Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi is Dead. Let’s Honor the Iranian Women He Repressed

Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers. Due to a change in my travel plans, I am flying back to the US on Friday and so there will be no Q&A that day. We will gather on Sunday, May 26, 8-9pmET. Yes, it is Memorial Day weekend, but I did not want to miss two weeks in a row. Paying subscribers will receive a link to register for the Zoom meeting at 5pmET that day.

If you can’t attend that gathering, we will also gather on Sunday, June 2, 8-9pmET. Our guest will be Hawa Allan, a lawyer and author of the illuminating book Insurrection: Rebellion, Civil Rights, and the Paradoxical State of Black Citizenship.

I am lining up great guests for the summer! If you’d like to join us, you can sign up as paying or upgrade to paid here:

A Feeling about Putin

Sometimes I get a feeling…about what autocrats are going to do. On May 15, I published an essay that calls out Western banks that do business in Russia for indirectly subsidizing Putin’s war through the taxes they pay to the Kremlin. I had added a sentence about how those Western banks would soon regret their entanglements with Russia, but it sounded too ominous, and I deleted it.

My intuition was correct. On May 16, a court in St. Petersburg ruled that European banks’ assets could be seized. Over the next days, Putin turned on those banks and seized hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of assets, properties, shares, and more.

As I state in the updated essay, a big drop in Gazprom profits made this move fairly inevitable (Putin has routinely plundered Gazprom, and now there will be less to exploit). I hope all businesses and educational institutions from democratic countries that operate in Russia get the message about all that you can lose by dealing with the Kremlin.

Raisi was the past. The women who protest the regime are the future.

Since I am in San Sebastián, Spain, this week, I had planned to continue my “how dictators die” series with a piece on Francisco Franco (here are essays on the demise of Il Duce and Hitler). The news about Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash changed my focus.

As you’ve likely heard, Raisi, who was president from 2021 to 2024 and Chief Justice for a few years before, is not the ultimate authority in Iran. That would be the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. So, we should not expect major changes in the regime’s domestic or foreign policy.

If anything, we can expect a hardening of attitudes and an escalation of terrorist actions. Cynical autocrats know that an untimely death of a leading figure creates the perfect opportunity to blame your enemies at home and abroad.

Let’s Honor Those Raisi Repressed

For some Iranians, the death of the man known as “the Butcher of Tehran” is cause for celebration, since so many have lost family members to his repression. His infamy among Iranians dates to the 1980s, when he was reportedly part of the Death Committee that executed thousands of political prisoners. More recently, Raisi oversaw the crackdown on the 2022 protests sparked by the killing of Mahsa Amini for a supposed improper wearing of her hijab,

Kosar Eftekhari was among his victims. The 24-year-old was one of over 100 women blinded during the protests when Raisi ordered security forces to fire at demonstrators at close range. A video she sent to Iranian exile Masih Alinejad, whose X feed posts testimonies of Iranians who feel Raisi met a just fate, shows her relief.

Kosar Eftekhari, blinded in one eye by Iranian security forces in Oct. 2022, speaking at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, March 19, 2023. Photo by Human Rights Documentation Center.

Kosar Eftekhari reacting to Ebrahim Raisi’s death, video on Masih Alienajad’s X feed, May 20, 2024.

Raisi’s death is a moment to honor Eftekhari and other the brave women of Iran and to mark the losses they and their compatriots have suffered. Between September and December 2022 alone, more than 500 Iranians were killed and 18,400 arrested.

It’s also a moment to honor the other brave women whose prior protests of the regime’s morality laws had prepared the way.

In 2017, Alinejad launched the #whitewednesdays social media campaign, sharing videos by women in Iran who had replaced the mandatory black head covering with a white scarf. Many of those women were arrested: in 2019, Saba Kord-Afshari received a 24-year sentence for her #whitewednesdays action.  

The high stakes of these acts of resistance made their steady growth all the more significant. In June 2022, the regime's annual National Hijab and Chastity Day was openly mocked for the first time by women who "celebrated" the holiday by going bare-headed.

Mahsa Amini, the young woman who died in police custody three months later, was not among these resisters. Amini kept her hijab on in public. A few stray hairs peeping out of her headscarf, as well as pants deemed overly tight, caused the morality police to detain her. Her death drove tens of thousands of Iranian men and women into the streets; images of Iranian women cutting their hair and going out in public bare-headed were suddenly everywhere on social media.

The scale of the protests reflected the coming of age of a new generation of highly educated Iranian women who simply could not live any longer with such strictures. Each pioneering bare or white-robed head that they may have seen between 2014 and 2022 helped to seed a new consciousness.

In a country ruled by out-of-touch old men, the road to freedom is paved with the discarded headscarves of young women who risk their own liberty and physical safety so that no other woman will meet Amini's fate.

Raisi may receive a hero’s burial by the Iranian state, but he was a coward who hid behind lies and violence. He represented Iran’s past, while the brave protesters are Iran’s future. They are the ones we should honor.