Sociologist Warns, Iranians Might Take Up Arms Against Each Other
Sociologist Ahmad Bokharaei warns that divisions authorities intentionally create in society will eventually push Iranians to take up arms against each other.
Sociologist Ahmad Bokharaei warns that divisions authorities intentionally create in society will eventually push Iranians to take up arms against each other.
Bokharai also warned in an interview with the moderate Rouydad24 news website that excessive restrictions on society is likely to lead to revolts. He further warned that the government-fabricated bipolarity might lead to conflicts between ethnic groups.
The sociologist said the government's strict control over the media leaves no room for critics of hardliners dominating the government.
During recent weeks the government has unleashed its so-called chastity squads to crackdown on women who do not wish to observe compulsory hijab. Patrols and roadblocks by the morality police and vigilante hardliners have led to a series of confrontations in the streets and on public transport with women who are seen as not fully covering their heads and bodies.
In several social media videos men and women are seen confronting each other and pushing one other out of trains and buses as government’s forced hijab enforcers try to intimidate women for their “lose headscarves”.
While Iranian reformists and some well-known regime apologists call these conflicts “social bipolarity” between two groups of people, many Iranians on social media point out that this is in fact a conflict between the government and those who oppose it. They accuse the apologists of portraying a political problem that is occurring because of the despotic and totalitarian nature of the Islamic regime as a divide between two segments of the Iranian society.
Although the conflict is wider than the issue of hijab, most recent cases, including the one in a video posted by moderate cleric Rahmatollah Bigdeli on Twitter, involved intimidation by government hardliner supporters linked to the IRGC and other parts of the core of the fundamentalist regime. At least in one case a young woman who argued against compulsory hijab with an enforcer was arrested and the woman who confronted her and was pushed out of a bus, was praised by several religious officials and the state television as a hero.
Ahmad Abdollahi a religious official in Esfahan charged that women who are against the idea of compulsory hijab are the same women who keep dogs as pets and get rabies from their dogs!
Reformist activist Majid Tavakoli says, "Bipolar divisions are created by the government to give the sense of power and supremacy to its supporters who fight for the regime's survival." Another Twitter user argued that "A bipolar conflict takes place between two equal forces. But when one side has all the power and the other side is absolutely powerless, what the latter does is resistance."
Bokharaei said that such bipolarity might also occur in economic and cultural spheres as the government highlights and boosts divisions between insiders and the rest of the population. Pointing out that clusters of people are being formed at both ends of this bipolarity, and the government is constantly supporting one of the poles against the other, the sociologist warned that the escalation of these divisions might pose a danger for the clerical regime far more serious and detrimental that it could ever imagine.
Bipolar situations give way to disillusionment and eventually push society toward a quick implosion, he warned.
