“They wanted to bury us, but they did not know we were seeds.”
— Dinos Christianopoulos —

Sara Siyahpour is a teacher and one of the tireless professional activists who for years has criticised the poor quality of education and school-textbook content, injustice within the education system, and discrimination in teachers’ rights and living conditions.

In recent months tens of thousands of people have been summoned, arrested and imprisoned. Sara Siyahpour too is described here as one of thousands of honourable and courageous people who were arrested and sentenced to six years in prison.

The words behind this courageous and dignified woman in the photograph—“Those who have passed through the storm are no longer the same people who entered it”—reminded me of an article I had read recently.

The article was by Christopher Steinhardt, a political-science researcher at the University of Mannheim, who in 2022 conducted a broad study, as described here, of the effects of the mass imprisonment of political and social activists on social protest movements.

The conclusion of that research, stated here in brief, is that whenever autocratic governments have tried to silence society by imprisoning on a large scale those people who had the courage to speak, the result has, without exception, been the opposite of what those governments expected.

Such action not only failed to produce general fear but led to anger, higher levels of social protest, the emergence of future leaders of social movements, and growing instability and gradual erosion of autocratic power even in the short term.

If a large section of society has reached a condition of structural dissatisfaction, then in practice the only route toward creating social cohesion and passing through the crisis is for political power to listen and to undertake fundamental reform of defective structures. Yet, as argued here, this almost never occurs, because if such a capacity had existed the society would never have reached such a point.

Their insoluble problem is that what they are trying to bury is only a seed which, regardless of their wishes and efforts, will inevitably grow and multiply.

Aydin Areta