{"id":73718,"date":"2025-09-23T15:22:42","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T15:22:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.peace-mark.org\/articles\/173-13-2\/"},"modified":"2025-09-24T01:00:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T01:00:08","slug":"173-13-2","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/www.peace-mark.org\/en\/articles\/173-13-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Those Who Love Death\/ Arash Mohammadi"},"content":{"rendered":"

I.<\/strong>
I was a child\u2014perhaps ten years old. I can\u2019t recall my exact age, but I vividly remember walking past the Baqi Cemetery when I heard a scream. A man and a woman were about to be stoned to death. Out of curiosity, I stopped to watch. The problem was that although a large crowd had gathered, I somehow managed to see the mutilated corpses of the two\u2014right at the moment when it was all over and people were gathering the stones.<\/p>\n

Now, when I look back at that day, I think to myself: how did that crowd of death-seekers manage to whitewash such a human atrocity?<\/em> The truth is, as a child or adolescent thirsty for life, I saw no sorrow or regret in the faces of those onlookers. What I saw\u2014what there was an abundance of\u2014was the thrill of witnessing two deaths. The deaths of two human beings, of whom nothing remained but crushed faces and lifeless bodies.<\/p>\n

II.<\/strong>
The reality is that after all these years, whenever I think of public executions, I am reminded of those two mangled bodies\u2014of how people stood and watched and casually chatted about how such a death was \u201cdeserved.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think of the man and woman\u2014who perhaps died the moment the first stone struck their skulls. But their memory, and the imagination of what may have transpired between them, lingered for days, months, and perhaps even years in the minds of those who had watched them die. I say \u201cyears\u201d because five years later, when I was in the thick of adolescence, a classmate in our schoolyard recounted the very scene I had witnessed\u2014with one difference: his account was laced with descriptions of the woman\u2019s beauty, though all I had seen was her destroyed face.<\/p>\n

III.<\/strong>
The truth is that if the Islamic Republic cannot today carry out executions as freely as it did in the 1980s, it is not because it doesn\u2019t want<\/em> to\u2014it\u2019s because it can\u2019t<\/em>. Back then, it could\u2014because it felt the legitimacy and approval of a people who blindly accepted whatever it proclaimed.<\/p>\n

I remember a friend whose brother had been executed for alleged cooperation with the Mojahedin. He once told me that the worst memory of his life wasn\u2019t his brother\u2019s death, but the nights of Iraqi air raids. He said, \u201cOur neighbors threw stones at our walls and doors, accusing us of helping the enemy with targeting coordinates.\u201d In those days, whatever the state said was taken as sacred by much of Iranian society. So now, when the regime no longer enjoys such legitimacy, it\u2019s not that it doesn\u2019t want to create mass graves for political prisoners\u2014it simply can\u2019t<\/em>.<\/p>\n

IV.<\/strong>
I\u2019ve said all this to arrive at a brutal critique of Iranian society itself. The truth is that whether in this war-torn and rebellion-ridden Middle Eastern land\u2014or anywhere else on this planet\u2014as long as there is an audience, there will be public executions and state-sponsored killings.<\/p>\n

If we still witness this corrupt and incompetent regime\u2014despite all its failures, crimes, and layers of corruption\u2014turning people into actors in its grotesque spectacle of death, it is because audiences still exist<\/em> who are eager for such horrific endings.<\/p>\n

The day Iranian society realizes that every execution, regardless of the crime or circumstance, is a form of state-sponsored killing\u2014and refuses to bear witness\u2014then we will no longer see such disgraceful displays.<\/p>\n

The Islamic Republic can no longer send political prisoners en masse to the firing squad. Society will no longer tolerate such collective deaths. And so, the day a collective understanding is born\u2014that every<\/em> execution is a crime, and watching one is an act of complicity<\/em>\u2014we will see an end to public executions altogether.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s time we became eager to witness life<\/em> instead of death. Perhaps it\u2019s time to dance in Azadi Square, rather than watch someone die.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I.I was a child\u2014perhaps ten years old. I can\u2019t recall my exact age, but I vividly remember walking past the Baqi Cemetery when I heard a scream. A man and a woman were about to be stoned to death. Out of curiosity, I stopped to watch. The problem was that although a large crowd had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":73663,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5460,5444],"tags":[50926,56532,50270,56522,55156,56517,51098,50372,52162,50363,55436],"class_list":["post-73718","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-right-to-life","tag-arash-mohammadi","tag-baqi-cemetery-in-qom","tag-execution","tag-execution-in-malaam","tag-line-peace-en","tag-peace-line-173","tag-public-execution","tag-right-to-life","tag-stone","tag-violence","tag----en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peace-mark.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/articles\/73718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peace-mark.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/articles"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peace-mark.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/articles"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.peace-mark.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/articles\/73718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73739,"href":"https:\/\/www.peace-mark.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/articles\/73718\/revisions\/73739"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peace-mark.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/author\/39467"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peace-mark.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peace-mark.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peace-mark.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peace-mark.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}