Lukashenko, Look At Iran

Both countries have something in common.

Perhaps the most viewed videos on the internet in recent days have been the numerous videos taken by cell phones in Iran. For me personally, the most eloquent was not even the video, but the voices in the background of the explosions. On the balcony of a Tehran apartment, a local man is filming the explosions of his hometown with his phone. In the back of the apartment, a woman is crying. He comforts her and tells her everything will be all right. Then he shouts loudly: "Death to Khamenei!" Not to Mossad, not to the "Israeli military," but to Khamenei.

In fact, strange as it may sound, Belarus and Iran have something in common. Not only dictatorship - its content is systematically different. In Iran the dictatorship is theocratic, in Belarus it is personalistic. Iran is swarming with ayatollahs, driving people behind barbed wire, while in Belarus the wire is stretched by wordless creatures on the orders of one single uncontrollable citizen. Everything seems to be different, but there is a very important common thing. It is the boiling hatred of the people, driven deep inside.

The Iranian protests were not inferior to the Belarusian ones in the degree of inspiration and emotion. And people were beaten to death both there and here - the murders of Mahsa Amini in Iran and Roman Bondarenko in Belarus caused only increased hatred. The only difference was that in Iran one can be not only killed at a protest, but also executed for participation in it. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of Iranians took to the streets of their cities - against the power of the ayatollahs, against the compulsory wearing of hijabs, against the lawlessness of the security forces.

Iranian protests have been going on in waves for many years. A few years ago, I met journalist Masih Alinejad, who was forced to flee the country. However, her voice in exile has only gotten louder. It was Masih who came up with the "My Secret Freedom" campaign: Iranian women were photographed without hijabs and sent her their photos and videos. And men were photographed wearing hijabs in solidarity with their wives and sisters. Fact: Masih Alinejad has more followers than all of Iran's ayatollahs combined, even though she is not an actress or model, opposition leader or Nobel laureate. And recently, Masih said, one of the ayatollahs said on television that those who send her videos will be imprisoned for ten years. It's just like us: it's easy to get a "ten" for sending a video to an unreliable media outlet. After a series of executions, the protests in Iran have been driven deep under the asphalt, just like in our country, but the hatred under this asphalt is boiling so that it can burst out at any moment.

Another common misfortune of Belarusians and Iranians is the forced eradication by the rulers of the cultural and historical heritage alien to them. Belarusian ideology is obsessed with partisans and the BSSR, denying everything that was before. Mickiewicz and Kosciuszko have nothing to do with our history and culture. The nobility is ideologically alien and therefore does not deserve even a mention. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania - some kind of harmful history in general, with a Statute that was a democratic Constitution, so there are no options here at all. There was a heroic partisan struggle - and enough for the history of the country, study and glorify. Similarly, Iranian ayatollahs pretend that nothing existed on the territory of Iran before Islam. They deny the Achaemenids and Seleucids, the Parthian kingdom and the Sassanid Empire. We have nothing before the BSSR, Iranians - before Islam. There, numerous crazy grandfathers deny history, here - one. And, of course, all of them, like clockwork, tell us that there are enemies all around.

So the shout from the balcony of bombarded Tehran "death to Khamenei!" - is something Lukashenko should have applied to himself at least hypothetically. It is time to realize that if conditional enemies attack Belarus, the Belarusians will curse not them, but him. And there will be nowhere to hide - no one will open even a cellar or a closet. No one will save or even sympathize. Hate will still puff up the asphalt and break through. Only without ribbons and flowers.

And while that unknown Tehranian is calming his wife, while Yasmin, the wife of Reza Pahlavi of the Shah's family, writes on social networks "beat them, Israel!", while girls are tearing off their hijabs, laughing with joy at the news of the death of the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran is coming back to life and beginning to breathe. We will not have such a wonderful chance: there is no one to target the Thrushes. We will have to make do with the forces of our own hatred - as boundless as the universe.

Irina Khalip, especially for Charter97.org.

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