Thirty Days

We use the same platforms. Beyond that we have almost nothing in common, and the difference is not one of opinion.

When I write about Iranian politics I am writing from somewhere. I have read the material and taught it for years, and I hold degrees in it. The positions I take are not moods. They are arguments I have made in public and can be made to defend in public, and I disagree with people openly because that is what an argument is for. I lose my composure sometimes. Very occasionally a word gets past me that should not have. Anyone who has followed what I publish in English can go and check the cadence and the register across years of it, and decide for themselves whether abuse is my house style.

Now look at what comes back.

Disagreement has a shape. Here is your claim, here is why it fails, here is what you would need to show me. What arrives instead is slander. Smear. I have written before about how that machinery runs when it is turned on a singer who will not take instruction. Slurs typed so easily that the person typing them does not seem to register having crossed anything at all. In the camp that wants the monarchy restored, that way of writing has stopped being an accident of temper and become a dialect. It draws little comment any more, which is how a dialect turns into a norm.

The silence at the centre

I want to be exact about where the responsibility sits, because the next paragraph is the one that will be called unfair.

Reza Pahlavi has people around him. He works with them closely. Their language is on the public record, and he never denounces it. He never objects to it. He never opposes it. He has not, so far as I have seen, publicly disavowed a single one of them for it, and I would be glad to be shown the post where he did.

That is not a small failure. A movement asking a country to hand it power is asking that country to believe it will behave better with power than it behaves without it. Its conduct in opposition is the only evidence on offer. There is no other sample, and there will not be one until it is too late to matter.

Many in that camp do not speak this way at all. Serious people, some of whom I have argued with and learned from. They carry a share of it too, not for the words, but for the quiet around the words. You cannot campaign on decency and then find nothing to say while the loudest voices under your flag are disgracing it.

The weaker version

Let me hand my opponents their best argument, because I would rather lose to a strong case than beat a weak one.

Say it is a fringe. Say the abuse belongs to a few thousand anonymous accounts and tells you nothing about the movement, its leadership or how either would govern. Say a flag cannot answer for everyone who waves it. Granted, all of it, provisionally. My argument survives anyway, because it was never a claim about what anyone feels. It is a claim about what can be tested.

I have put a test like this before. I asked whether anyone in the opposition would say on the record that no Iranian state, under any flag, should hang anyone, and I wrote that the silence would tell you what the placards would not. That test was rhetorical. I knew the answer before I asked. This one is different, and the difference matters: I can lose it, and I am saying in advance what losing looks like.

One month

For one month, run your accounts clean. No slurs at people who disagree with you. No misogyny in the way you do politics. Nothing racist. Nothing Islamophobic. No open irrationality dressed up as passion. One month, that is all.

If I am wrong about your movement, the month will pass without incident and you will wonder what the complaint was.

If I am right, you will not last a fortnight, and that failure will be the most useful thing published about the monarchy movement this year.

But hold it, and watch what happens. Rooms that are shut to you will open, because the people refusing to enter them are not refusing the crown; they are refusing the conduct. You will find that Iranians who disagree with you will argue back instead of blocking you. You will find your own case gets stronger the moment it stops being carried by people screaming.

Thirty days. Try it. You will not regret it.