Narrative Protection of Evil
Aydin Areta

Published reports and testimonies concerning two nurses at Rajaei Heart Hospital in Tehran, who were reportedly arrested for trying to treat protesters and then injured under torture and sexual assault to such an extent that they now live with colostomy bags, are only one of the painful accounts of the crimes of Dey, but unquestionably among the most horrifying. At the same time, a video was also circulated of an Iranian woman in the United Kingdom, dressed freely, who in practice was justifying and encouraging crimes of this kind.

The coincidence of these two things reveals above all one truth:
we are never dealing only with a system of “crime.” We are dealing with an entire apparatus that, before the crime itself, has already constructed the language through which it will be justified.

Historically, this pattern is not new. After the fall of Nazi Germany, many ordinary Germans who had believed in the ruling ideology later said: “We did not know.” Historians, however, have shown that many people, even if they did not know the technical details of the gas chambers, the precise methods or the full scale of the crimes, were not unaware of the humiliation, exclusion, confiscation, deportation, disappearance and violence directed against Jews. Large numbers of “bystanders” knew of the expulsion of Jews from Germany, their deprivation of social rights, the seizure of their property and their forced deportation; in many cases they also benefited from it. But before all of this, language had already been created not only for producing the crime, but for making its moral acceptance and justification possible.

At Nuremberg, denial did not take only a crude and simple form. People at the highest levels of power, such as Hermann Göring, one of the most important figures in the Nazi political structure after Hitler, attempted after confronting undeniable documents to restrict their responsibility, justify what had happened, or shift responsibility to others, including Himmler. Many lower-ranking defendants did not say, “Nothing happened.” They said, “I was not responsible,” or, “I did not know its precise scale.”

Albert Speer, Hitler’s favoured architect and later Minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany, expressed remorse at the trial but denied first-hand knowledge of the plan to exterminate the Jews, while at the same time acknowledging in the trial record that he knew Jews were being “evacuated” from Germany. Hans Fritzsche, a journalist, broadcaster and prominent radio commentator in the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda, likewise minimized his own role in the crime by diminishing the effects of language and propaganda. He was among those who created an atmosphere through language, normalized crime through interpretation, and used the media to shape the indifference of the public conscience.

This is precisely where we must understand the difference between “evil” and the “narrative protector of evil.” Not everyone directly commits a crime, but there are many who produce the vocabulary that makes crime possible and reproduce its moral economy.

Martin Niemöller, the Protestant pastor who had once sympathized with some Nazi ideas and later became a prisoner of that regime, wrote in his well-known confession words that have subsequently been remembered and repeated in many societies:
“First they came for the socialists and I remained silent... then they came for the Jews and I remained silent... and when they came for me, there was no one left to speak for me.”

This passage describes the mechanism of the moral collapse of a society that gradually becomes indifferent to evil unfolding before its eyes and justifies it in the language of politics and security. Crime is built through incremental silence, gradual normalization and, at its foundation, the surrender of language to the apparatus of repression. Primo Levi, the Italian writer and survivor of Auschwitz, wrote:
“Monsters exist, but they are too few to be the principal danger; more dangerous are ordinary people, people prepared to believe and to act without asking questions.”

The question in Iran today is not only who has committed crimes. The question is who still creates language for crime and absolute evil. Who, when confronted with the testimony of a victim, is still primarily concerned with saving the government’s narrative? Who, when hearing reports of rape, mutilation and the destruction of a human body, first asks whether the “system” might be harmed?

History has shown that after collapse, these same people will often say: “We did not know.” But this is exactly the problem: one does not always need to know every detail in order to become morally complicit. It is enough to see the signs and still place one’s language at the service of concealment. The name of this condition is not ignorance. It is participation in oppression and in the realization of evil through narrative protection.

@AydinAreta

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