Not long ago in Iran, closing a troublesome newspaper, bashing fractious students and denouncing the troublemakers as "counterrevolutionary" would have been enough to stuff the genie of discontent back into the bottle.
But in the new Iran of the reformist President Mohammad Khatami such tactics appear doomed to fail, as they did last week with spectacular results, touching off the worst political crisis of his two years in office and threatening to spin out of control.
Students and their supporters took to the streets of Tehran for a fifth day of protest on Monday after police and hardline vigilantes, armed with tear gas, iron bars and clubs, went on a rampage against a peaceful pro-democracy rally at Tehran University's dormitory complex.
Scores of people were injured and students say up to five of their classmates were killed in the ensuing police action.
The violence sparked an unprecedented outpouring of public support for the students and outrage against the police action. All but the most extreme hardliners have deplored the police action and demanded prosecution of the officers who gave the orders to attack.
As a result, President Khatami and his allies look set to take full control over the law enforcement forces, further solidifying their influence at the expense of the conservative clerical establishment that clings to many of the key levers of state power.
"The rules of the game have changed," said a political scientist from an independent think-tank. "Of course, the conservative establishment has so far failed to realise this."
The roots of the crisis lie in the aftermath of President Khatami's landslide presidential election victory on May 23rd, 1997, against a complacent establishment candidate.
"The political faction which faced a severe loss on May 23rd thought it could retain its position of power by resorting to violence," Mr Abdollah Nouri, the reformist head of the Tehran city council and a former interior minister, told a rally of angry students. "Slowly we have arrived at the point where they are now defining freedom as freedom to use violence, and they are denouncing us as `liberals', `secularists' and `hedonists'," Mr Nouri said.
"They have restricted the legitimate freedoms of the people, while the violent factions are 100 per cent free to do as they wish."
Now, more than two years on, the coalition of youth, women and intellectuals which propelled President Khatami into office is increasingly frustrated that, despite their record turnout and stunning victory in the presidential election, little has been done to defend them.
That failure culminated last autumn in a series of murders of secular dissidents by extremists inside the intelligence ministry, and a concerted assault on freedom of expression and the pro-Khatami press.
Frustrations exploded last week after the police attack, taking the conservative establishment by surprise.
Even Iran's supreme clerical leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, traditionally above criticism, came under attack for failing to rein in the thugs of the Ansar-e Hezbollah vigilante group and the shadowy clerics who pull the strings. "Ansar commits crimes, and the leader supports them," chanted some of the students. "Oh, great leader, shame on you."
While such sentiments have so far been limited to more extreme students, widespread anger that President Khatami is moving too slowly lies just beneath the surface.
But even if the President, a sure-footed politician of the first order, has stumbled somewhat in the recent crisis, then his hardline rivals have come close to political suicide. It was their decision to steamroll tough new media restrictions through parliament last week and then to ban the most influential pro-Khatami newspaper that provided the spark for the worst student unrest since the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution.