This essay is written in response to recent events in Iran, where public authorities have reportedly used lethal force against nonviolent protesters. However, its purpose is not to single out one country, regime, or political system.

Instead, the article examines a more fundamental question that applies to any modern institution claiming legitimacy: What is the minimum ethical boundary that must not be crossed for an institution to remain justifiable?

By focusing on the relationship between public violence, nonviolent civilians, and institutional legitimacy, the analysis deliberately avoids local specifics in order to articulate a universal principle. Wherever nonviolent civil expression is met with lethal force, the same structural and moral problem arises—regardless of ideology, culture, or geopolitical context.

The argument presented here is therefore not about Iran alone, but about the bottom line of institutional legitimacy everywhere.

When one side holds live ammunition and the other insists on nonviolent expression, calling the situation a “clash” is already a distortion of reality. The term conceals a fundamental asymmetry: this is not a confrontation between comparable forces, but a question of whether public violence is being exercised within its legitimate bounds.

What is at stake, therefore, is not whether a particular action was tactically “necessary,” but something far more fundamental:

Does the institution still recognize the ethical boundary that justifies its own existence?

Once an institution chooses live fire against nonviolent civilians, the issue ceases to be one of governance efficiency. It becomes a matter of whether the very foundation of legitimacy has been crossed.

Armies, police forces, weapons, uniforms, barracks, food supplies, budgets, and salaries do not emerge from nothing. Every one of them is produced through collective social labor.

For this reason, what is commonly called “state violence” is never the private property of any individual or ruling group. It is, at most, a public capacity temporarily delegated under strict conditions.

Rulers are merely temporary occupants of structural positions. They do not own violence; they are only entrusted, conditionally, with the coordination of a public capability.

When this capability is treated as private power rather than a conditional public trust, a transgression occurs.

The privatization of public violence is itself a betrayal of institutional authorization.

Nonviolent protest is not the negation of order. On the contrary, it is a stress test of an institution’s legitimacy.

An institution that retains self-corrective capacity should be able to respond through language, law, procedure, and negotiation. When these channels are abandoned in favor of live ammunition directed at nonviolent crowds, a single message is conveyed:

The institution can no longer justify itself at the level of reason and procedure.

Using bullets to answer nonviolence is not an expression of strength. It is the moment at which an institution implicitly admits that its narrative has collapsed.

Human life is irreversible. This is not moral rhetoric; it is an ontological fact.

Firearms possess no ideological correctness. Bullets do not carry political judgment. Accidental discharge, misidentification, panic cascades, and escalation dynamics are structural risks inherent in the deployment of live ammunition.

To aim live fire at nonviolent civilians is therefore to accept the possibility of irreversible death as an administrative cost.

Any institution that treats human life as a variable in governance experimentation has already abandoned reverence for the human being as an end in itself.

Long before a shot is fired, a more subtle operation has usually taken place:

1. Protesters are redefined as “threats.”

2. Dissent is reframed as “disorder.”

3. Public violence is repackaged as “necessary order.”

This process constitutes a form of cognitive colonization—the manipulation of shared reality in order to manufacture legitimacy for force.

Yet one principle remains unavoidable:

When an institution must distort reality in order to justify violence, that violence has already lost its legitimacy.

The ethical failure does not begin with the bullet; it begins with the seizure of definitional power over reality itself.

Institutions do not endure through fear, but through recognition; not through coercion, but through public trust.

The minimum condition for such recognition is reverence for human life.

Once an institution crosses the bottom line of using lethal force against nonviolent civilians, surface-level order may persist, but legitimacy begins to erode at a structural level.

Silence can be manufactured at gunpoint.

Legitimacy cannot.

History offers rare but instructive cases in which leaders, facing systemic crisis or collapse, refrained from using lethal force against nonviolent civilians. Mikhail Gorbachev’s decisions during the late Soviet period constitute one such case.

The Soviet state possessed ample coercive capacity. The choice not to deploy large-scale lethal violence against nonviolent public expression was therefore not a matter of incapacity, but of restraint. This restraint did not preserve the existing political structure; power was lost. Yet the refusal to cross the bottom line demonstrated that lethal repression is not inevitable—it is a choice.

The significance of this case does not lie in success or failure, but in principle: institutional survival does not confer unlimited entitlement over human life. A system may endure longer by crossing the line, but it forfeits legitimacy the moment it does.

Whereas Appendix A illustrates the principle of restraint, history also provides instructive counterexamples. Boris Yeltsin, during the constitutional crisis of 1993 in Russia, confronted nonviolent and minimally armed opposition but authorized the use of military force, including tanks and artillery, against parliamentarians and demonstrators.

This counterexample demonstrates the structural consequences of crossing the bottom line. While Yeltsin ultimately preserved political control and the continuity of the post-Soviet state, the legitimacy of his actions was widely questioned, both domestically and internationally. It illustrates that choosing immediate survival through lethal repression may achieve short-term order, but at the cost of eroding moral and institutional authority.

This essay is written in response to recent events in Iran, where public authorities have reportedly used lethal force against nonviolent protesters. However, its purpose is not to single out one country, regime, or political system.

Instead, the article examines a more fundamental question that applies to any modern institution claiming legitimacy: What is the minimum ethical boundary that must not be crossed for an institution to remain justifiable?

By focusing on the relationship between public violence, nonviolent civilians, and institutional legitimacy, the analysis deliberately avoids local specifics in order to articulate a universal principle. Wherever nonviolent civil expression is met with lethal force, the same structural and moral problem arises—regardless of ideology, culture, or geopolitical context.

The argument presented here is therefore not about Iran alone, but about the bottom line of institutional legitimacy everywhere.

When one side holds live ammunition and the other insists on nonviolent expression, calling the situation a “clash” is already a distortion of reality. The term conceals a fundamental asymmetry: this is not a confrontation between comparable forces, but a question of whether public violence is being exercised within its legitimate bounds.

What is at stake, therefore, is not whether a particular action was tactically “necessary,” but something far more fundamental:

Does the institution still recognize the ethical boundary that justifies its own existence?

Once an institution chooses live fire against nonviolent civilians, the issue ceases to be one of governance efficiency. It becomes a matter of whether the very foundation of legitimacy has been crossed.

Armies, police forces, weapons, uniforms, barracks, food supplies, budgets, and salaries do not emerge from nothing. Every one of them is produced through collective social labor.

For this reason, what is commonly called “state violence” is never the private property of any individual or ruling group. It is, at most, a public capacity temporarily delegated under strict conditions.

Rulers are merely temporary occupants of structural positions. They do not own violence; they are only entrusted, conditionally, with the coordination of a public capability.

When this capability is treated as private power rather than a conditional public trust, a transgression occurs.

The privatization of public violence is itself a betrayal of institutional authorization.

Nonviolent protest is not the negation of order. On the contrary, it is a stress test of an institution’s legitimacy.

An institution that retains self-corrective capacity should be able to respond through language, law, procedure, and negotiation. When these channels are abandoned in favor of live ammunition directed at nonviolent crowds, a single message is conveyed:

The institution can no longer justify itself at the level of reason and procedure.

Using bullets to answer nonviolence is not an expression of strength. It is the moment at which an institution implicitly admits that its narrative has collapsed.

Human life is irreversible. This is not moral rhetoric; it is an ontological fact.

Firearms possess no ideological correctness. Bullets do not carry political judgment. Accidental discharge, misidentification, panic cascades, and escalation dynamics are structural risks inherent in the deployment of live ammunition.

To aim live fire at nonviolent civilians is therefore to accept the possibility of irreversible death as an administrative cost.

Any institution that treats human life as a variable in governance experimentation has already abandoned reverence for the human being as an end in itself.

Long before a shot is fired, a more subtle operation has usually taken place:

1. Protesters are redefined as “threats.”

2. Dissent is reframed as “disorder.”

3. Public violence is repackaged as “necessary order.”

This process constitutes a form of cognitive colonization—the manipulation of shared reality in order to manufacture legitimacy for force.

Yet one principle remains unavoidable:

When an institution must distort reality in order to justify violence, that violence has already lost its legitimacy.

The ethical failure does not begin with the bullet; it begins with the seizure of definitional power over reality itself.

Institutions do not endure through fear, but through recognition; not through coercion, but through public trust.

The minimum condition for such recognition is reverence for human life.

Once an institution crosses the bottom line of using lethal force against nonviolent civilians, surface-level order may persist, but legitimacy begins to erode at a structural level.

Silence can be manufactured at gunpoint.

Legitimacy cannot.

History offers rare but instructive cases in which leaders, facing systemic crisis or collapse, refrained from using lethal force against nonviolent civilians. Mikhail Gorbachev’s decisions during the late Soviet period constitute one such case.

The Soviet state possessed ample coercive capacity. The choice not to deploy large-scale lethal violence against nonviolent public expression was therefore not a matter of incapacity, but of restraint. This restraint did not preserve the existing political structure; power was lost. Yet the refusal to cross the bottom line demonstrated that lethal repression is not inevitable—it is a choice.

The significance of this case does not lie in success or failure, but in principle: institutional survival does not confer unlimited entitlement over human life. A system may endure longer by crossing the line, but it forfeits legitimacy the moment it does.

Whereas Appendix A illustrates the principle of restraint, history also provides instructive counterexamples. Boris Yeltsin, during the constitutional crisis of 1993 in Russia, confronted nonviolent and minimally armed opposition but authorized the use of military force, including tanks and artillery, against parliamentarians and demonstrators.

This counterexample demonstrates the structural consequences of crossing the bottom line. While Yeltsin ultimately preserved political control and the continuity of the post-Soviet state, the legitimacy of his actions was widely questioned, both domestically and internationally. It illustrates that choosing immediate survival through lethal repression may achieve short-term order, but at the cost of eroding moral and institutional authority.