Two years ago the US/Israel opened that latest offensive in the War of the Worlds that may be the Götterdämmerung of our civilization. They released the Stuxnet virus to degrade the Iranian attempt to build nuclear weapons.
In the interim, China has used viruses and worms sneak into computers around the war probably in preparation for opening a new front in the Computer Wars.
Now there is a mysterious outbreak of a virus in the US's drone fleet. It isn't clear who has unleashed this new attack and what the intentions of the probe may be.
We are in the fog of war and in the opening stages of WWIII.
A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.
The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.
“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”
Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.
Most wars are fought with the bottom 90% of the population in a fog. We will be victims of this new war. We will have our economies wrecked, lives lost, and most of us won't even know there are battles going on, who is involved, and what kinds of devastation are being inflicted. We are like the serfs of the Middle Ages. Our feudal lords (the top 1% who control the government and military) are fielding armies that scourge the land and we know nothing about it until the armed columns descend upon our tiny village and put us all to the sword.
Iran's theocrats have discovered a more pure, a more pristine, a higher type of "democracy". One where you remove the people from the politics because they have such "undeveloped" views and are not completely dedicated to the glories of the "Islamic Revolution". Here is the Iranian parliament deciding that the best way to handle the "unfinished business" of the last "democratic" election in Iran. They call for the execution of all those who ran in an election and weren't able to use the instruments of state to stuff the ballot boxes to assure their own "victory"...
From the UK's Guardian newspaper site:
9.07am – Iran:
The Iranian regime continues to try to blame the opposition for yesterday's violence.
Members of the Iranian parliament today called for the death penalty to handed out to opposition leaders Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi, who were put under house arrest ahead of the protests, according to Reuters.
"Mehdi Karroubi and Mirhossein Mousavi are corrupts on earth and should be tried," the official IRNA news agency quoted them saying in a statement.
The loose term "corrupt on earth", a charge which has been levelled at political dissidents in the past, carries the death penalty in the Islamic Iran, Reuters points out.
Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei said: "Those who created public disorder on Monday will be confronted firmly and immediately."
State-funded Press TV directly blamed opposition "rioters" for the violence.
That certainly does tidy up the loose ends of a "democratic" election where the foolish populace does not follow the gentle proddings of the supreme leader, the ayatollah-how-to-vote-so-you-do-it-or-die Ali Khamenei and his stooge Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
It is so tragic that the confused Egyptians don't understand the true "Islamic" version of democracy. A political system where all the people get to vote as one following the clear directions of the supreme religious leader who knows exactly what God wants because this leader is "special". The Egyptians apparantly want a "messy democracy" where each person decides for himself what is best and tries to pick a political party that best fits his needs. How un-Islamic! Everybody knows that real Muslims love to vote like robots doing exactly what their "supreme leaders" tell them to do.
George Orwell wrote the Nineteen Eighty-Four as a dystopian novel to show the logical extreme that the despotic Communist party had created in the USSR. Sadly, the Iranian theocracy has studied the lessons of history well and have re-created all the ugly trappings, especially the newspeak which preverts language into an instrument of state policy. So Iran's leadership blandly makes completely ridiculous claims and cares not a whit whether the outside world laughs itself silly at the corruption of truth. The poor people inside Iran are forced to chant the religious "party line" and side with the Ayatollah's God-mandated terror state and accept the "benevolence" of an Islamic revolution where white is black, truth is lie, and justice is whatever the torturer in an Iranian prison decides to dish out.
10pm GMT: PBS's Tehran bureau's blog has some gripping eyewitness accounts of the protests in Tehran today:
When I reached Eskandari Street it looked like a war zone: smoke, dust, teargas, screaming people, flying stones and regular attacks by the well equipped motorcycle riding guards. A petite young girl with a green wristband and a small backpack was walking to my left. Just before we reached Navab Avenue the guards charged from behind, one of their clubs hit my left leg but three of them attacked the girl relentlessly. She screamed and fell to the ground, but the guards kept hitting her. I ran towards them, grabbed the girl's right hand and released her from the grip of the guards. She was in a daze and crying unstoppably. I pushed her north into Navab Avenue towards Tohid Square away from Azadi Avenue when the guards charged towards us. This time the crowd fought back and stones of all sizes were directed back at them. This gave me a bit of time to ask one of the restaurants to open their doors and let us in. The girl was in shock and pain. I got her some water and asked how she was. Her clothes were dusty, her backpack was torn and her hands were shaking. "Why?" she kept asking.
I love how tyrants can "decide for people" what they really want or what their real intentions are. Here is the Iranian version of a "nurturing" government making sure its citizens don't get infested with crazy ideas about freedom, free speech, the right to peacefully assemble, the right to petition one's government:
9.15pm GMT: In Iran, the authorities are using the state media to accuse opposition leaders of being part of a Western plot to overthrow the Islamic system. According to state TV:
Hypocrites, monarchists, thugs and seditionists who wanted to create public disorder in Iran were arrested by our brave nation ... These people set garbage bins on fire and damaged public property.
I find it curious that the Iranian "Islamic Revolution" idea of good government comes at the end of a truncheon and delivered by tear gas cannister:
9pm GMT: The Guardian's Saeed Kamali Dehghan reports on today's protests in Iran:
Supporters of the Green movement appeared in scattered groups in various locations in central Tehran and other big cities in what was seen as the Iranian opposition's first attempt in more than a year to hold street protests against the government.
The riot police and government-sponsored plainclothes basiji militia used teargas, wielded batons and opened fire to disperse protesters who chanted "death to the dictator", a reference to both Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Witnesses told the Guardian that despite a heavy security presence, small groups of people succeeded in gathering in main squares leading to Azadi ("freedom") Square – a chosen focal point.
Because of a government ban on reporting on the protests by the international media, footage and coverage today has been sparse.
It is tragic that the poor people of the Middle East are infested by social parasites, thugs, and criminals masquerading as "government" and whose only job is to steal from the people and repress any attempt to get out from under their poisonous control.
It is especially scurrilous when this kind of evil hides under the cloak of "religion". But the ayatollahs of Iran are cut from the same cloth as the vicious right wing fundamentalist Christians in the US who think nothing of lying to advance their political "cause". I was watching the Rachel Maddow show tonight on MSNBC. These right wing thugs are killing abortionists rather than use the political system to achieve their political goals. These are mini-ayatollahs who infest America. Sadly the Iranians have an even more virulent strain of vicious ayatollahs who infest their country:
The very heart of democracy is "civil society", the respect for the rights and liberties of others. Without this ability to recognize the limits of your rights and the presence of their rights, you can't have a democracy. You have an autocratic regime where only one viewpoint is permitted.
The joke is that these unrepentant, illiberal Islamists would never have gotten a toehold in Mecca or Medina if the surrounding society wasn't at least a bit tolerant. If they had been quashed like they are quashing those with "unacceptable" views, then there would be no Muslim world today.
The fanatic Christians who are intolerant of other viewpoints demonstrate the same hypocrisy. Early Christianity was nearly extinguished because the Roman empire was intolerant. But it never carried out the determined, empire-wide, and persistent repression needed to crush the early Christians, so they survived. But the way these present day "Christians" behave, fanatically intolerant, then if they were running the Roman empire, they would have made sure that the early Church was eradicated, totally obliterated.
I wish there was a way to bundle up the crazy Islamists and the crazy Christians and put them on a separate planet and let them go at each other. Meanwhile, reasonable Muslims and reasonable Christians could happily co-exist here, on earth, our wonderful "blue marble" hanging in space.
There is an excellent article by Laura Secor on Iran in the New Yorker. It is a profile of the economist Mohammad Tabibian. The details from this article help you to understand the surge of anti-Ahmadinejad voting and the undercurrents of Iranian society:
In the strange, tumultuous story of Iran’s thirty-year-old Islamic Republic, the battle over free speech has captured the world’s imagination, but the debate over free markets goes just as deep. Since the revolution, most industries in Iran have been owned either by the state or by enormous Islamic foundations that are connected to the ruling oligarchy and exempt from government oversight and taxation. While the Iranian government points to rapid economic growth, inefficiencies are rampant, and the traffic in exports, other than petroleum products, is anemic.
...
Tabibian shared this ambition with the generation of Iranian intellectuals, students, and other revolutionaries who toppled the Shah, in 1979. At that time, Tabibian was studying for his Ph.D. in economics at Duke. He was a devout Muslim and a member of the Islamic Students Association, which united Iranian expatriates across Europe and North America. The revolution was a powerful tug: expatriate scholars were pulled back into Iran, which they found in a heady state of utopian promise and practical disorder. “All projects were stopped,” Tabibian recalls. “The factories were closed. The ministries were in chaos. The systems in the old administration were not there anymore. Everybody was engaged in revolutionary activities, slogans, and shouting.”
Someone had to keep the economy and the basic structures of the state from collapsing, and that job fell to the students returning from abroad. Iranian students from M.I.T. took over the Ministry of Science; those from Stanford and the University of California system ran the Central Bank; those from North Carolina took over the Planning and Budget Organization, or P.B.O. “It was based on previous relationships,” Tabibian told me. “You collected other friends who knew each other from abroad.” For Tabibian, the key connection was to Mohammad Taghi Banki—a graduate of North Carolina State University and the head of the P.B.O. Banki hired Tabibian as the director of the agency’s Macro Economy Bureau in 1981, at a moment when the P.B.O. was charged with the awesome task of drawing up an economic agenda for the world’s first revolutionary Islamic state.
...
Post-revolutionary Iran was infused with leftist ideology, in particular the work of a radical egalitarian Islamist thinker, Ali Shariati, without whose Marxist-Leninist reading of Shiite theology the revolution might never have taken place. (“Shariati was a confused person,” Tabibian said bluntly. “His were an emotional type of arguments, provocative and revolutionary. But he had no clear idea about economics or politics. Unintentionally, he did a lot of disservice to this country.”) Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolution’s charismatic leader, was far from a leftist, but, breathing the same air, he arrived at a religious populism that made frequent reference to the righteous struggle of the oppressed against the ruling class.
...
The new Iranian constitution, however, outlined an economy controlled largely by the state, partly by coöperatives owned by the public, and marginally by a private sector that would include the traditional merchant class of the bazaar. It was a fractured vision, and each of these power centers fought for control. Much of the country’s wealth and industry ended up in the hands of a few giant, semi-private foundations that were opaque to the public and controlled by powerful clerics. Tabibian recalls, “There was a mix of rational and revolutionary attitudes and emotions—pushing, pulling, disputing, arguing.”
...
In 1989, Khomeini died, and the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse. A more liberal economic plan finally seemed politically feasible. Iran’s new President, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, reached out to the economists and industrialists who had been stymied for the past decade, and offered them the opportunity to clean up the country’s contradictory goals and policies, scale back its inefficiencies, and lift the government’s heavy hand.
...
The economic-reform program became the signature of Rafsanjani’s Presidency. One Iranian journalist in exile told me that Tabibian was “Rafsanjani’s brain.” Yet Tabibian’s ideas were once again undercut by politics: Rafsanjani was widely believed to be floridly corrupt, bestowing favors on friends and relatives and undermining the public trust. Moreover, revolutionary idealism still permeated Iranian politics. The watchwords of the revolution had been social justice and independence from the imperial West. Many Iranians were convinced that Tabibian’s reforms would curry favor with the West while inflicting pain upon the poor. This feeling persisted, even though the Rafsanjani administration protected key entitlements, such as subsidized food and medicine.
...
As the price of oil rose, poverty declined, and the Islamic Republic made good on many of its promises, bringing electricity, safe water, health care, and education to the hinterlands. But at the same time the rich grew richer—conspicuously so, as the opening of the market made foreign luxury goods available in Iran for the first time since the revolution. New cars from Japan, Germany, and Korea, the sort that used to belong only to diplomats, became common in north Tehran. These visible inequities, combined with Rafsanjani’s personal enrichment, made many Iranians resentful.
...
Meanwhile, for Rafsanjani, the reforms were a political catastrophe. The public recoiled at short-term shocks, such as the doubling of prices for gas, phone service, and public transportation, and at the cost of reconstructing the country after the war with Iraq. In 1993, the Rafsanjani administration bungled its effort to unify Iran’s three foreignexchange rates. Tabibian had long called for a single exchange rate determined by the market, but the government chose instead to adopt an artificially low rate. As he recalls it, “The Central Bank was in no position to support and maintain this politically determined foreignexchange rate, and it did not serve the economy.” The resulting debt crisis depleted the reserves of the Central Bank in about a month. The government bailed out the borrowers, rescheduling and paying off debts it could not afford. From nearly every quarter—the students and the clerics, the left and the right—came an overwhelming backlash. Under pressure, Rafsanjani reimposed price controls and halted privatization.
...
In 1997, Rafsanjani was handily defeated by a Presidential candidate from the left: Mohammad Khatami. The incoming President, who served two four-year terms, introduced a new openness in Iranian politics and culture, but in the arena of the economy his administration lacked a clear direction. He tentatively resumed the reform program Rafsanjani had abandoned, but he quickly terminated any policy that was not well received by the public. Meanwhile, higher oil prices gave the illusion of prosperity: poverty declined, inequality did not rise, and by 2005 the standard of living in Iran was the highest it had been since the mid-seventies. None of this, though, was a result of government strategy, which remained an ad-hoc affair.
The country’s unemployment epidemic made clear that the economy still had festering troubles. Iran’s population had doubled since 1979, and the revolution had made education available to more Iranians. But there was no role for these people in an economy that depended not on productive industries but on the dispensation of oil rents, which tended to create unskilled jobs. During Khatami’s two terms, unemployment among illiterate men declined from seventeen per cent to eight per cent; among men with advanced degrees, it leaped from fifteen per cent to twenty-three per cent. (Among the most educated women, it was forty-three per cent.) The unemployment problem alienated Khatami’s core constituency of educated young Iranians. Moreover, Khatami’s penchant for lofty intellectual rhetoric signalled to many unemployed Iranians that he was out of touch.
...
embers left. Tabibian stayed, though he spent less and less time there.
Unemployment and inflation continued to dog the Iranian economy, and Khatami, embattled on other fronts, showed little will or aptitude for addressing Iran’s systemic ills. In 2005, he was swept from power by the radical populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who campaigned on the promise to end corruption and to deliver oil money to kitchen tables. His base saw him as the last hope for reclaiming the revolution for its foot soldiers: veterans of the war with Iraq; the armed young men of the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij militia, who felt snubbed by Rafsanjani’s technocrats and Khatami’s intellectuals; and the rural underclass, which survived on government subsidies and felt a kinship with Ahmadinejad, whose family migrated to Tehran from the village of Aradan.
Ahmadinejad didn’t just campaign as a populist; he governed as one, doling out billions of dollars on his tours of the provinces. He was assisted immeasurably by the continuing oil boom; in 2006, revenues were almost fifty billion dollars. But Ahmadinejad’s policy of funnelling this cash directly to his constituents backfired. The ensuing rise in inflation made food and housing—the two things nobody can do without—particularly expensive. The analyst Saeed Laylaz said of Iranians who rent their homes, “One night they slept, and they awoke in the morning and they realized that they were under the poverty line.” Nearly seven hundred thousand urban Iranians fell into poverty in 2006. Inequality had worsened for the first time since the Rafsanjani reforms. ...
In January, 2008, more than half of Iran’s two hundred and ninety parliamentarians had signed a letter blaming Ahmadinejad’s policies for rising unemployment and inflation.
...
During the Rafsanjani era, many left-leaning student activists had bitterly protested the reforms that Tabibian pushed through. Yet, in 2006, when pro-democracy students demonstrated against Ahmadinejad, one of them waved a placard that read “Bring Back Tabibian.”
...
But under the Islamic Republic, Iran has become a modern country with few visible signs of squalor. All over the capital, commerce is brisk, from the upscale shopping malls in the north to the clogged passageways of the Grand Bazaar and the modest curbside shops of low-income quarters.
Even so, many Iranians are enraged by the state of their economy. Not only do they complain about high unemployment and income inequality; they are angered by the pervasive cronyism and political corruption that reward the ideological faithful. Three decades of populism have won the Islamic Republic the fealty of the rural underclass, but at the cost of rendering the educated middle class ineffective, unmoored, and nearly irrelevant to the country’s economy.
...
One Friday morning, outside a mosque in the working-class neighborhood of Narmak, where Ahmadinejad grew up, I met a young man who rented a narrow basement apartment. He had been trained as an electrical engineer with a specialty in jet engines, but he worked in a tire factory and had not been paid in five months. “Because of the wrong policies of Ahmadinejad, our factory’s door is locked,” he told me. “I have two engineering certificates, but unfortunately there is no place for technocrats in this country.” He had voted for Ahmadinejad in 2005, but he had come to believe that the President’s economic policies were “a hundred per cent wrong.” He echoed the credo of Tabibian: “Economic freedom will come together with political freedom.”
Young people in the run-down neighborhood of Naziabad, in south Tehran, told me that they saw no point in going to school. The best they could hope for, if they wanted to make money, was a life of crime.
...
“We have a bad economic situation at the moment—a sick economy with poor management. Thirty per cent of the people have family money. They sell their property, buy something cheaper, and spend the difference.” And the other seventy per cent? The real-estate agent laughed. “We have a stadium over here,” he said. “They go and hang themselves.”
Last April, Ahmadinejad gave a speech in Qom addressing Iran’s economic woes. Iranians should be grateful, he proclaimed, for twenty-two-per-cent inflation. Foreign powers wanted Iran to suffer seventy-per-cent inflation, but his administration had fended off their schemes. Still, he could not deny the persistence of corruption and other economic problems. These problems, he said, were the fault of sinister elements within his own cabinet.
...
Even if Iran’s middle class is finding ways to live decently, it contributes little to the economy. Khajehpour’s research has shown that many middle-class Iranians live on unsustainable and ultimately unproductive sources of income: remittances from relatives abroad, second jobs, brokering deals between third parties, selling off family property. It’s a precarious existence for the class that would normally stand at the core of a healthy economy. And that is no accident.
The most important group of religious leaders in Iran called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate on Saturday, an act of defiance against the country’s supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country’s clerical establishment.
A statement by the group, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, represents a significant, if so far symbolic, setback for the government and especially the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is supposed to be final. The government has tried to paint the opposition and its top presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, as criminals and traitors, a strategy that now becomes more difficult — if not impossible.
“This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. “Remember, they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.”
Here is a joke from Tehran that sums up the situation there:
In Iran we always use this joke to describe this situation:
They say that a group sees a fox that is running away, they ask him, "Why are you running away?" The fox says, "The ruler has ordered that all foxes that have three testicles be killed." They note, "But you have two testicles," and the fox responds, "But first they kill and then they count."
This is exactly the situation activists in Iran are facing. Any crisis is an excuse to suppress them; their crimes have been decided beforehand.
The above is from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. This is a US government funded operation, so I guess you can say that the US taxpayers are in the business of funding Iranian "jokes"!
Here is a post from Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish that spells out how the Bush/Cheney torture regime has completely undermined any moral legitimacy the US might have had regarding the suppression of dissent in Iran and the torture that Iran uses against its dissidents:
Here's another first-hand account of a student protester tortured by the Iranian regime after the last round of student uprisings ten years ago. What he describes is exactly what the United States did to prisoners under the Bush-Cheney torture regime:
The place was one of the semi-abandoned military camps outside Tehran that date back to the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. There we were shoved into metal freight containers – the kind used for shipping. They stripped us naked and gave us two blankets each. Inside there was nothing to sleep on and no electric light. There was no way to tell the time except by the daylight when it shone through the watchman’s peephole at one end and a ventilation vent at the other.
This is more daylight and two more blankets than allowed the bulk of prisoners tortured under Bush and Cheney. But the cramming into windowless cages naked is classic neocon torture.
I was in the container with four other boys. We were all barely 20. And we were inside for two weeks -- naked, powerless, and face-to-face with the fear of being totally at the mercy of our captors... I was in the container with four other boys. Food was thrown in once a day. From time to time, we were taken out for questioning. And both those processes helped to destroy whatever shreds of our dignity remained.
The prisoners were beaten as part of their torture, something endemic in US captivity but formally restricted to mild forms under Cheney. There are other similarities:
The interrogations were conducted with a hood over my head. Looking down, I could see only the floor. Once I saw the hands of one of the interrogators after he cuffed my head. His hands were twice the size of mine. After two weeks, I was transferred to a succession of other prison cells, with no idea where I was. Sometimes, the cells were pitch dark. Sometimes, they had four brilliant light bulbs shining 24 hours a day.
A word to the neocons: you have no standing to protest the barbaric treatment of these prisoners any more. And you have made their torture more helpless, more powerful and more brutal than it would otherwise have been. As these protesters - the men and women hose tweets we were reading so recently - look toward America, as they try to see a beacon somewhere that would let them know that their torturers have no standing in the civilized world, they find one thing.
That beacon? Neoconservatism snuffed it out.
The West won the Cold War because they were seen as morally superior to the commies. But Bush/Cheney has undermined the future by putting the US on all fours with all the other slimey torture regimes around the world.
Here's another post on The Daily Dish that lays out the blight of Bush/Cheny torture. In this case, it is the fact that only the underlings were punished for Abu Ghraib. Admininstration officials and top CIA/military were never held accountable:
[W]hen images do show torture or execution actually happening, not just victims' bodies afterwards, they encourage us to feel enraged at the people doing it -- but those people are invariably low-level operatives, not policy-makers. And so (as essentially occurred in the case of the Abu Ghraib photographs, for example) those powerful decision-makers who are actually responsible for the system of abuse trot off into the sunset while a handful of soldiers or prison guards get labeled "sadistic" or "bad apples" and get thrown in prison. It's just never going to be photos that implicate the people at the highest levels -- that requires different kinds of sources, much less sensational but nevertheless enormously important. There's a reason tireless French anti-torture campaigner Pierre Vidal-Naquet described the entire anti-torture movement during France's Algerian War as boiling down to "a passionate quest for documents."
This isn't to say images aren't exceedingly valuable. They are. As I've said before, cell phone cameras -- and the existence of the Abu Ghraib photographs in particular -- are one huge reason for the differences between the American conversation about torture for the past several years and the French conversation (or, more often, non-conversation) about torture during the Algerian War. I believe that Obama ought to release the photographs. But ultimately photos can only be worth a thousand words when they're framed by lots and lots and lots of...words.
What we can see in Iran today are two simultaneous struggles, one from below (people with legitimate grievances against their government), and one up above (a power struggle between factions).
Although many had hoped that the post-electoral struggle in Iran would be a one act play, this one seems more likely to be headed into a saga that is four or five acts long. Like many previous social movements throughout history, this has turned from a hundred yard dash into a marathon.
The dynamics of this struggle are also very different than those that have occurred in other countries. The Iranian system is kind of “a state within a state.” There is an elected part of the government – the president and parliament – but they are answerable and subject to a Supreme Leader and the various bodies of Islamic clergy that choose him and that, on paper at least, serve as a check and balance to his powers.
That dual state apparatus, although designed to maintain those in power, has caused the regime of Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad – very much joined at the hip - the problem of having to defend itself on two fronts at once. If it loses control of only one of those institutions, it loses everything.
...
About ten years ago, a deep split emerged in the high clergy that, under the Iranian Constitution, has the final say over all matters and is above the elected government in the hierarchy of state. About half of those theocratic leaders came to the view that the theocratic system is not desirable, that involving itself so heavily in political institutions was making them dirty (or defiled). Although that sentiment is heavy in Qom, the religious seat of power, the objective conditions have not appeared – until now – to provoke action toward reform.
...
There are unconfirmed reports today that a national strike is underway already, including by Iran state television which has reported that today, Tuesday, thirty percent of workers in the country have not shown up on the job.
If state media is admitting 30 percent, it is a safe bet that adherence to the strike is larger than that. It would also be very impressive because the government has warned that any citizen that participates in a strike will be fired from his and her job, or lose his or her space in the public markets. Thirty percent compliance on what is only the first day a strike would also be heartening for the resistance because some sectors – specifically a call by the Grand Ayatollah and spiritual elder Montazeri for three days of mourning beginning tomorrow, Wednesday, have not kicked in yet.
...
The regime is thus not only defending itself on two major fronts: against the citizens in the streets and the dissident clergy above. It must also be acting around the clock to keep any single one of those “autonomous networks” from acting in a unified manner.
The regime is thus spread very thin as it is being nipped at from so many directions at once. The longer this dynamic continues, the less chance the regime has to remain in control. It’s finite resources cannot indefinitely defend on all those fronts at once.
If past civil resistance struggles across the planet under authoritarian regimes are prologue, once the street demonstrations calm down the regime will likely set about arresting (or assassinating) every movement leader it can find. Tyrants usually look to “decapitate the leadership,” perhaps quite literally under the Iranian system. The movement, thus, has to find a way to decentralize if it is going to prevail.
A prolonged or indefinite General Strike would be very difficult in any land, but particularly in a country like Iran with 40 percent unemployment: the well from which to draw “replacement workers” (read: scabs) is very deep.
...
Another interesting dynamic is that those in charge of the regime lived through and were active in the 1978-79 revolution (as were those like Rafsanjani and Mousavi who are engaged in the power struggle up above against the regime). The moves made so far by the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad regime smack of a certain paranoia that 1979 could repeat itself, and seem designed to head it off at the pass. An example of that is how the families of the martyrs created over the past week – including that of the young woman named Neda who was assassinated by Basiji sniper fire and become a global cause celebre – have been ordered by state forces not to hold public funerals for their fallen sons and daughters (in 78-79, the funerals of martyrs became the loci of protest marches).
Likewise, the Mousavi electoral opposition, as well as other key sectors like students and labor, have very much echoed the slogans and tactics of 1978: “Allah O Akbar” and “Marg Bar Dictator” (“God is Great” and “Death to the Dictator” being the renovated slogans of that era).
But here’s where it gets interesting: about 75 percent of the Iranian citizenry today was born after 1979. While the elders of the resistance have the experience of having lived through and won a revolution, and their experience is very valuable to the opposition, the wild card in this thing is the young people. This is especially true when it comes to communications systems – Internet, cell phones, etcetera – in which the side that has the youth has the capacity to remain one step ahead of the regime in the speed at which it communicates among its ranks and to the rest of the Iranian population and to the world. (Just as most aging folks need a teenager to figure out how to work the remote on the DVD player, all revolutionaries need them to do the same on a societal scale.)
It is evident that the youth of Iran are overwhelmingly in favor of change and if one had to set Vegas odds on whether the regime can prevail, the odds would be stacked against it in large part because the nation’s youth have had it and are energized to sustain the “five act play,” if necessary, to win control of their lives and country.
...
According to Gooya citing Rava News, the people of Iranian Kurdistan have begun a strike in support of the people's movement for freedom.
In response to calls for a one-day strike in Kurdistan by human rights organizations, student groups, unions, and political associations, today, Tuesday, the people of Kurdistan, in support of the people of Iran, have not gone to work.
The reporter of Rava News from Saghez, the second largest city of Kurdistan, reports that despite government warnings, 90% of the shops in the bazaar and other public places are closed, and there are plans for a calm civil protest in one of the city's main squares.
Upon learning of his son's death, the elder Mr. Alipour was told the family had to pay an equivalent of $3,000 as a "bullet fee"—a fee for the bullet used by security forces—before taking the body back, relatives said.
Mr. Alipour told officials that his entire possessions wouldn't amount to $3,000, arguing they should waive the fee because he is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war. According to relatives, morgue officials finally agreed, but demanded that the family do no funeral or burial in Tehran. Kaveh Alipour's body was quietly transported to the city of Rasht, where there is family.
This is as cruel double imposition. It is insult added to injury.
Family, friends mourn Neda Agha-Soltan, Iranian woman whose death was caught on video
Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, 'was a beam of light' and not an activist, friends say. The video footage of her bleeding to death on the street has turned her into an international symbol of the protest movement.
By Borzou Daragahi
12:49 PM PDT, June 22, 2009
Reporting from Tehran -- The first word came from abroad. An aunt in the United States called her Saturday in a panic. "Don't go out into the streets, Golshad," she told her. "They're killing people."
The relative proceeded to describe a video, airing on exile television channels that are jammed in Iran, in which a young woman is shown bleeding to death as her companion calls out, "Neda! Neda!"
A dark premonition swept over Golshad, who asked that her real name not be published. She began calling the cellphone and home number of her friend Neda Agha-Soltan who had gone to the chaotic demonstration with a group of friends, but Neda didn't answer.
At midnight, as the city continued to smolder, Golshad drove to the Agha-Soltan residence in the eastern Tehran Pars section of the capital.
As she heard the cries and wails and praising of God reverberating from the house, she crumpled, knowing that her worst fears were true.
"Neda! Neda!" the 25-year-old cried out. "What will I do?"
Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, was shot dead Saturday evening near the scene of clashes between pro-government militias and demonstrators who allege rampant vote-count fraud in the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The jittery cellphone video footage of her bleeding on the street has turned "Neda" into an international symbol of the protest movement that ignited in the aftermath of the June 12 voting. To those who knew and loved Neda, she was far more than an icon. She was a daughter, sister and friend, a music and travel lover, a beautiful young woman in the prime of her life.
"She was a person full of joy," said her music teacher and close friend Hamid Panahi, who was among the mourners at her family home on Sunday, awaiting word of her burial. "She was a beam of light. I'm so sorry. I was so hopeful for this woman."
Security forces urged Neda's friends and family not to hold memorial services for her at a mosque and asked them not to speak publicly about her, associates of the family said. Authorities even asked the family to take down the black mourning banners in front of their house, aware of the potent symbol she has become.
Go read the whole article.
Here is the video of her death:
Here is an interview with a doctor who was a few feet away from Neda when she was shot...
Here's a summary in a nutshell of US policy and what's happening in the Muslim world:
"OK, let me see if I've got this right. Since Barack Obama has taken the presidential oath of office we have witnessed: a) Hezbollah lose a shoo-in election in Lebanon, b) Pakistan begin serious efforts to control the Taliban and al Qaeda elements inside its borders, c) Netanyahu of Israel mumble support about a two state solution and rethink settlements and, d) A major awakening of the Iranian citizenry against the heavy-handedness of the mullahs. What hasn't changed? The simple-minded thuggery of the Right when it comes to foreign policy (and Grover Norquist, someone should gently remind him that it's 2009, not 1989). They have long preferred a modified Teddy Roosevelt approach. Speak loudly and wail away with the biggest stick you can find. I don't know if all this is the results of one speech in Cairo by the President but if it is I hope he gives a second, and soon," - Carl Owen, Politico.
Notice how the author, Carl Owen, points out that the right wing nuts, the neocons, are so out of step with the world. Not only did they bring the world the eight year disaster of George Bush, they haven't accepted their failures and continue trying to bring forward a wrong policy for the present. Tragic!
Here is the crazed Right's wet dream:
If they had their way these black leather outfits would be the fashion rage for police/militia all around the world and the kind of thuggery that is going on in Iran would become standard "police procedure" around the world.
Here is an article by Roger Cohen in the NY Times on June 20 giving a feel for the turmoil inside Iran:
The Iranian police commander, in green uniform, walked up Komak Hospital Alley with arms raised and his small unit at his side. “I swear to God,” he shouted at the protesters facing him, “I have children, I have a wife, I don’t want to beat people. Please go home.”
A man at my side threw a rock at him. The commander, unflinching, continued to plead. There were chants of “Join us! Join us!” The unit retreated toward Revolution Street, where vast crowds eddied back and forth confronted by baton-wielding Basij militia and black-clad riot police officers on motorbikes.
Dark smoke billowed over this vast city in the late afternoon. Motorbikes were set on fire, sending bursts of bright flame skyward. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, had used his Friday sermon to declare high noon in Tehran, warning of “bloodshed and chaos” if protests over a disputed election persisted.
He got both on Saturday — and saw the hitherto sacrosanct authority of his office challenged as never before since the 1979 revolution birthed the Islamic Republic and conceived for it a leadership post standing at the very flank of the Prophet. A multitude of Iranians took their fight through a holy breach on Saturday from which there appears to be scant turning back.
Khamenei has taken a radical risk. He has factionalized himself, so losing the arbiter’s lofty garb, by aligning himself with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against both Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a founding father of the revolution.
He has taunted millions of Iranians by praising their unprecedented participation in an election many now view as a ballot-box putsch. He has ridiculed the notion that an official inquiry into the vote might yield a different result. He has tried pathos and he has tried pounding his lectern. In short, he has lost his aura.
...
I don’t know where this uprising is leading. I do know some police units are wavering. That commander talking about his family was not alone. There were other policemen complaining about the unruly Basijis. Some security forces just stood and watched. “All together, all together, don’t be scared,” the crowd shouted.
I also know that Iran’s women stand in the vanguard. For days now, I’ve seen them urging less courageous men on. I’ve seen them get beaten and return to the fray. “Why are you sitting there?” one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk on Saturday. “Get up! Get up!”
Another green-eyed woman, Mahin, aged 52, staggered into an alley clutching her face and in tears. Then, against the urging of those around her, she limped back into the crowd moving west toward Freedom Square. Cries of “Death to the dictator!” and “We want liberty!” accompanied her.
There were people of all ages. I saw an old man on crutches, middle-aged office workers and bands of teenagers. Unlike the student revolts of 2003 and 1999, this movement is broad.
I tend to project my hopes onto events. Maybe I'm fooling myself, but it appears to me that this revolt is real and has legs. It looks to me that the people have had it with the current regime in Iran and this will force a real change. At least I hope so.
Go read Roger Cohen's whole article. It is full of interesting insights and facts.
Perspective is everything. It helps to see how somebody else sees you. Here is an Iranian perspective on the Western democracies:
This is cartoonish. It is hard to believe that people this is directed at, the Iranian public, take this seriously. To me, the obvious heavy hand of government trying to "shape" public opinion goes a long way toward explaining why a lot of Iranians are in the street demonstrating. They object to a government that creates such obvious lies.
Governments in the West manipulate their own populaton, but with a lighter hand. Most people want to see their own country as "good" so they are willing to interpret facts in a positive light. Most Western governments rely on this to manage social control. The Iranians obviously has not caught on to this simple fact. They go well beyond a "deft hand" into the surreal world of a heavy-handed cartoon version of reality. People are not stupid. They don't like being manipulated in such an obvious way.
It is difficult to assess what is truly going on in Iran. It is obvious that the regime is corrupt and suppressive. They have thrown out foreign reporters and arrested local reporters. Their actions are blatant frauds, even as seen from this distance.
What is known are the following:
Mousavi was a radical in the 1979 revolution and served as Prime Minister during the Iran-Iraq war. Apparantly he has mellowed and is no longer as hard line. Another thought is that he has been caught up in the emotions of his "supporters" and moved toward a more liberal view. Perhaps it is an influence of his wife, Zahra, who was a political advisor to the reformer Khatami, the previous president.
All candidates in this election were screened to ensure their allegiance to the current state structure, the "Islamic republic". So differences are limited to how to rearrange furniture within the existing structure, not revolution to overthrow the current structure
There are deep rifts in the current leadership. Rafsanjani's daughter, Faezeh, attended Mousavi campaign rallies and has now been arrested by Ahmadinejad. Rafsanjani ran for president of Iran in 2005 and lost to Ahmadinejad so there is some bad blood between them.
This is a brutal regime. When it took power it crushed the Left and other elements that had been part of the revolt against the Shah. Executions were numerous. There are many books that give you insight into the brutality of the regime, for example Prisoner of Tehran: One Woman's Story of Survival Inside an Iranian Prison by Marina Nemat or a less brutal book but one with more insight into the ruling elite Things I've Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi.
In trying to interpret what is happening, you are left with reading opinions and trying to sift out the ones that sound correct. Here are a few opinions that appear to be sound:
It is true Mousavi has presented his campaign and movement as trying to restore and not unravel the Islamic revolution. This is an effective and necessary trope within Iran--Mousavi would have been prohibited from running, had he presented himself as opposed to the Islamic Republic. But efforts to reform the Islamic revolution in a meaningful sense have been exhausted. This is why Mousavi, insofar as he is a vessel of Iranian contempt for and rage at Khamenei, is the undoing of the 1979 revolution, not its restoration.
The Islamic revolution, if it is to mean anything, it is the institutions created after 1979 that guard a regular democracy from deviating from Islam. It is the office of a supreme leader, the assembly of experts, the guardian council etc.. These institutions have at every turn blocked the reformers, to the point that the reformers tried and failed in 2003--through constitutional amendment--to limit the powers of supreme leader, in order to pass the kinds of social and cultural reforms demanded by the vast majority of Iranians. And the reformers that sought to limit and modify the institutions of the Iranian state were met with something of a coup--all of those reformers were barred from running for re-election in the Majlis, many reformers were arrested, and any coordinated effort to reform the Islamic Republic since 2003 ran up against the hardliners in the state, whose job was to guard the revolution, a major subset of this group is the revolutionary guard. In this contest, there is a claim on both sides for the spirit of the 1979 revolution. But there is also a recognition, I think for Mousavi, that the Islamicness of the Islamic Republic has led Iran to this depraved state of affairs. I find it very hard to believe that if Mousavi's movement succeeds there will still be a supreme leader. He has talked about returning Iran's government to its people, and he is openly defying now Khamenei. In Persian thought there is a concept called Farr, the aura around the emperor. Roger Cohen wrote about this idea yesterday. Well it's gone. And that aura, this notion that the people's institutions, the presidency and the majlis must be checked by clerics, is gone too. None of this means that Islam will not thrive in Iran, but it will be a quietist Islam, the kind advocated by Montazeri and Sistani. Khomeinism, if Mousavi succeeds, is finished.
Moussavi issues this statement to the opposition and to the world. The most compelling description of the relationship between Moussavi and Karroubi to the opposition is that they're the vehicles for it, rather than acting as its leaders. While they appear to be rising to the moment, it's probably prudent not to describe the statement as a manifesto. But he wouldn't have said what he says here if he didn't think it captured the sentiment of the opposition.
And so it's conspicuous how fundamentally reformist a statement Moussavi has issued. His message is one of reaffirming the promise of the 1979 Iranian Revolution -- "a revolution for freedom, a revolution for reviving the dignity of men, a revolution for truth and justice." The era of Khomeini was one of enlightenment and joint spiritual and material fulfillment. Moussavi's career has been dedicated to proving "it was possible to live spiritually while living in a modern world." And although the new Iranian generation stands "accused of being removed from religion," its iconography and sloganeering -- the Sea of (Islamic) Green, the chants of God is greater than the enemy -- proves that it's possible to rekindle the spirit of the Islamic Revolution. That's what they fight and suffer and die for.
Clearly we're in the realm of myth, and foundational myth at that. It matters very little what westerners think about Moussavi's description of Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution. By locating the opposition within the promises of the Revolution, Moussavi claims a clear source of legitimacy, the same that the regime claims, and seeks to denies that legitimacy to Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. His rhetoric is designed to convince patriotic Iranians to join the opposition -- and to reassure the millions of Ahmadinejad supports that the opposition does not seek to fundamentally do away with their way of life.
This may be the most significant aspect of the statement:
If the large volume of cheating and vote rigging, which has set fire to the hays of people’s anger, is expressed as the evidence of fairness, the republican nature of the state will be killed and in practice, the ideology that Islam and Republicanism are incompatible will be proven.
This outcome will make two groups happy: One, those who since the beginning of revolution stood against Imam and called the Islamic state a dictatorship of the elite who want to take people to heaven by force; and the other, those who in defending the human rights, consider religion and Islam against republicanism.
Several things should now be apparent. First, he's really talking about the U.S. here, as we have for 30 years described the Islamic Republic in precisely the way Moussavi outlines. (And we've been right to have that view; or, at least, we haven't been wrong, descriptively speaking.) Accordingly, would it really be better for the opposition if we embraced Moussavi's neo-Khomeinist movement? Second, we in the west would not want to live under the sort of system that Moussavi envisions. But we are not the issue here.
Third, and most importantly, the west has nothing to fear from Moussavi's restorative attempt to reconcile Islam and republicanism in and of itself. Obviously the Iranian government has its interests and desires and we have ours, and they can conflict. But Moussavi's rhetoric, in this important speech at least, is not filled with the anti-western demagoguery that marked Khomeini's and marks Ahmadinejad's. The opposition movement is not a movement of "liberals" in the way that some inwardly-focused American writers lazily imagine. But that doesn't mean that the reformist syncretism that Moussavi offers adds up to an effort that western liberals, intellectually, can't support. What it means is that Iranians are working to redefine their Islamic Revolution, not abandon it, and do so in a way that favors openness and justice and freedom. The contours of that debate may be restricted by brute force over the coming days, but a significant proportion of the Iranian people are not going to settle for those restrictions for long. And they're pushing their interpretations of their foundational myths in a direction that Americans -- as progressives, as conservatives, and as everyone concerned about U.S.-Iranian relations -- can welcome.
It is true Mousavi has presented his campaign and movement as trying to restore and not unravel the Islamic revolution. This is an effective and necessary trope within Iran--Mousavi would have been prohibited from running, had he presented himself as opposed to the Islamic Republic. But efforts to reform the Islamic revolution in a meaningful sense have been exhausted. This is why Mousavi, insofar as he is a vessel of Iranian contempt for and rage at Khamenei, is the undoing of the 1979 revolution, not its restoration.
The Islamic revolution, if it is to mean anything, it is the institutions created after 1979 that guard a regular democracy from deviating from Islam. It is the office of a supreme leader, the assembly of experts, the guardian council etc.. These institutions have at every turn blocked the reformers, to the point that the reformers tried and failed in 2003--through constitutional amendment--to limit the powers of supreme leader, in order to pass the kinds of social and cultural reforms demanded by the vast majority of Iranians. And the reformers that sought to limit and modify the institutions of the Iranian state were met with something of a coup--all of those reformers were barred from running for re-election in the Majlis, many reformers were arrested, and any coordinated effort to reform the Islamic Republic since 2003 ran up against the hardliners in the state, whose job was to guard the revolution, a major subset of this group is the revolutionary guard. In this contest, there is a claim on both sides for the spirit of the 1979 revolution. But there is also a recognition, I think for Mousavi, that the Islamicness of the Islamic Republic has led Iran to this depraved state of affairs. I find it very hard to believe that if Mousavi's movement succeeds there will still be a supreme leader. He has talked about returning Iran's government to its people, and he is openly defying now Khamenei. In Persian thought there is a concept called Farr, the aura around the emperor. Roger Cohen wrote about this idea yesterday. Well it's gone. And that aura, this notion that the people's institutions, the presidency and the majlis must be checked by clerics, is gone too. None of this means that Islam will not thrive in Iran, but it will be a quietist Islam, the kind advocated by Montazeri and Sistani. Khomeinism, if Mousavi succeeds, is finished.
The symbol of the fight for an honest election in Iran appear to be Neda, a young woman killed during the demonstrations:
Photo is from flickr of a poster in San Francisco supporting the Iranian demonstrations
The story about her is:
At 19:05 June 20th Place: Karekar Ave., at the corner crossing Khosravi St. and Salehi st. A young woman who was standing aside with her father watching the protests was shot by a basij member hiding on the rooftop of a civilian house. He had clear shot at the girl and could not miss her. However, he aimed straight her heart.
I am a doctor, so I rushed to try to save her. But the impact of the gunshot was so fierce that the bullet had blasted inside the victim's chest, and she died in less than 2 minutes. The protests were going on about 1 kilometers away in the main street and some of the protesting crowd were running from tear gass used among them, towards Salehi St.
The film is shot by my friend who was standing beside me. Please let the world know.
Here is the video that captures her death, a victim of a regime that refuses to recognize democratic rights:
What happened this time is that the anger at the regime had reached such a level — because of near-20 percent unemployment and a rising youth population tired of seeing their life’s options limited by theocrats — that given a choice between a dark black regime candidate and a light black regime candidate, millions of Iranians turned out for light black: Mr. Moussavi. The Iranian people turned the regime man into their own candidate, and he seems to have been transformed by them. That is why the regime panicked and stole the election.
The playwright Tom Stoppard once observed that democracy is not the voting, “it’s the counting.” Iran’s mullahs were always ready to allow voting, as long as the counting didn’t matter, because a regime man was always going to win. But what happened this time was that in the little crack of space that the regime had to allow for even a faux election, some kind of counter-revolution was born.
Yes, its leader, Mr. Moussavi, surely is less liberal than most of his followers. But just his lighter shade of black attracted and unleashed so much pent-up frustration and hope for change among many Iranians that he became an independent candidate and, thus, his votes simply could not be counted — because they were not just a vote for him, but were a referendum against the entire regime.
But now, having voted with their ballots, Iranians who want a change will have to vote again with their bodies. A regime like Iran’s can only be brought down or changed if enough Iranians vote as they did in 1979 — in the street. That is what the regime fears most, because then it either has to shoot its own people or cede power. That is why it was no accident that the “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei, warned protestors in his Friday speech that “street challenge is not acceptable.” That’s a man who knows how he got his job.
And so the gauntlet is now thrown down. If the reformers want change, they are going to have to form a leadership, lay out their vision for Iran and keep voting in the streets — over and over and over. Only if they keep showing up with their bodies, and by so doing saying to their regime “we cannot be bought and we will not be cowed,” will their ballots be made to count.
I am rooting for them and fearing for them. Any real moderation of Iran’s leadership would have a hugely positive effect on the Middle East. But we and the reformers must have no illusions about the bullets and barrels they are up against.
This is exactly why Thomas Jefferson said "Occasionally the tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants." This is a tragic fact. Slimeballs weasel their way into power and the only way to get their "cold dead hands" off the levers of power is through violence. (Sorry, I couldn't resist using the very words used by that slimeball Charleton Heston in defending the undefendable NRA.)
In a statement on Saturday afternoon, Mr. Obama called the government’s reaction “violent and unjust,” and, quoting Martin Luther King Jr., warned again that the world was watching what happened in Tehran.
“We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost,” he said, adding: “Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.
“Martin Luther King once said: ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ ” I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.”
Those words sound noble, but are they real? I was going to include a clip showing the brutality of the Iranian regime. When I checked the clip before I inserted it here I discovered that it had been removed by YouTube with this note "removed due to terms of use violation". In other words, President Obama says "the world is watching" but YouTube has decided to side with the repressive regime and make sure we remain innocent of knowledge of the brutality. Talk about mixed messages!
The odd thing for me is that just over a century ago people went to public executions for "entertainment". Now we are too delicate a creature to see violence and bloodshed. If you can get past the YouTube censors you will see that Iranians treat the shed blood symbolically. They dip their hands in it and show it to all around to pass the message that life is sacred and that blood was shed. But the executives at YouTube think that showing the world as it really is is "morally wrong". In their world, we hide our eyes from the truth. Obviously if we live in a bowdlerized world we will be morally pure and safe.
I'm outraged. How can people act intelligently if they don't have access to the truth? Why do corporations decide to treat us as children unable to stare directly at the truth?
It is hypocritical for the US President telling people that we must "bear witness to the truth" while US corporations are censoring what desperate Iranian people can uploading onto the Internet. The US corporations are censoring the videos because they find them "morally offensive", but this is the ultimate in hypocrisy. On the one hand we are supposed to be offended by the violence in Iran. On the other hand we aren't allowed to see the violence. So how can you be offended? What is Obama talking about? Without seeing the truth all we are doing is shadow-boxing with opinions. The media is making sure that our "opinions" are sanitized, just like the Iranian regime has sanitized it media by turning off YouTube, Twitter, and all the other social media.
Hypocrisy!
A supporter of Iran's defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi shows her hand covered in the blood of a wounded person during a demonstration on June 20, 2009 in Tehran, Iran.
The beating and killing of students in 2009 is over a stolen election. The beating and killing of students in 1989 was over a demand for democracy by students in Tiananmen square. The beating and killing of students in 1970 was over a mindless war without end that was suddenly escalated by Nixon in his infamous "Cambodian Campaign".
History is an endless cycle. Those in power quash the young and idealistic. But hope springs eternal. In the struggle between the new and the old, between freedom and repression, the battle line surges and retreats. It is the ebb and flow of life.
Whatever happens next, Iran has already written a new chapter in the history of people power. Every single Iranian woman or man who has broken through a personal barrier of fear to protest peacefully on the streets of Tehran, Isfahan or Shiraz, wearing some strip of green, is making history.
Alone, each individual is powerless. Together, by the sheer power of numbers, they can – if only for a few hours – utterly confound the violent repressive power of the state. Even the brutal thugs of the Basij militia simply cannot beat so many human beings over the head. So long as the green-clad protesters remain non-violent, which the great majority of them do, and so long as they keep coming out in large numbers, Mahatma Gandhi will be applauding from beyond the grave. For they will have learned Gandhi's fundamental lesson about the power of the powerless.
The quintessence of people power remains the same, but every new chapter in its history brings some new development. This year's Iranian innovation is the deployment of the latest information and communication technologies.
Details of demonstration venues, tactics and slogans are passed round via Twitter, social networking sites like Facebook and text messages. Videos of demos and shootings are uploaded on to YouTube and other websites, whence they can be accessed from outside the country and broadcast back into it. Digital David fights theocratic Goliath.
None of which is to say that the young Iranians tweeting for freedom will succeed in the short term. Or that more of them will be not be assaulted and murdered in their student dorms by those Basij goons, as some already have been. Or that we in the west should rush to label this "the green revolution", and over-hastily compare it to the toppling of the Shah 30 years ago. Or that we should be naive about the motives of clerical schemers like Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose backroom manoeuvering is an important part of this story.
People power movements often do fail, at least in the short term. Like the Burmese protests of 2007, they then live on as memories and touching images of a brief people power moment – until, maybe decades later, they finally take their place in the retrospective mythology of a liberated country.
In this case, I have no doubt that the young men and women who provide much of the energy of the opposition demos will win in the end. Two out of every three Iranians is under 30. Many were born at a time when the mullahs were urging families to have more children – little "soldiers of the hidden Imam", propagandists called them – to strengthen the new Islamic regime and replace the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war. Thanks to a big expansion of higher education under the Islamic Republic, millions of them have been to university. Roughly half of those graduates are women. And more than two thirds of Iran's people live in cities.
This young, increasingly educated and urban population wants jobs, homes, opportunities and more freedom. Anyone who has travelled around Iran talking to these young people knows how discontented they are. Last week the whole world saw it, above all in the unforgettable faces and words of those Iranian women who, as women in an Islamic state, are doubly in need of the power of the powerless.
So this Islamic revolution has created the children who will eventually devour it. Those who were meant to be "soldiers of the hidden Imam" will one day see off the self-styled officers of the hidden imam, such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But that day seems unlikely to be today or tomorrow.
For now, we should concentrate on the stolen election. It was only the scale and brazenness of the electoral fraud that turned a moment of politics into a moment of history. If the regime had fixed it so Ahmadinejad scraped back with, say, 52% while the opposition candidates won in their home areas, there would have been protests – but probably nothing on this scale. Many, including western governments, might have accepted the result, recognising that Ahmadinejad does have a significant level of genuine support. Instead, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, licensed this bogus landslide and even blessed it as a "divine assessment".
As a result of the Supreme Leader's supreme political misjudgment, the protagonists of change now have two great advantages. First, there is a clear, simple appeal which attracts the support of millions of ordinary Iranians who may not agree on much else: "My vote was treated with contempt. It must be respected." Second, and crucially for the success of many people power movements, the regime itself is deeply divided.
For those Iranians who want significant change, the challenge now is to maintain the peaceful popular pressure and to keep it strategically focused on Mir Hussein Mousavi's demand for a fresh election. A crucial moment will come if the Guardian Council, which is now revisiting the "divine assessment" to the extent of countenancing a partial recount, decides over the next week or two that Ahmadinejad did win, albeit by a smaller margin of divine falsification. What then? Is there sufficient energy, somewhere between a self-mobilised, networked youth, the Mousavi camp and disaffected factions within the regime, to sustain the demand for a new election? Or will it all fizzle out, defeated by a combination of repression, censorship, exhaustion and disunity?
Only the people of Iran can answer this question. Only they have the right to answer it. For western governments to come out explicitly in support of Mousavi and the protesters – as George W Bush would have done, and John McCain now urges – would only give the regime a stick with which to beat Iranian democrats. This is, after all, a state that for decades has blamed all evil things on the machinations of the great (American) and little (British) satans. By contrast, to follow China and Russia in recognising Ahmadinejad's fraudulent victory – misguidedly putting a short-term interest in pursuing nuclear negotiations before the longer term interest of democratisation – would be a slap in the face of disenfranchised Iranians.
As so gratifyingly often over the last five months, Barack Obama has thus far got the balance just right.
There is, however, one thing our governments can and should do, without needing to say anything in direct relation to the authorities in Iran. This is to maintain and enhance the 21st-century global information infrastructure which allows Iranians – whichever candidate they support – to keep in touch with each other and to find out what is really happening in their own country. Earlier this week, I spent some time in the studio of the BBC Persian TV service, watching them upload and air electrifying video footage, blog posts and messages generated by Iranians from inside Iran.
Probably the single most important thing the US state department has done for Iran recently was to contact Twitter over the weekend, to urge it to delay a planned upgrade that could have taken down service to Iranians for some crucial hours of people power protest. Welcome to the new politics of the 21st century.
This is an excellent article. It hits all the right notes. It is cautious. It puts things in historical context. It urges the focus to be kept on the immediate in order to make the long term possible. Too many attempts at social change go off the rails because social demands explode into the utopian and too many voices confuse the populace. Finally, this article points out that change is hard, that change may not come quickly, that his may be yet another false dawn. It encourages but reminds people to be realistic. It points out that most things in life an achievement takes hard work and long term commitment. Too often easy "victories" are hollow. Real change requires real commitment and a sustained focus. This is an excellent article.
