A speech at the program introduction
Fatan Joker
Today’s gathering also coincides with the first anniversary of the death of Gina (Mahsa) Amini. Gina, 22, from Saqqez in Kurdistan Province, had traveled to Tehran with her family to visit relatives. On Tuesday, September 12, while he was walking with his brother and cousin on Haqqani Street in Tehran, he was attacked and beaten by the Ershad patrol and arrested. Mahsa is taken to the “Moral Security Police” detention center, where her beatings continue. After two hours, his half-dead body was transferred from the “Moral Security Police” to Kasra Hospital. Mahsa suffered brain death from the blows she received to the head, and died three days later, on Friday, September 15, from injuries to her brain.
The murder of Mahsa Amini by the Moral Security Police on September 15 of last year ignited the flames that had been creeping under the skin of society after the bloody repression of November 1998, and quickly grew into a broad political and social movement with the slogan “Women Live for Freedom,” which subsequently severely shook the foundations of the Islamic Republic and religious tyranny. This time, the struggles of the masses of the people reached a new level and, while shaking the authority of the dictatorship, created a revolutionary situation, the foundations of which had emerged in November 1998. The Islamic Republic, this time again viciously and with indescribable brutality, hastily suppressed this movement, killing hundreds of young men and women, injuring and blinding thousands, and arresting and torturing tens of thousands of young men and women.
The Women’s Freedom Life Movement is completely different from its predecessor social movements, which were mostly protest and at times reformist. From the very beginning, this movement sought to end the tyranny and capitalist theocracy of the Islamic Republic through a social revolution. Unlike the 57th generation, which only sought to overthrow the monarchy and did not set a vision for the future form of Iran’s system, the generation of the revolutionary women’s movement for freedom set the type of future Iranian system in its vision for the future of Iran with the slogan “Freedom, the bread of work, the council administration.”
The Women’s Freedom Movement is a modern movement that challenged tradition, religion, injustice, inequality, and discriminatory relationships, paving the way for a democratic, popular government and the permanent marginalization of religion in Iran. This movement has been marked by a renaissance. A Renaissance that will lead to an Age of Enlightenment in Iran and will put an end to tyranny and dictatorship, the power and influence of religion and the old order in society, and the interference of foreigners in Iranian affairs.
All social movements in Iran, whether reform, protest, or revolutionary, while challenging the tyranny and authority of the Islamic Republic, have had a justice-seeking and justice-seeking nature, and ultimately, in the Women’s Freedom Movement, they have developed into subversion and a revolutionary situation. In all of these movements, advocacy and justice have been among the people’s central demands. In reform and protest movements, people demand justice within the framework of the actual existing system. But in a revolutionary movement, the masses of people have come to believe that only through a social revolution can they establish justice and equality in all social, economic, political, and gender spheres. In Milton Fisk’s words, capitalist justice is self-defeating because it reflects capitalist interests in exploitation and inequality. In contrast, justice for the underprivileged is not self-defeating, because it is based on the interests of freedom from oppression, inequality, and discrimination.
In The Gotha Program, Marx says that if ordinary people accept the justice of the ruling system, they will sue. If they reject justice, they will revolt. Therefore, justice plays a fundamental role in the fight against oppression.
The Islamic Republic has used all its repression capacity to prevent people from returning to the streets on the anniversary of Mahsa’s murder. In addition to sending its Basij and security mercenaries into society to suppress women who are no longer willing to follow its reactionary and backward laws and wear the hijab, it has also taken steps to rearrest on a large scale the released prisoners of the Women’s Freedom Life Movement, and has arrested the families of the victims of this movement, civil activists, and women’s activists in several regions of Iran.
The shameful glass of the Islamic Republic’s life has cracked violently with the Women’s Freedom Movement and will fall apart with another shock that will connect all aspects of society. The Islamic Republic cannot prevent its collapse with any repression, even by importing its mercenaries from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon and sending its tanks into the streets of Iran.