Before we left for our winter holidays, it was possible to say certain clear things about Iran.
It was an authoritarian country, with a cleric at its head, but not a totalitarian country, like the former East Germany. Its protests were limited in scope and largely obsolete. Its revolutionary constitution had the respect of most people. Its nuclear program was not active.
In less than two weeks, everything has changed. But we must carefully discern which of the new realities matters.
The slaying of protesters on the holy day of Ashura, two days after Christmas, the seizing of their corpses before they could be buried, and the brutal crackdowns that have followed, have permanently changed the Iranian people's view of their President and the regime he represents.
The arrest and banning of opposition figures, the new use of spies, the much wider repression, have turned a populist-acting regime into something more like a total state.
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