How to protest correctly: Notes from Iran, warnings from Pakistan |
The West is very proud of its eyesight. Satellites blink. Algorithms scrape. Journalists retweet. Intelligence agencies inhale metadata like oxygen. We are assured—ritually — that nothing escapes the gaze.
And yet, for more than two years, one of the largest, most unified, and most explicitly nonviolent protest movements in the Muslim world unfolded in Pakistan and barely registered as a rumour. Millions marched. Courts were folded into origami. Media was throttled into obedience. Protesters were killed. An election was bent in public view. A former prime minister — still the country’s most popular politician — was jailed, isolated, and legally pulverised in slow motion.
The West saw none of it. Or rather, it saw everything — and chose silence.
That silence has outlived the alibi of oversight. It is not a blind spot. It is a preference. A policy choice, executed with the same professional calm Pakistan’s rulers apply to repression: administrative, legalistic, incremental — and therefore safely boring.
Now contrast Iran. There, unrest — sometimes courageous, often fragmented, occasionally theatrical — is greeted with breathless saturation. Every burning trash bin becomes a prophecy. Every scuffle is narrated as destiny. Panels bloom. Hashtags are canonized. Sanctions are proposed as moral hygiene. Bombing plans are floated as compassion. The West’s moral imagination, we are told, is fully awake.
In Pakistan, repression lacks cinematography. It is paperwork with bruises. Court orders with truncheons. Blackouts, disappearances, selective massacres — administered in........