Iran’s state-run daily Aftab-e-Yazd, in an article by Mostafa Eghlima, deals with the issue of distrust of the people for Iran’s clerical establishment. Mustafa Eghlima is a government expert close to the power factions. He is the president of the Iranian Social Welfare Association and a university professor. “There is no such thing as trust in society,” he wrote in the Aftab-e-Yazd daily. (Aftab-e-Yazd, 31 January 2021)
“Today we can say that 80 to 90 percent of people are distrustful. Distrust is the basis and principle of any harm in any society. In fact, distrust has spread when the authorities did not fulfill their promises.”
“This distrust can be seen in various institutions today. I think there is no trust in our society,” the government expert wrote.
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He is right. There is no such thing as trust in society. Trust can only exist in a free and democratic society.
42 years of accumulated disobedience
Trust is not a directive. Trust is the result of social capital. Social capital that regulates the relationship between the powerful and the common people and between the rulers and the ruled.
A quick look at what has happened in the current 42 years of the current dictatorship reveals that there can never be trust.
When Ruhollah Khomeini, the regime’s founder, was in Paris, he said that after the overthrow of the Shah, he would study in Qom and would not participate in the government. But when he came to power, he created an absolute dictatorship that has not been accountable to anyone.
Khomeini had said do not be satisfied with these things; we will make everything free, but now even the bread is taken from people’s baskets, and now over 70 percent of the people are below the poverty line.
Khomeini had said that the Shah built our cemeteries and destroyed our country, but when he came to power, he filled the cemeteries with the corpses of political prisoners and turned the whole country into a cemetery.
The Iran-Iraq war was a big lie
Khomeini destroyed the nation’s trust by killing and displacing nearly 2 million people. A war that only served the regime in its struggle for survival. The authorities massacred 30,000 Iranian political prisoners at the end of this anti-patriotic war with Iraq in 1988, human rights activists say.
Later, the regime’s current supreme leader Ali Khamenei spent Iran’s oil and the wealth of the people in Syria and Iraq.
Khamenei has made the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) and the foundations under his command the main owners of Iran. The wealth of the people is concentrated in the centers of power.
Khamenei ordered the suppression and killing of 1,500 young Iranian protesters during the November 2019 uprising, thus killing the last vestiges of trust.
In collaboration with Khamenei, the regime’s president Hassan Rouhani and his administration misused the people trust and forced more people under the poverty line. And now the have killed more than 200,000 people by neglecting and mismanaging the coronavirus crisis. They still do not stop this crime and worse they refuse to import vaccines to save the people’s lives, because they have found out the coronavirus is an effective weapon against any protests.
Thus, Iran’s people not only do not trust the government, but show their anger on the streets. This anger and rebellion are flaming up with every excuse. In the face of this lack of trust, this public outrage will pave the way for a general uprising.
