It’s been beyond devastating to watch (or at some points agonizingly wait for some news, any news, from) the recent protests in Iran. Seeing the authoritarian government of a country jail, brutally beat and injure, and even in many cases outright kill its own citizens under the pretense of “domestic terrorism,” for only exercising their constitutional rights for assembly and free speech (yes, Iranian constitution also has mentions of freedom of speech and assembly, although who cares about them when there are also clauses that define the position and authorities of a supreme leader) is depressing. It’s even more depressing if that country is one where you were born and raised and have so much memoires from.

But it’s even more devastating to see that some, possibly out of desperation, try to cling, as the solution, onto similar ideological believes that brought this current regime to power more than 45 years ago. At the time, our parents, apparently tired of the oppressions and corruptions of the authoritarian king (“Shah”) took to the streets, but with the false hope that their savior was going to be someone in whom they believed only because he was a clergyman (or a “man of God,” as some might want to put it), and not because of his actual (non-existing) credentials or expertise in governance and government policies, economy, international diplomacy, or anything at all for that matter. It is baffling to see that for some it is so difficult to see the parallels between believing in someone for being a “man of God,” and believing in someone for being the “son of the last king” of Iran. Both are based on some made up belief (accepting something without questioning it or asking for a reason), and not those people’s actual credentials. Neither man had been an expert in anything that might come handy in governing a country; both man had never had a real job or worked as an ordinary citizen of the country even for a single day. Their only credential is their ties to someone or something who might have had some of the needed credentials. It’s like submitting your father’s resume when applying for a job for yourself. It feels like for some, it is not the “dictatorship” that is bothersome, but rather “which dictator” is in power; often getting caught in pointless arguments around the somewhat made up differences between various kinds of kingdoms, and monarchy, and other similar forms of government. One friend recently was telling me that they were not looking for an autocracy, but a parliamentary kingdom, like in UK. Although it is hard to explain the actual role of the King in such a structure, other than earning a handsome salary for doing nothing.

And then came the faint hopes of the current US administration intervening, like they did in Venezuela, to remove at least the heads of a government who has vowed to kill half the people of the country if that is what it takes to keep them in power. It feels extremely embarrassing and painful for me to admit that after arguing against any foreign intervention as a solution for the various crises in Iran, even I have had such hopes over the last few days. Some part of me still says that it is a false hope and expectation, especially from an administration for which everything is transactional. Even if it intervenes, it won’t be to save the Iranian people from the atrocities of the ruling regime; it will likely be to access the vast resources of oil and other minerals, and the large markets of Iran for their technology and consumer products. I know it is also not too unlikely for the current US administration to make a “deal” with the Iranian regime, even the supreme leader himself, either openly or behind the scenes. I won’t be surprised if someday in the near future we hear President Trump praise Iran’s supreme leader for being a strong man, and a ruler with iron fist, as he has done for Xi Jinping, Putin, and Kim Jung Un. Yet the human mind is a strange thing and can get stuck in such false hopes as the one above, and I am certainly not immune to that.

Even if the current regime of Iran is somehow removed, the outlook at least for the near future is not very bright. Witnessing, in the largest democracy in modern history, an elected president and his administration of sycophants consider themselves the owners of the country, and harass and even kill their own citizens under the pretense of “domestic terrorism” for practicing their constitutional rights for assembly and free speech (yes, just like the current regime of Iran does, albeit in a smaller scale, at least for the time being) is not particularly encouraging either. But what we can be sure of, at least based on the thousands of years of written history, is that no autocratic regime lives on forever. We may not see it, but I am certain that there will come a day when students will read about the atrocities of the current brutal regime of Iran in their history books. Hopefully by then there won’t be any human being who would consider those lessens from the history as a manual or handbook for starting a new brutal autocracy.