While Vladimir Putin’s latest threats of nuclear retaliation now seem to be a virtual admission of Russia’s conventional force limitations so long as the West continues to supply arms to Ukraine, his most vocal supporter in Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is doing what she can to help him by voting against a House resolution honoring aid workers after the recent earthquakes that killed 50,000 people in Turkey and Syria; Greene complained that the resolution was critical of Russia's efforts to block aid to certain parts of Syria. Greene and a few others of like mind who back Putin and his illegal war should remind of us of people like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, who publicly provided aid and comfort to Hitler and the Nazi regime, at least before the U.S.' entry into the war.
Of course Greene's support of Putin is limited for the time being insofar as direct assistance is concerned (maybe she should go to Russia so she can feel less lonely in her more natural habitat), but Putin still has a few “friends” who will help out in time of “need.” That would include Iran, which has been supplying deadly drones to Russia that have principally been targeting civilian areas and power infrastructure in Ukraine.
But the regime’s terrorist activities have not been consigned solely to citizens of another state who have done it no harm. In response to the biggest threat to the theocratic regime’s legitimacy in decades, Iran has become a virtual torture chamber of secret facilities outside “official” channels where forced confessions from mainly male detainees in a female-dominated protest have been tortured into false confessions, charged with “thought crimes” like “enmity against God”—meaning against his "representatives" on Earth who control the country—and barred from basic due process rights before being found “guilty” and executed in as short as two weeks after being arrested.
There is no doubt that the regime is consciously trying to avoid such sham "trials" and executions with female detainees, for it would likely cause further eruptions of protest not just in Iran but around the world. The graphic below shows that since September when the protests against the killing of Mahsa Amini by “morality police” for not wearing her hijab “properly” reached a peak, there has been a drastic reduction since the beginning of year:
This may represent not just the repression by the government, where CNN reported that in these secret torture facilities detainees endured “electrocutions, removal of nails, lashings and beatings that resulted in scars and broken limbs,” but that there may be no “end game” for the protesters, who have seen no sign that the religious fanatics in charge of the country have any intention of loosening the stranglehold of sharia law, and the country continues to be overrun with Gestapo-like “morality police” who view any deviation from strict adherence even in dress to be a direct threat to the regime’s control.
The regime had only made things worse for itself when it refused to acknowledge the killing of Amini and punish the perpetrators. Instead, it chose to engage in a brutal crackdown. Almost 20,000 protesters were arrested by the end of 2022, and the current count is over 500 killed by police and security forces. Although on the eve of the anniversary of the “revolution” earlier this month most of the remaining detainees still alive were “pardoned,” The Christian Science Monitor noted that the regime has indicated that “reform” is not part of the program:
Signals of retrenchment also include the mid-January appointment of hard-line cleric Abdolhossein Khosropanah to head the powerful Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, which outlines hijab and other social policies. He has said that protesters should be spared “no mercy” and be put to death by “crucifixion.” In an interview with Fars News Agency, Mr. Khosropanah described how – even before 1979 – he used to personally fire a slingshot at women he saw wearing their hijab loosely. He apparently stopped the practice when his father expressed concern for the women’s safety, and afterward only threw water at them.
We are told that female school children are constantly bombarded with threats from school officials on how to behave and dress “properly,” although a few brave teachers have tried to remind their students that they are a new generation and their future doesn’t have to be what regime forces on them. However, women who refuse to wear hijabs in protest have found themselves forced to wear them anyways when seeking services after being denied them for that reason.
It is interesting to note that Egypt is one of the few Muslim countries that actively discourages the wearing of hijabs or any head coverings by women, for the reason that it promotes Islamic extremism in a largely secular society. Turkey under Erdogan and his Islamist AK Party has gone in a different direction, overriding court rulings and allowing what secularist opponents say is a "creeping intrusion" of Islamic law into the state that includes the wearing of the hijab, which was once banned completely.
But increased repression has a way of backfiring, merely building-up the heat of opposition in preparation for the next round of protests, perhaps on a much greater scale than this past event and one the regime cannot control without offering some form of concessions. Many participants of the past protest had hoped for foreign intervention to aid them (that certainly was what the regime was blaming it on), but for that to happen the endgame has to be seen more decisively in the protesters' favor, and for the time being the Amini protests have been just another trial balloon of what such protests can achieve and what has to be done for them to succeed.
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