Throughout history authoritarian and despotic regimes have always worked hard to maintain the appearance of legitimacy. Instead of simply doing away with a regime’s enemies in the dead of night, for example, the authorities may insist on judicial proceedings, with indictments, trials, judges, and attorneys. When justice is systematically perverted, however, show-trials can begin to erode a regime’s popular support rather than paralyze its citizenry with fear.

Laura Secor reports (read her piece here) on how the show-trials in Iran are not having their intended effect among the Iranian people.

In the grotesque pageant of Iran’s show trials, former high officials—hollow-eyed, dressed in prison pajamas, and flanked by guards in uniform—sit in rows, listening to one another’s self-denunciations. Since the disputed Presidential elections of June 12^th, about a hundred reformist politicians, journalists, student activists, and other dissidents have been accused of colluding with Western powers to overthrow the Islamic Republic. This month, a number of the accused have made videotaped confessions. But the spectacle has found a subversive afterlife on the Internet. One image that has gone viral is a split frame showing two photographs of former Vice-President Mohammad Ali Abtahi. Before his arrest, on June 16^th, he is a rotund, smiling cleric; in court on August 1^st, he is drawn and sweat-soaked, his face a mask of apprehension. The juxtaposition belies the courtroom video, making the point that the only genuine thing about Abtahi’s confession is that it was coerced through torture…

The indictments prepared by the public prosecutor are almost surreally obtuse. Before the election, one indictment claims, Western governments, foundations, and individuals joined forces with corrupt Iranians in an attempt to overthrow the Islamic Republic and institute a regime compliant with American designs. The nefarious plotters engaged in “exposing cases of violations of human rights,” training reporters in “gathering information,” and “presenting full information on the 2009 electoral candidates.” Apparently, the Iranian citizen is meant to consider it self-evident that the country’s national interest depends on concealing human-rights abuses, censoring the news, and obfuscating the electoral process…

And so a spectacle that was meant to produce compliance and terror has instead stoked fury and derision. The regime has lost control of the political discussion within Iran, which is focusing on the abuse of prisoners rather than on the perfidy of foreigners or the futility of resistance…

In today’s Iran, the interrogator, not the repenter, has become the object of rage and ridicule. Recanting under pressure, Abrahamian [author of Tortured Confessions] told me, is now seen as a sign not of weakness or treachery but, rather, of “being human.” The display of systemic cruelty is not chilling but galvanizing…

Source: “The Iran Show” by Laura Secor in “The Talk of the Town” in The New Yorker (August 31, 2009) pp. 25-26.