We beware of excessive optimism: world tyrannies have not disappeared, on the contrary, in recent years they have even intensified.
But the totalitarian Moscow-Tehran-Beijing axis is now being shaken. Military setbacks in Ukraine have embarrassed Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin, and the faltering Chinese economy has forced President Xi Jinping to demand an explanation. And in Iran, the masses are not protesting against America and Israel, as the ayatollahs have been trying to hammer into them for years, no – they are chanting “Death to the dictator!”
However, unlike the themes of Russia and China, the feminist revolt against the mullahs has a niche in the German-language media. Without Twitter or Instagram, the scale of the outrage and incredibly violent resistance from the authorities would hardly have been heard.
The Federal Council also hesitated for a long time – only on Wednesday, two weeks after the escalation, the Foreign Ministry issued a dry statement “alarmed” by the violent death of 22-year-old Iranian Mahsa Amini, who was arrested and ill-treated because she wore a headscarf not properly.
While respect for human rights was whispered from Bern to Berlin, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau created the facts and declared the Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization. Surprisingly, some equality organizations in this country even move with the handbrake on; Helvetia is silent.
The hesitant public interest is understandable, Persia seems geographically and culturally distant, and what do a few dead teenagers mean in a country where you don’t vacation anyway, compared to the threat of nuclear war?
But those who look the other way underestimate the geopolitical scope of events. Because the mullah regime is a historical experiment. This is the first attempt by political Islam to create something like a modern state out of a prayer rug.
Now, more than four decades later, the theocracy is faltering because bearded preachers feel threatened by the tiktok generation, because fearless people are rioting at the risk of their lives, and because the mullahs can’t think of an answer other than murder and manslaughter. The signal sent by courageous men and women in the struggle for their fundamental rights drowns out all the calls of the muezzin: the fundamentalist ideology is in fact failing and can only survive through terror. The civilized façade of the turban-wearers is drowning in the blood of their own citizens.
It is a beacon for fanatics in mosques: in the new millennium, no ideology has smothered the West – and the Islamic world – with such corruption as fundamentalism. With the moral bankruptcy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the notion that religious dogmatism can function as a political program is also crumbling.
It is quite possible that 2022 may become for the world of Islamism what the turning point of 1989 was for the existing socialism. This also applies to the suppression of the uprising in Iran: the illusion of reformability has been dispelled. With every young woman killed, the movement for democracy finds another martyr, every atrocity committed by the guardians of morality further exposes the fascist nature of the system.
When the revolutionary leader Khomeini ended his exile in Paris after the expulsion of the Shah in 1979 and landed in Tehran, when asked by journalist Peter Jennings how he felt now, he replied: “Nothing.” It is possible that the era of political Islam will eventually find itself there again – in the void of world history. If not this time, then maybe next time or after that.