Gen Z leading a new kind of rebellion against regime
Protests in Iran often carry with them a grim sense of fatalism. Uprisings in the recent past that captured global attention were crushed by a state well versed in the instruments of coercion. There were bloody crackdowns, arrests and disappearances, and online censorship.
When anger roils the streets – kindled by economic woes, political despair, and a cascade of other pent-up frustrations in a nation chafing under four decades of theocratic dictatorship – it is muffled by the iron hand of a regime that brooks little dissent.
The unrest of the past few weeks may constitute something different.
The death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who perished in the custody of Iran’s morality piece, has sparked an astonishing youth revolt across the country. City after city has seen protests by students and other ordinary Iranians denouncing the draconian restrictions on what women can wear in public.
Videos of crowds chanting ‘‘Women, life, freedom!’’ proliferate on social media. So, too, remarkably, do calls for ‘‘Death to the dictator’’ – a direct, strident denunciation of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
The protests have been met with predictable brutality. Iranian authorities have fired indiscriminately on demonstrations in numerous instances. According to rights groups, more than 100 people have been killed so far by security forces. More than a thousand people have been arrested, including dozens of journalists.
The protesters seem undaunted. According to researchers, demand for virtual private network apps to circumvent the regime’s cyber controls has spiked by 3000% within the country, while demonstrations against the regime and the wearing of the headscarf by women continue.
The Islamic Republic emerged in 1979 in the wake of a mass protest movement against an autocratic monarchy. Many of its ruling elites are holdovers from that revolutionary era, and reflect a status quo that, while entrenched, is also calcifying, seemingly incapable of change.
The toll of sanctions, economic mismanagement and years of political overreach in Iran’s neighbourhood now dog the regime, whose rhetoric of revolution and resistance to Western imperialists is proving more hollow than ever. There is mounting antiIranian sentiment in countries once dominated by Tehran’s proxies, such as Lebanon and Iraq.
Abroad, the ill will toward the Iranian regime is at its highest level in many years. Solidarity protests with Iranian women have taken place in cities across the world. European parliamentarians have cut their hair in symbolic solidarity.
This week, Khamenei cast the unrest as ‘‘riots’’ and blamed it on foreign agitators. That age-old scapegoating can hardly assuage a revolt that is being driven by young people who seem fed up with the stultifying, stifling controls placed on them by an ageing crop of ideologues.
In an interview with Iranian economic daily Donyaye Eqtesad, sociologist Maghsoud Farastkhah argued that the protesters, who are as active online as their contemporaries in other parts of the world, wanted a normal life that was out of reach for them because of their country’s closed political system.
‘‘Generation Z sees itself in a dystopian atmosphere,’’ Farastkhah said.
The level of fury at the status quo marks a departure from earlier rounds of protests.
Consider the uprising in 2009 which followed a presidential election that was widely viewed as rigged in favour of the theocratic regime’s preferred candidate. ‘‘The discourse of that movement was a reformist discourse. It was not calling for a full break from the framework of the Islamic Republic,’’ Mohammad Ali Kadivar, an Iran scholar at Boston College, told the Los Angeles Times.
‘‘Women were present in 2009 . . . But they didn’t have the leading role that they have now.’’
That leading role has crystallised something all the more radical – a more overt rejection of the entire Islamic Republic, built on years of growing disenchantment.
The rawness of the rage makes it hard to predict where the protests will go. Analysts see the movement as operating without real leadership, and with little coordination or influence from the vast and politicised Iranian diaspora.
‘‘One of the most astonishing aspects of the current movement is that it is overwhelmingly composed of young Iranians under age 25 who identify themselves as more than just opponents of Islamist ideology – they are also avowedly alien to the mindset of the older generation, including anti-regime politicians,’’ wrote Mehdi Khalaji of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Their anger may reflect a social explosion more so than a political movement.
‘‘A revolutionary turn does not necessarily depend on the number of active protesters – it arises from a dead-end situation,’’ wrote Iran-based journalist Mahzad Elyassi. ‘‘Following Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech in which he called the protests riots’ and blamed a foreign plot for the unrest, the obstruction has never been clearer.’’