Iran criminalises contact with foreign media

To make speaking with a foreigner a crime is to admit, with unusual candour, that one’s own citizens are the most persuasive argument against the state - and that the only remaining defence is to keep them from ever making it aloud.

This is the great, unstated compliment that Tehran has just paid its own people. A government confident in its account of itself does not need to legislate against comparison. It invites the foreign correspondent to dinner and trusts the meal to go well. Only a government that suspects the truth is unflattering feels the need to criminalise the conversation in which the truth might come out. The lawmakers who advanced this bill this month have therefore done something more revealing than they intended: they have told us, more honestly than any communiqué could, exactly how little confidence they hold in their own narrative’s ability to survive contact with a second opinion.

Consider the mechanism, because it is worth admiring the way one admires a well-made trap. The law does not target spies, who are rare and already illegal to be. It targets journalists, researchers, and ordinary citizens - the categories, that is, of people who talk. A university lecturer who answers an email from a foreign academic, a shopkeeper who gives a quote to a wire service about the price of bread, a mother who tells a diaspora relative what the hospital was actually like: these become, under this reasoning, security risks. One admires the thoroughness. Most authoritarian innovations content themselves with silencing critics. This one silences the weather report.

The human rights groups objecting to the measure will, no doubt, be told that they misunderstand the delicacy of national security, that a nation surrounded by hostile foreign media must guard its narrative the way a garden guards against frost. This is the strongest version of the case for the law, and it deserves to be taken seriously precisely because it is sincerely believed by people who are not fools. But a narrative that requires a wall to survive is not a narrative; it is a rumour with a police force attached. The régime’s actual complaint is not that foreign media lies about Iran. It is that foreign media occasionally reports the truth about Iran, and the truth, unlike the lie, cannot be rebutted, only prevented.

There is a particular cruelty in choosing civic engagement as the crime, rather than dissent as such. Dissent, at least, announces itself, and a state can prosecute it with the dignity of an adversary meeting an adversary. What this law prosecutes is ordinary curiosity - the graduate student writing to a colleague in Berlin, the retired engineer following an English-language broadcast out of habit, the sort of gentle intellectual appetite that in any healthy society is called being alive. To convert this into a security offence is to inform an entire population that thinking about the world beyond their borders is now a form of treason against the imagination. One almost admires the ambition of it: most governments settle for controlling what their citizens say. This one aspires to control what they are curious about.

I am told the law represents only a first step, which is the phrase governments use when they wish credit for restraint while reserving the right to none. A first step is, after all, simply a second step that has not yet been taken, and the direction of travel is not in doubt. The society such a law imagines - sealed, self-referential, immune to the indignity of being seen clearly by outsiders - is not a fortress. A fortress at least permits its inhabitants a view of the horizon through the arrow-slits. This is closer to a house with the windows painted over, in which the family inside congratulates itself on having achieved, at last, complete privacy, without noticing that privacy and darkness have become, for practical purposes, the same word.

The saddest figure in this whole arrangement is not the journalist who will be arrested, nor the researcher who will stop answering emails. It is the ordinary citizen who was never planning to say anything seditious at all, and who will now hesitate before a perfectly innocent sentence, unsure which word in it might be the one that gets reported.