Psycho-Terrorist Ultraviolence in Iran

It is urgent to understand the regime of violence currently at work in Iran. Tens of thousands of people—sometimes very young—have been killed or fatally wounded by the henchmen of the Islamofascist regime. Discomfort reigns in the media universe. Twice, the death of a single individual killed in Minneapolis by federal agents made front-page news in the United States and Europe, pushing into the background other information—such as the staggering number of victims of the massacres of January 8 and 9 in Iran. There are reasons for this, but none of them are defensible from a cosmopolitan standpoint. One must acknowledge that this is not new. Black Lives Matter! Every life matters, we are told. And yet everything seems to prove the opposite.

Editorial choices in the press are marked by a discrimination among victims that has become glaring since October 7, 2023. The death toll of “Black Saturday” was quickly eclipsed by the number of deaths claimed by Hamas, which deliberately conflated armed militants and civilians killed in Gaza to support the indecent accusation of genocide. Meanwhile, the terrifying crimes perpetrated in Darfur by Hemedti’s paramilitary groups have received minimal coverage in the West, even though what is unfolding there—following the 2003 genocide—is in fact an ethnic cleansing accompanied by an appalling catalogue of atrocities: torture, gang rape and sexual slavery, executions, and even… human safaris. Something is deeply wrong in the world of information. What criteria govern this inequity in the treatment of violence?

It is not the number of victims that matters. A demonstrator killed by an armed representative of the state does not carry the same political meaning as a violent crime committed by an unbalanced individual or a common thug. In both cases, premeditated murder is far more serious than accidental killing, and it becomes even more aggravated when the crime is ordered by a gang leader—or worse, by a temporal or spiritual authority that grants a license to kill with complete impunity, as with Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Criticized for having condoned the brutality of ICE and for taking the risk of a foreseeable escalation, the federal administration is not accused of having ordered a killing in Minneapolis. But what about Iran, where mass murder planned by the state strongly resembles organized gang assassination?

Every fascist regime violently eliminates its opponents in the name of national unity, understood in ethnic terms. Since Khomeini’s coup d’état establishing the dictatorship of the learned ayatollah (velayat-e faqih), the Islamofascist regime of Shiite Iran has done so by invoking the transnational Islamic community (ummah) to justify the punishment of demonstrators for the crime of “enmity against God” (moharebeh). To claim to be the Imam and to speak in God’s name in order to punish on His behalf is the foundation of a totalitarian ideology that authorizes the use of unheard-of violence to repress the slightest deviation from the Islamic way of life. Beaten to death by the morality police of the ruling Islamists for wearing her hijab “incorrectly,” Jina Amini has become the symbol of the oppression Iranian women endure daily. This disproportionate violence, unleashed at the slightest pretext, is systemic. The tyrannical cruelty displayed by the mullahs’ henchmen is a transgressive violence rooted in the ultimate transgression (hubris): assuming the role of God in order to punish in His name.

From the very beginning of the Islamist Republic, torture and rape were perpetrated en masse in the regime’s prisons prior to executions. The regime does not hide this at all. Rape has been publicly justified by the highest religious authorities in order to prevent virgins from entering paradise. Informing families of the rape, along with the date of execution, is an integral part of the punishment. The aim is to crush all resistance by inflicting psychological violence on the victim’s parents—terrorizing them as much as overwhelming them with grief. This sadism does not stem from unrestrained, senseless hyperviolence, but from an institutionalized ultraviolence that explicitly assumes the strategic function of terrorizing the masses. This is precisely what the terrifying repression recently unleashed against the Iranian people has confirmed.

This is not about crushing a rebellion by eliminating armed insurgent groups. The regime is not facing the uprising of an armed minority, but the revolt of a mass of unarmed people whom it is materially impossible to exterminate. The millions of Iranian women and men who have chanted slogans hostile to the Islamist dictator represent at least ten to twenty times that number. The ayatollah is naked in the streets. With the ideology of the totalitarian regime collapsed, the ruling facislamism has nothing left but Terror to survive. It must terrify the Iranian people through the sheer scale of the mass slaughter ordered by the regime of the mullahs. The official number of pasdaran allegedly killed by “terrorists” must be multiplied by at least ten or twenty to approach the real number of victims.

Like the Iranian people, the entire world is horrified by the modalities of the military repression inflicted on unarmed civilians: opening fire with military-grade weapons on demonstrators trapped from both ends of a street, with snipers in ambush; aiming at the head and executing at point-blank range; setting fire to places of refuge; finishing off the wounded on site or in hospitals; persecuting medical personnel and raiding homes to hunt down the injured; tracking parents who come to retrieve the bodies of their children, and so on.

Everything recalls the psycho-terrorist strategy of counter-insurgency wars practiced by colonial powers to crush guerrilla movements led by armed partisans. Alongside mass killings, Islamofascist security forces are now waging a surface war across the entire territory, to be blanketed by intelligence and control operations in order to identify and eliminate dissenters. Psychological warfare aims to terrorize the entire population—already devastated by mourning—in order to prevent any return to the public space. This is unprecedented. Like a colonial power, the regime is waging total war against its own people, with the objective of subjugating society by completely atomizing it.

This is not an exacerbated hyperviolence arising from the chaotic context of a civil war between two military forces, as in Sudan. The license to kill was deliberately issued by the Islamofascist regime, with orders to use it without restraint to stun and terrorize everyone. The militarized ultraviolence of these massacres of unarmed civilians turns these mass killings by organized criminal groups into genuine war crimes falling under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. Under these conditions, beyond the culpable silence of the regime’s objective allies, one can understand the general shock that has seized the media world. It is easier to denounce what happened in Gaza or in Minnesota than to analyze what is happening in Sudan or Iran. But it is difficult to comprehend the Western inability to recognize the fascist nature of the systemic violence perpetrated by the Islamist regime in power in Iran.