Sunday, November 22, 2009

The Green Movement: Countering Objections




These days it's become pretty popular for pundits to say the Green Movement is a failure and insist that only war and sanctions can change the Iranian Regime.

When teenyboppers on Twitter started saying this in late summer, I just laughed at their impatience. The 1978-79 Revolution in Iran took about a year of demonstrations and protest to bring about change, so of course it would be ridiculous to think that the Green Movement could completely reform a corrupt de-facto military coup, whose legitimacy is based on the flawed anti-democratic concept of rule by supreme leader, in only a few weeks. The internet is amazing but it is not magic.

Since it seems that now even respected grown-ups, who may or may not have investments in the military/industrial complex, are jumping on the bandwagon of calling the Green Movement finished, I'd like to counter some of the objections these people bring up to defend their gloomy predictions.



Objection 1: "They're just not ready for democracy."

This objection is frankly nothing more than racism. Everyone, even farmers who can't read and live way out in remote areas, want, by definition, to live the way THEY want to live. And as long as they're not hurting anybody else, they ought to be able to. That's democracy, in a nutshell. To say that someone isn't ready to live that way is to say they are less than human.

History also disputes the notion that Iranians are somehow genetically unfit to have freedom, as King Cyrus the Great issued the first known charter of human rights granting freedom of religion to all his subjects. Restoring human rights to the people of Iran will not be some new innovation they might not be ready for, it will be returning to their most basic roots in history.


Objection 2: "Demonstrations keep getting smaller, while in '79 they got larger every time."


The police in 1978-79 were much less brutal. Women, the elderly, and children were not beaten, and the conditions in the prisons were far more humane. Given the brutality and very real danger of death, torture, and rape faced by the demonstrators, it is a testament to the strength of the Green Movement that anyone is going out at all. I'm sure Khamenei thought that people's spirits would have broken by now, but they just keep pushing onward, organizing demonstration after demonstration.

True, at every protest some people are hurt or arrested, but for every person hurt or arrested there is a network of friends and family who may not have been "radicals" before, but who will certainly become so when the regime's brutality touches their lives. It's worth noting as well that Ahmadinejad has had several public appearances since the election, and failed to draw large crowds as would be expected if he had truly won a two-thirds majority of votes and maintained overwhelming popular support.


Objection 3: "The Green Movement has no defined leader."


Well, what functions does a leader fulfill? Does it have to be one charismatic old guy in a beard? We know of many groups that are led by consensus, like a board of directors running a company or interactive votes determining the outcome of a reality show. The true "leaders" of the Green Movement are the anonymous people who create, print, and distribute the posters that coordinate the demonstrations.


Is that type of leadership good enough to overthrow the coup Regime? It depends. If what you want to do is conduct a precise military attack, then yes, you need one leader to coordinate the teams to make sure each does their part. But if all you want to do is to get EVERYBODY to do ONE thing, like not show up to work anymore, then it's actually a benefit to have that message spread by as many people as possible at once, so that even if many are arrested, the posters still go out, the action still goes forward. There's no head to decapitate, no way for the movement to be silenced in one catastrophic loss. As long as one Green still has access to a printer and a cell phone, the movement lives.

Objection 4: This Regime is too ruthless to be removed without civil war.


This objection is actually the most believable, because when the truth about police brutality, prisoner abuse and the death of Neda came to the world's attention, it seemed like Khamenei was definitely the type of dictator who would use indiscriminate lethal force to try to restore control. However, on 13 Aban we saw that while he is willing to go to the utmost lengths of brutality to intimidate people, he is not willing to simply mow down thousands of unarmed people in the street.  On 13 Aban, security forces fired dye at people, hoping to catch and arrest them later, but they did not kill.

However, even if Khamenei were to become this ruthless, and simply order wholesale slaughter, that would merely speed up his inevitable downfall.  Military service is compulsory for Iranian youth, so, far from being the powerless civilians they're often portrayed as, the youth of Iran are perfectly capable of handling an armed insurrection if thousands of their number were massacred, especially by paramilitary forces like the private religious army, the Revolutionary Guards, or the plainclothes volunteer Basiji.


16 Azar is coming, and once again the people of Iran will demonstrate that they are ready for democracy, they know how to get it, and they will not be turned aside or scared away.  It's only a matter of time before they astonish the world with the birth of a new Free Iran.

9 comments:

  1. i love section 2 and your exactly right these protests hav gotten smaller and they need to protest more often as well

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  2. Just that the ideology you are trying to spread is of a genuine COMMUNIST nature: creating masses of brainwashed people, without a defined political option, an action plan and a leadership. Lenin himself wouldn't have write a better blog than yours. I told you Rev that you are an American Communist bitch!
    *This is from Dinesco, the well known anti-communist, anti-islamist, anti-greenidiocy and anti-bitches !
    PS: Why don't you exercise your talents on making a better pizza?

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  3. @Dinescu Wow my blog is less than a week old and I already have a troll!! Awesome!

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  4. Until SoG and #greenidiots have clear political options on Religion and Governing.. you all are a bunch of islamo-communists, even if you are not aware of it and of who is using you.
    Try to understand who might want to create a Color Revolution in Iran in order to consolidate it's influence in Asia and control the oil-gas prices. You will find one country: Russia!
    Which other country might be interested to use Russia in order to influence USA? You will find Israel.
    Now look at the Haystack operation and at those who took their side.
    It's very simple to see who are the agents lurking in #iranelection, what is propaganda and what a normal behavior. Just that 95% of the twits there are pure propaganda and the normal behavior appears abnormal. And all those who try to say something with an open mind and non-affiliate thinking are spam attacked and banned.
    The other side of the coin is that realities in Iran are far from the image one can get reading #iranelection, the hashtag became a pure delirium.

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  5. @Dinescu You grew up in a Communist dictatorship, so the only people you knew who were patriotic were Commies. Now you conflate the two and think everyone who's patriotic is also a Commie! Nonsense!

    It's OKAY to love your country if it's a free one where your peers are fairly and democratically elected to representative office, and seeing some of the nutjobs who get elected to the US Congress, I'm reassured that, God Bless America, I do live in a free country where anybody CAN participate in government.

    Feeling a kinship with your fellow citizens, and empathy for the people of another nation, is not always some sick commie plot. Sometimes it's a natural emotion that anybody would feel.

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  6. Rev, commies have no country, their country is any country. The Romanian patriots, some 200.000 of them died in the mountains and prisons.
    Be aware that the Green Movement was plot before elections by a wing of IRGC with large FSB & Mossad assistance. And that there is an extraordinary war at the top of IRGC/Basij going on.

    My insights are based by analyzing the semantics of the facts via a method we use in Macro-systems Engineering when analyzing events. The method, if properly used cannot fail. By now I never failed.

    Lissnup is spreading an occult and very smart subliminal propaganda which of course doesn't come from her pour mind of unemployed housewife, and the essence of it is communist with islamic clothes.

    Since you are so critical with me, why don't you take some time to analyse the activity of Lissnup and his Green Church, or Mosque, however you wish?

    Perhaps you don't know much about the Communist Psychological warfare, but the good sense and logics can drive you to the truth about what's going on in Iran.

    Btw, I know you are not affiliated and just speak your mind, this is why I paid you so much attention. :-)

    Try to be more critical on your next posts.

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  7. Nice blog, Rev. Too bad about Vlad.
    aka jlbtwee

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  8. @Dinescu Sorry, I'm just not going to add another objection for "They use subliminal communist mind control through semantics!" because that one is obviously the delusion of a crazyperson. I keep telling you, get more sunlight! Take a vacation in Spain or something! The world is safe from Commies, though we do have new threats to deal with these days.

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  9. @jlbtwee Thanks! I don't mind the Vlad, I'm happy to let anyone express themselves as long as they don't overstep the bounds of respecting privacy and such.

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