratic, strictly Islamic state like Iran. This is a 92-million conglomerate on a vast territory, in which children are indoctrinated from a young age that the eternal enemies are Israel and the USA. There, the "great leader" Ali Khamenei has not just closed the borders - if you are a young person in Tehran or Isfahan, you can't do anything, which are obvious rights for us. Well, in a Shiite cultural sense.
And here it is good to try to quickly explain something difficult to explain - what is the difference between Shiites and Sunnis in Islam. Let's try: those who, after the death of the Prophet, follow his first friend Abu Bakr, become "Sunni" (because according to them, they follow the example of the Prophet - "sunna", which roughly means "orthodox"). And those who followed the Prophet's cousin - Ali, become "Shiite" or "Shiite". They do not recognize Bakr and the next two caliphs. In short: the Sunnis, led by Saudi Arabia, say that they follow Muhammad exactly, and the Shiites, led by Iran, oppose that "Shia" is the true undiluted Islam, according to which the Prophet gave his relatives the very development of the religion. The second option is clearly more adamant and more ultra. Today, Saudi businessmen, for example, are not so angry with Israel, they even work with the Jews on a diplomatic level, unlike the Shiite regime in Tehran, which was imposed after the revolution in 1979. It was different before, but that's another topic.
Here's something important: it's hard for any of us to imagine life in such an autocratic regime that not only bans smartphones, but even when it does allow them, it hires some IT geniuses from India and Uzbekistan to monitor everyone through a certain intelligence program.
Everyone followed the Israeli-American strikes on targets related to Iran's nuclear program in order to prevent it or at least postpone it for a while. These days we have learned that even Europe, which was formally not a party to the conflict, will restore economic sanctions against Khamenei, unless the old bearded leader, roughly speaking, stops the nuclear program and begins to comply with the 2015 agreement.
But here the question is completely different - that this Shiite totalitarian regime is swaying like a stilt in a strong wind.
Will Khamenei's regime fall?
40% of them are people under 24. These people want openness to technology and, accordingly, to basic freedoms and they don't care much that Iran, which beats its chest as the proud heir to the Persian Empire and almost specifically the Achaemenids, is a country rich in oil and gas, and the responsibility for this lagging behind modernity lies personally with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Supreme Leader has been at the helm of the Islamic Republic since 1989 and over the past 36 years has built a theocratic and terrible state in which these same young people - especially women - have no opportunities.
I remember two examples related to football - that only in 2021 were women allowed to go to stadiums to watch football matches. And even more crude: that when an Iranian women's national team was created, they were forced to play football with niqabs. And the intellectual and civil pressure on the authorities, which cannot contain the impulse of this huge youth population, will probably bring down this medieval theocracy in many respects. Not to mention that Khamenei has brought this huge and resource-rich country into practical international isolation.
For Iranian women, even attending a football match was taboo for many years, but they have won back this rightPhoto: AFP/Getty Images
The country's first attempt to get out of this quagmire was associated with President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, an exceptional pragmatist who was considered Iran's answer to Deng Xiaoping. Rafsanjani's name became famous for secret arms deals with Israel and the United States in the "Iran-Contra" scandal, when it turned out that Washington was helping Tehran circumvent the arms embargo.
His two presidential terms - from 1989 to 1997 - were a period of relative recovery for the country and easing of relations with the West. Rafsanjani, of course, is no angel, quite the opposite - he killed a lot of dissidents abroad and helped thaw the country's nuclear program. At the same time, however, the Iranian economy somehow recovered and it seemed that the country had turned its course. To reach the point where the brutally totalitarian regime of Khamenei is on the verge of creating a nuclear weapon.
Some of the Iranians in exile themselves, with whom I have spoken, quite reasonably assume that such a huge Shiite state will fall into unimaginable chaos and guerrilla war, i.e. the dream of the minority of Tehran's pro-democrats will never come true. And the biggest one seems to be whether Iran can produce an atomic bomb. And this is key to the fall of the Khamenei regime.
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Khamenei's failures
This same Khamenei believed that the elimination of two of Iran's historical enemies - Saddam Hussein and the Taliban - opens the doors for Iranian Shiite influence throughout the region. In the 2009 presidential election, Iranian voters gave Khamenei the opportunity to support peaceful and liberal reforms, overwhelmingly supporting Mir Hossein Mousavi. But Grandpa stood behind the straw man president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who won the election amid suspicions of very serious abuses. From there, Iran finally became a totalitarian dictatorial state, like Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, only strictly theocratic. In the face of mass protests against election fraud, Khamenei placed Mousavi under house arrest and introduced a brutal "Stalinist" state that continues to this day.
And what's next? It's kind of clear - this ruthless regime is going away, but due to Shiite specifics and some analyst assumptions about which wing in the army will prevail, the "after" predictions are not particularly optimistic.
And this possible future chaos, besides potentially leading to a Western "peacekeeping" invasion, would affect most of all the millions of young Iranians who want to live like their peers in the First World, to be able to think about careers in their homeland, including in Western branches of companies, to listen to music that was previously banned, to be able to chat and use social networks on their smartphones.
The responsibility lies entirely with Ali Khamenei. He can give up on himself, but he can also reject any opportunity that the Iranian people give him for peaceful change. Because his Shiite stubbornness ultimately led to the 12-day war in June, in which the regime, of course, did not acknowledge the possible thousands of victims of Israel's well-aimed strikes.
Let's keep our fingers crossed for Iran
Yes, as in our country, and everywhere else, the adults support him, but the big challenge here is whether the West has learned from the Arab Spring it caused in other countries, that political turmoil without a plan leads to incredible and violent chaos. Let's hope that Iranian youth do not see anything like that, no matter how much I doubt it.
Okay, the Iranians probably can't push Khamenei away on their own, but they can do so much later, led by the exiled opposition, if by some miracle he returns and takes power. We'll see.
And finally: imagine 30 million or more young people who have no access to anything, or if they do, it's illegal and they're constantly threatened with imprisonment and torture. Imagine also loads of young girls who want to listen to Dua Lipa and Sabrina Carpenter, or even the locals Fazrad Farzin and Shadmer Aghili, to be able to put on makeup, talk about cosmetics and whatever girly stuff they want. Including talking about civil protest when they're forced to wear headscarves and their basic human rights are violated just because they're women.
Imagine. And keep your fingers crossed for Iran. They'll need it.