Here we go again. It is almost boring how predictable history is, isn't it? We are watching the same old play, performed by the same bad actors, on a stage that is slowly catching fire. In Iran, the students are back on the streets. For the second day in a row, young people in the country’s two biggest cities have decided they have had enough. And the government, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that the best way to handle unhappy people is to beat them until they are quiet. It is a strategy as old as time, and about as effective as trying to put out a forest fire with a water pistol.

Let’s look at the absurdity of the situation. The men running Iran are currently stuck in a very tight spot. It is almost funny, in a dark, tragic sort of way. On the outside, they have the United States breathing down their necks. There are threats of strikes, talk of war, and the constant hum of drones in the sky. The regime is terrified of the Americans. They know they cannot win a real fight against a superpower. So, what do they do? To prove they are still strong, they turn around and attack the only people they can actually hurt: their own children.

It is the classic behavior of a bully. When the big kid on the playground threatens you, you don't fight him. You go find someone smaller than you and push them down to make yourself feel big again. The Iranian government cannot stop the U.S. military, but they can certainly send police to a university to crack heads. It is pathetic. It is weak. But in the twisted logic of a dictatorship, it probably looks like strength.

The reports coming out tell us that protests are happening at universities. This is important. Universities are where people go to learn how to think. They are places for questions. But authoritarian regimes hate questions. They hate thinking. They want obedience. When you have a government that relies on total control, a student with a book and a question is more dangerous than a soldier with a gun. The soldier you can shoot. The idea? That is much harder to kill.

So, we see the "crackdown." That is the polite word the news uses. It sounds so official, doesn't it? A crackdown. In reality, it means violence. It means tear gas. It means arrests. It means taking bright, young people who want a future and throwing them in cells. The state is grappling with "domestic discontent," the reports say. That is a fancy way of saying the people are sick and tired of being poor, isolated, and controlled. They look at their leaders and see old men obsessed with rules from centuries ago, while the rest of the world moves on.

And let's not forget the timing. This is all happening while the threat of foreign strikes hangs over everyone's head. Imagine the stress of being an Iranian student right now. You have to worry about a foreign bomb dropping on your house, and you have to worry about your own police beating you up on the way to class. You are trapped between a rock and a hard place, and neither side seems to care much if you survive.

The government thinks that if they hit hard enough, the students will go home. They think fear works. And to be fair, fear does work for a little while. People have families. They have lives to lose. But fear has a shelf life. Eventually, people get so tired of being afraid that they just stop caring. They look at the police lines and realize that the scariest thing isn't getting hit; the scariest thing is living like this for another forty years. That is when the real trouble starts for the regime.

It is easy for us to sit here and analyze it. We can shake our heads and say, "Oh, how terrible." But we should recognize what we are seeing. We are seeing a government that has run out of ideas. They have no solutions for the economy. They have no way to fix their relationship with the world. All they have left is the club and the jail cell. When a government has to use violence against its own students just to survive the day, it is already dead. It just hasn't fallen over yet.

The tragedy is how long it takes for the body to hit the floor. In the meantime, more students will march. More police will swing their batons. The cycle will repeat. The leaders will go on TV and blame foreign spies or bad influences, refusing to look in the mirror. They will shout about their power while hiding behind riot shields. It is a grim, cynical theater. The curtain needs to fall, but the actors refuse to leave the stage.