When Power is afraid

The repression of popular protests in Iran continues and worsens. All the opposition newspapers have been closed and journalists arrested. The opposition leader Mousavi seems to be under house arrest, and several members of the regime threaten exemplary punishment against him for having instigated the demonstrations. Seventy university professors have been arrested after visiting his home. The police and the basji militia fired on the crowd several times, and there were also raids in hospitals to arrest the wounded or carry away the bodies of demonstrators killed.

We don't know the real number of victims and if this government stays in place we will probably never know. What is most disturbing in all this as in any other repressions in the world is not so much the fact that a group of power is willing to shed the blood of those who oppose it.
Power corrupts and when power is out of control more easily uses murder, torture and slaughter to preserve itself. What is most disturbing in all the stories of repression in the world is the police, army men or militia men who savagely beat and kill demonstrators. It is generally assumed that a person choose this job to defend his country and the people who inhabit it. So how can someone go quietly, as if nothing had happened, from prevention of crime to repression and murder of unarmed people who walk the streets? It's clear that these people must have completely given up their humanity and their ability to think, as to convince themselves that boys, girls, people who walk in the street are the enemy. But the enemy of whom? May hundreds of thousands of citizens of a country be the enemies of the country? Obviously not, is an absurd concept.
The cops and militiamen who shoot on the crowd in Tehran and other Iranian cities truly believe that the demonstrators are operated by America and Great Britain, the historical enemies of the Iranian Islamic revolution? What can push a man who in theory should be responsible for fighting the criminals to become easily a cold-blooded murderer?
The power is afraid. The power is afraid of losing its privileges and more scared it is the more savage and violent it becomes. It's clear that the policemen and militiamen who beat and kill in the streets are afraid too. A man who fires on unarmed people or beat a girl is a coward, a criminal, a man without dignity and without honor. And that they are in the eyes of the world, Ahmadinejad, religious men, politicians, policemen and militiamen who support him. Cowards scared to death.

Now, Ahmadinejad declares that Obama is like Bush, in his conspiracy delirium that the protest would be operated by Cia. A fable that no one believes except the Venezuelan president Chavez, who apparently for reasons of anti-American propaganda is more than happy to support a bloody dictatorship, even if we cannot understand what proximity may have the ultra religious Iranian regime with Latin American left. That in fact partly disagree with Chavez.

The road to where the iranian power is headed at this point is very dark: already is waging a real war against a substantial percentage of its citizens and then, if mantains itself by these means, we can only expect more repression, more propaganda against the West, a huge number of death sentences, the final transformation into a ruthless and murderous dictatorship such as Burma and North Korea.
The West and the U.S. still hope that the protest will end and that they can establish a dialogue with Ahmadinejad and his government. They hope that maybe he will stop ferociously repress the opposition, but it is unclear on what basis they believe that. And then there are some countries, such as Italy, Germany and Russia, that have huge economic interests in Iran, and frankly they don't mind at all about the government Iran will have. But at this point, with dead people in the streets, the idea that you can talk to the Iranian government seems not only naive but also a little criminal.

Francesco Defferrari