In an effort to avoid revolution, Iran's Islamic regime is holding a series of "show trials." History suggests this is a very bad move.

The Iranian authorities are terribly concerned to avoid a “velvet-type revolution” in the Islamic Republic – hence the more than two months of vicious societal repression since the June 12 elections. However, their latest effort – a series of classic “show trials” complete with conspiracies, secret evidence, and “confessions” – maybe brings them closer to regime change than they themselves realize.

Political trials have long been a hallmark of authoritarian governments of all stripes. Particularly in states where adherence to the rule of law is questionable at best, one wonders why rulers would bother holding such trials at all. After all, the charges are usually either trumped-up or fabricated, the testimony is often pre-rehearsed, and the outcomes are all but assured in the state’s favour.

Nonetheless, such trials have long served a variety of purposes other than as a means to determine the guilt or innocence of the alleged offenders. They are public and ritualistic exercises in defining friends and enemies. They afford undemocratic societies the opportunity to place blame on particular groups and individuals when things go terribly wrong. Moreover, they are didactic – instructive in delineating the limits of permissible dissent. Trials, after all, are stories. The metaphor of courtroom drama is appropriate: trials offer dramatic narrative, conflict, betrayal, and often a falling from grace or calling to account. The characters are slotted into Manichean stereotypes, and whether the system of law is inquisitorial or adversarial, final judgement is inevitable. Long before reality television, political trials have been both sensational and entertaining.

However, the miscarriages of justice that the verdicts of political trials produce are instructive in another sense. They stand as hallmarks of a regime’s willingness to sacrifice justice to political expediency. Because individual trials are often microcosms of larger social dramas, they come to represent societal antagonism and political excess. Inevitably, calls for the rehabilitation of trial victims or judicial review of one sort or another form an important subset of concrete demands from organized opposition groups. If particular “criminals” are executed, their “martyrdom” and “innocence” become symbolically and powerfully important.

The rehabilitation of the Slansky trial victims, for example, was an important precursor to the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. Similar calls for re-evaluating the Rajk trial victims preceded the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Although both these movements were eventually crushed by Soviet tanks, these trials and the political repression they represented helped spell eventual doom for the authoritarian communist rulers of these two states. They became enduring symbols of illegitimacy and corruption. Moreover, as with the Moscow “show trials” of the 1930s, such trials do little to garner support from abroad, and those who were duped given their own commitment to communism were later reminded of their gullibility. Political trials have a tendency to generate more shame than justice.

If they really wanted to avoid a “velvet” or “coloured” revolution, the rulers of the Islamic Republic would pay closer attention to the lessons of history. If they did, they would do everything possible to avoid such trials and such a public display of the base and paranoid foundations of their repressive power. At the same time as we abhor such trials, however, we can be somewhat smug in the foreknowledge that another day of reckoning may arrive for Iran. Not financed by the CIA or the British secret service as the official story currently suggests, nor by criminal and seditious elements in their midst. Rather, judgment will ultimately come from Iranians themselves who, in continually and effectively speaking truth to power (albeit currently in coded phrases whispered from rooftops), will not forget the shame of the obviously forced confessions, the absurd charges, and the devastating outcomes.