These two young and beautiful lives have each been sentenced to ten and a half years in prison for dancing.

It has not yet been a month since the final judgement was announced in the horrific murder case of seventeen-year-old Mona Heydari. That killing too, as described here in public terms, received a ten-year sentence.

A law that considers dancing deserving of a punishment greater than killing mocks both the concept of justice and the value of human life.

The nature of injustice is so evident that it is said no human being can see injustice without recognising its ugly face.

Henry David Thoreau was a philosopher who refused to pay tax in protest against an unjust law and was imprisoned. Thoreau’s *Civil Disobedience* later inspired campaigners such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Thoreau is rendered here as writing in that work:

When law is not justice, resistance to it is not merely the right of every citizen but the moral and human duty of every citizen.
A structure founded upon injustice ultimately asks every citizen to accept, through everything they do and fail to do, becoming a small cog in the great machine of injustice and falsehood within their society.

Ultimately, it is the choice of each one of us whether to accept being a cog that keeps this machine moving, or to turn our life into a resistance that slows and stops it.

When the number of those who refuse to be cogs—and, beyond that, make their lives a resistance to the movement of this machine—exceeds the force driving it, the machine will stop.

The exiled Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn is attributed here with writing:

Even if falsehood and injustice ultimately prevail in the world, I will never allow them to achieve that victory through me and through my obedience.

Injustice and despotism ask for our obedience every day. They demand that, through everything we do and do not do, we reduce our life and human value to being a cog. What makes the continued movement of this machine possible is not its power, but our obedience.

Aydin Areta