Why extremists win
Punishing dissent doesn't eliminate opposition. It makes it evolve into radicalism
All societies have their critics. Most of them are mild.
People complain over dinner about petrol prices. More politically engaged individuals might grumble to others about government policies. The most animated will post online or even create online content to spread their disgruntlement.
Most of the time, ordinary dissent remains moderate because ordinary people are moderate. People have jobs, families, reputations. Particularly older people. They have things to lose.
The young are usually more radical because they have less to lose and more to gain by improving their future status.
But when dissent becomes a profound moral challenge to the established social order and groups begin to organise, the elites in charge notice. Mechanisms are activated to redirect, offset, and, if necessary, crush organised resistance.
The online rageposter tones it down after losing their Facebook account, although their views don’t change. Their anger doesn’t go away. Those with more to lose, reputation, status, livelihoods, relationships, go quiet.
There’s a type of person, however, who doesn’t comply. They harden. They organise. They develop consensus views with others like them and they dedicate their life to overthrowing the unjust regime they despise.
These are the radicals. A wave of these types arose in the post-68 student movements in the West, and they were ultimately mollified by being given academic positions with tenure, high status, and access to molestable students. Their neo-Marxist ideology was eventually absorbed by the system and became the woke hegemony we see throughout Western societies today.
The radicals of yesterday become the elites of today. If the hardened radicals cannot be accommodated by bribery and institutionalisation, however, then the system has a problem. History is clear.
There’s going to be a revolution.
The Shah’s Mistake
In the 1960s and 70s, Iran under the Shah looked to outsiders like a modernising state.
Universities were expanding. Oil money was pouring in. Western observers imagined that if the regime ever collapsed, the successor would likely be some version of liberal nationalism.
That assumption rested on a quiet belief that the political opposition looked roughly like the population. But repression had already changed the composition of dissent.
The Shah’s security apparatus, SAVAK, spent decades arresting and torturing dissidents, dismantling political parties, and suppressing reform movements.
The regime believed it was eliminating opposition. What it was actually doing was decanting the timidity and reasonableness out of it.
Liberal reformers had careers. Students had futures. Technocrats had reputations. They could be intimidated.
Clerics were harder to intimidate, particularly in the rural areas. One of them in particular was a preacher named Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Khomeini was not originally a towering national figure. He was a provincial religious scholar who spent much of his political career in exile.
His advantage was something simple. He had a network the state could not fully dismantle.
Religious teachers were usually not political in Persia, but they had enormous cultural power via mosques, religious schools, and clerical relationships that stretched across the country.
Alongside this institutional power came the new technology of cassette tapes.
Khomeini’s sermons were recorded abroad, duplicated endlessly, and smuggled into Iran. They circulated through mosques and bazaars, played quietly in homes and religious gatherings.
It was the pre-internet version of viral media. While secular opposition groups were infiltrated and dismantled, this religious communication network continued to spread a message that was uncompromising, theological, and revolutionary.
By the late 1970s, many moderate opponents of the regime had already been neutralised. The clerical movement remained.
So when the Shah’s state finally cracked under economic crisis and mass protests, the outcome surprised Western observers. But it should not have.
The Shah had eliminated opposition from established alternatives. Clerics had not held political positions in Shia Islam until that point.
The Ayatollah changed that, and thereby changed world history. By fusing religious fundamentalism with revolutionary political zeal, the new clerical elite in Iran proved yet again that liberalism’s great weakness is that it cannot understand a man who cannot be bribed.
It does not understand and cannot accommodate the true extremist.
Weimar’s Disappearing Middle
The late Weimar Republic offers a political version of the same dynamic.
Germany in the 1920s was a debauched, dispirited place. A plethora of political parties contended for power. Cultural norms had collapsed. Cynicism and nihilism were rampant.
The credible threat of a communist revolution led to a hardening of reactionary forces, particularly among returned World War I veterans who were sickened at what Germany was becoming.
As instability grew, the state increasingly tried to control extremism through bans, arrests, and emergency powers. Hitler himself attended the first meeting of what became the NSDAP as a spy for the army, before joining up that night.
In the post-WWI crisis of German society, the centre gave way, aided by the repressive Weimar government. Moderates disappeared, and gradually German politics collapsed into two poles.
By 1932, the streets of Berlin were dominated by the communist Antifaschistische Aktion (Antifa) and the NSDAP's Sturmabteilung (SA).
Kind of like Melbourne today, really.
Luther’s revolution
The same process occurred via the Protestant Reformation. The Catholic Church had accommodated the reformatio movement for centuries, but letting the peasants read the Bible in their local language was a bridge too far. It was something the medieval church could not accommodate. It struck at the base of their power structure.
They burned heretic after heretic until finally Martin Luther, with the support of German elites wanting to break into the Jewish-controlled banking game, led the revolution that established the Protestant churches.
Martin Luther was a fanatic. That’s why he won.
The revolution of the saints
Ironically, of course, the Catholic Church itself was the heir to just such a process.
The Romans were famously lax when it came to the religion and cultural practices of those they governed. Just pay your taxes and do what you like, was the vibe. The new Jewish religious movement that came to be called the Christians, however, found the one pillar of Roman power that the Roman emperors could not budge on.
Christians refused to participate in the civic religion of Rome. Religion was a public duty in Rome and was believed to hold the state together and appease the gods. As growing numbers of lower-class people in particular converted, the Roman elite saw the threat. They could not accommodate this new morality that sought to undermine the foundations of their power.
The persecutions of the church were intended to wipe it out, of course, but instead they purified the faith. The lukewarm fell away. Only the most fanatical remained, and the willingness of the fanatics to face martyrdom, alongside their moral superiority to the decadent pagan Romans, ensured the victory of the faith.
The Evolutionary Law of Revolutions
All ruling structures become decadent, corrupt, and inward-looking over time. It’s the universal law of entropy that drives history forward. Individuals will emerge who develop critiques of the structure. Those people will influence others, groups will form, resistance will organise, and power will be challenged.
The repressive reaction of the ruling structures provides evolutionary pressure for the rebellion. Like resistance training, the pressure of censorship, persecution, and martyrdom refines the membership of the dissidents and solidifies their identity as revolutionaries.
The martyrs of one generation become the leaders of the next. It can take a long time. For Christianity, it took centuries. Yet the evolutionary law of revolutions holds fast.
Iran is playing this role on the global stage among nations. Twelver Shia Islam as developed by the ayatollahs, fused with anti-Zionism and eschatological zeal, is a critique not only of liberalism but of modernity itself. It is a more profound challenge to the Western liberal world order than even communism was. The communists were still materialists. They weren’t going to martyr themselves.
The US-Israeli attack on Iran has now hardened the ideology of the ayatollahs and no doubt galvanised their supporters. The evolutionary pressure is now in overdrive.
Dissent, populism, and religious zeal are emerging in various forms around the world. Decadent, Zionist, liberal imperialism is doubling down on the repression.
Liberalism itself was once a radical ideology opposed to aristocratic privilege. Now it’s the power structure. It is the ‘sensible centre’.
It’s become what the Catholic Church was in northern Europe by the 16th century.
It’s not the future. The future is tomorrow.
And tomorrow, as always, belongs to the radical.