Iran criminalises contact with foreign media

There is a gate across this road, and the Iranian lawmakers who wish to build a new one this month have made a curious admission without quite meaning to. For the gate they propose is not against invasion but against conversation - against the ordinary citizen who speaks to a foreign journalist, the researcher who corresponds with a colleague abroad, the small unremarkable traffic of human beings comparing notes across a border. Normally the man who builds a fence at least pretends the field beyond it is dangerous. This is the first fence I have encountered that admits, by its very design, that the danger is not the field but the fact of looking at it.

The modern reformer, when he wants to tear down an old custom, is asked why it was built, and if he cannot say, we rightly refuse him the crowbar. But here the procedure is reversed with a wonderful and horrible symmetry: the lawmakers are not tearing down a fence, they are erecting one, and they are the only party in this affair who have been spared the obligation of explaining themselves. Human rights groups have asked, this month, what precisely a citizen’s conversation with a foreign outlet endangers, and the honest answer - the only answer consistent with the law’s design - is that it endangers nothing except the state’s monopoly on the citizen’s own understanding of his condition. That is not a fence built to keep out wolves. That is a fence built to keep the sheep from counting themselves and noticing how many of them there are.

Consider the journalist under this law, and the researcher, and picture them, if you will, as I picture most abstractions - as an actual person at an actual desk, hesitating over an actual email to a foreign editor, wondering whether the reply will constitute a security crime. This is the concrete image the law produces: not a spy meeting a handler in an alley, but a demographer in Tehran deciding not to answer a question about birth rates because the question came from London. Civic engagement becomes espionage by redefinition alone, which is the cheapest trick a government can play, because it requires no new evidence, only a new dictionary.

Here is the paradox, and it resolves, as all good paradoxes must. We are told the purpose of such laws is protection - protection of the nation from foreign interference, from the meddling of hostile powers who would use contact with ordinary Iranians to destabilise the state. This is the reformer’s argument turned inside out: usually it is the progressive who wants to tear down the ancient fence because he cannot see what it is for; here it is the state that wants to build a new fence and cannot say what it is for either, except in language so elastic that it could apply to a grandmother phoning her son in Toronto. A nation genuinely confident in the loyalty and good sense of its own people does not need to criminalise their curiosity. It is only the government that suspects its own account of itself cannot survive contact with an outside version of events that feels the need to seal the borders of conversation as well as the borders of land. The fence, in other words, has been built not to keep foreign ideas out but to keep Iranian doubts in, penned and unable to compare notes with anyone else’s doubts, which is the oldest trick of the prison and the newest trick of the modern security state, and they are, on inspection, the same trick.

The lawmakers will say they are only doing what all nations do - guarding against foreign influence, a phrase that sounds so reasonable it has excused nearly every censorship since Babel. But guarding against influence and guarding against information are not the same fence, whatever the lawmakers this month wish to call them, and a society that cannot tell the difference has stopped building fences and started building walls around itself. Iran is not sealing a border. It is sealing a room, and calling the people inside it protected, and hoping none of them ask, in a whisper too quiet for any foreign microphone, protected from what, exactly, and by whom.