Sunday, December 6, 2009

Free Iran: The Time is Now

Posted by: Rachel Bevilacqua


This time tomorrow, the streets of Tehran will be filled once again with Green Movement protesters  committed to nonviolence in the face of certain brutality.  Students will go to sleep tonight not knowing if Ayatollah Khamenei's private army, the Revolutionary Guard, will trap them inside their universities tomorrow to prevent them from joining street demonstrations.  Mothers will go to sleep tonight not knowing if this is the last night their children will be safe at home.

Why do they do it?  Why keep on fighting after innocent, peaceful demonstrators like Neda were shot down in cold blood, and hundreds of others have been "vanished away" into the darkest recesses of the medieval Regime prison system, to be tortured, raped, and even killed, or allowed to die through medical neglect?  Why go on?


The Green Movement fights on because their victory is inevitable.  They are the overwhelming majority, and they fight for the noble cause of taking back their birthright to free speech, free assembly, and free thought.  An old saying goes, "Whenever people fight for Justice, they are never outnumbered, because there is Another who stands with them."  Maybe that Other is the collective consciousness of the planet, as we scan the net for information, waiting and thinking of those risking their lives.  Maybe it's a real deity who can intervene for Justice.  I don't know, but I know that history tells us people fighting to free their own land from oppressors always win in the end.

Iran News Now has an excellent analysis, "Why the Green Movement Will Prevail," in which the author states:

Let’s be clear about something right here and right now: the movement that is called the Green Movement in Iran, is the Iranian people! The Green Movement belongs to all Iranians who stand for fundamental human rights and dignity. The Green Movement, at is core, wants the same thing that all free peoples have: freedom, dignity, respect and representative government. It is not ideological. It is at its heart, a civil rights movement.
This is so important for the world to understand, that this is about more than just an election.  This is about the rights of the Iranian people to exercise their basic freedoms.  For 30 years the Regime propped up a facade of being an "Islamic Republic," and being at least in part answerable to its people.  The June protests, and the brutal crackdown that followed, shattered that facade, and caused the Green Movement to spring up, as Iran News Now goes on to explain:


Via the social networks, telephone, e-mail and other means, people communicated this phenomenon back to the ground level in Iran, and via broadcasts from the outside captured by satellite dishes on the rooftops of homes, people in Iran saw what was being done to them, saw their own people out in masses in the streets, saw that the world is aware of what is going on and realized their shared collective rage. This led to the realization that millions of them shared collective values and vision. This was the birth of the Green Movement. The entity became self-aware, but it did so in every single person who took any action in opposition to the repressive regime, however small. Everyone took part in they own ways, inside and outside of Iran, and their cumulative efforts was a gut punch to the regime.
That collective realization, and the power it brought to the Iranian people, shattering the illusion that each of them was alone in wanting change, is what formed the Green Movement and what will carry it through to victory.  As you go about your daily life, please spare a moment to think of these brave people, choosing to use nonviolence in the face of the utmost brutality, standing up for the rights that people in the West take for granted.   The story of Iran isn't about nukes.  It's about the people.




1 comment:

  1. Hi Reverend Magdalen,

    You have a great blog. Going to have to visit often. ;)

    Thanks for helping educate the world on what is happening in Iran, and on the struggle of the Iranian people.

    ReplyDelete