#security forces

Morality police and security forces have humiliated, threatened and arrested millions of women in the streets and in state institutions. According to a police report in 2006, during the eight months of the assault on “bad hijabis” [women wearing loose headscarves], 1.3 million women were stopped in the streets and given formal citations. The following year, during a three-day crackdown, more than 150,000 women were detained. Such assaults reminded Iranians of the images of the Israeli army humiliating Palestinians. But the resistance and the quiet encroachment or non-movement of Iranian women continued. In the process, they have established new norms in society and new realities on the ground, like public presence and the hijab as a matter of choice rather than compulsion. And now, that very non-movement, mediated through the murder of one of those women, Mahsa Amini, has given rise to an extraordinary political uprising in which women and their dignity, indeed human dignity at large, have gained a prominent place. But this uprising is not merely about the “woman question.” The encompassing character of this protest movement has gone beyond women. It has embraced many other deprived, rejected and oppressed social, religious and ethnic groups and classes. There is a feeling that the emancipation of women opens the way for the emancipation of all, including men and the deprived. In other words, the protesters now seem to share a common pain and an understanding of a greater good that unites all protesters. It seems that “Woman, Life, Freedom” represents that universal good.

Mao imagined eliminating division of labor in society, but the trend of social development is for division of labor to become ever finer; he imagined a society with no commodity exchange, but a society with a high degree of division of labor requires commodity exchange to supply everyone's needs; he imagined a society with equal distribution but without distribution incentives, society becomes stagnant and unproductive. Combining executive, legislative, and judicial functions eliminates the balance of powers, and the Cultural Revolution proved that replacing security forces with the dictatorship of the masses results in lawlessness and mass persecution. Mao envisaged being able to recall public servants at will, but that would require an ultrapowerful individual higher than the public organs. Clearly, what Mao imagined was a totalitarian society ruled by a super-powerful individual with no rule of law.