I went to my first demonstration today in my fifty-one years of life.
I have never had the need before, never had the feeling that I physically had to stand somewhere together with other people to mark something as fundamental as FREEDOM - but today was different, because this was not about yet another political pet cause, not about small shifts in taxes, symbolic battles over unreal genders or climate - but about a people who for nearly half a century have lived under a regime that has systematically crushed everything in the Human Being that wishes to live freely, think freely and breathe without fear.
I stood there looking at people carrying Iran's old flag - the Lion and Sun flag, the symbol of the Iran that was before the revolution - and you could sense that this was not just a protest, but a longing, a memory of something that was before, something that still lives beneath the surface, a civilisation that did not begin with the ayatollahs, but was strangled by them, and which now slowly, almost cautiously, is beginning to stir again, as if drawing its first fresh breath after being held down far too long.
Because what has taken place down there through decades is not just politics, it is not just "a different culture", as the nice people inside the television so conveniently call it - it is a systematic tyranny, where the state does not merely control people's actions, but their thoughts, their art, their expression, their faith, their bodies, where women are whipped for showing hair, where young men are hanged as warnings, and where even hospitals - places that ought to be sacred - at times have been used as places where wounded demonstrators are not healed, but finished off, like animals that are no longer to be allowed to live.
And yet they stand there, again and again, year after year, and rise up, knowing what the price is, and it is hard not to be struck by that contrast, when you yourself come from a part of the world where we speak so easily about freedom - as if it is something that is just there, something that cannot disappear, something that demands nothing of us.
Iran's struggle is not my struggle - not directly. I have not lived their life, I have not felt their fear in my body, but I cannot help standing with them nonetheless, because what they are fighting against is not unique to Iran, it is a form, a structure, a way of organising power and view of humanity, which we also see the contours of elsewhere, and which we can only allow ourselves to ignore if we choose not to understand how such a thing arises in the first place.
Because it does not happen from one day to the next - it is not as if a free society suddenly wakes up and is unfree. It happens slowly, through small shifts, through ideas one does not contradict, through a naive belief that everyone fundamentally wants the same thing, that everyone just wants peace, and that all differences are therefore superficial.
And that is perhaps the greatest lie of them all - "diversity is our strength" - for some ideologies do not want peace on others' terms.
They want DOMINANCE on their own.
And when I look at Europe, at our own countries, at the development of these last many decades, it is hard not to see how we again and again - filled with suicidal empathy and fear that others might think one racist - have chosen not to take it seriously.
How we have opened the doors in an imagination that everything can coexist without conflict, without consequence, without something eventually having to give way - and all the while the same patterns, the same ideas, the same forces have been allowed to gain foothold, grow, make demands, be given resources and granted freedom and space to spread their anti-Western arrangement in our societies.
I know that many of you - whatever I write - will pull this down into that track anyway, but I have no desire to make this an analysis of great powers or geopolitical games, because I am perfectly aware that what is taking place in Iran is not only about the Iranian people, but also about a long series of other interests, strategies and power balances, which both pull in different directions, and where I can see the logic in some points and distance myself from others.
And I know that some today quite deliberately chose not to show up, precisely because the demonstration did not only carry the old Iranian flag and the Dannebrog - but also the Stars and Stripes and Israel's flag, and that in the current media-fabricated political climate it has almost become a disqualification in itself to stand shoulder to shoulder with one's own civilisational roots and allies, because in certain circles they have been reduced to symbols of everything claimed to be wrong with the world - harnessed to a left-wing narrative blended with an Islamic victim logic, where guilt is ALWAYS placed in the same location regardless of reality's complexity.
But I cannot - no, I WILL NOT - let that sort of thing keep me from acknowledging when something is moving in the direction of giving a people their country back.
Because sometimes reality is actually so simple that something is OPPRESSION, and something is an attempt to BREAK FREE from it.
And perhaps that is in truth why I stood there today - not because I believe I can change Iran's fate by showing up to a demonstration in Denmark, but because I need to remind myself that what we have is not given...
...that freedom is not a natural law, but something that ONLY exists as long as someone understands it, values it and is willing to stand up for it, before it is too late.
The Iranians are fighting that fight now, with a brutality and a consequence that is difficult for us even to grasp up here, where freedom still feels like something self-evident - but the force they stand against is not unique to their country, it is not bound to their geography or their history, it is a way of organising power and human being that shows itself again and again, wherever it is allowed to take root, grow in peace and meet too little resistance.
And that is precisely why this does not stop with Iran.
It moves.
It finds new places.
It adapts.
And the question is not whether we like that recognition or not, but whether we understand what we see, while we still have the luxury not to stand in the midst of it ourselves, but instead have the possibility to avert it, before it becomes our own reality.
Because it does!
For Iran.
For Freedom.
For the Human Being.
❤️🔥🪽
Good evening, friends 🕯️
