Eccentric Flower:200906/Iran So Far
From Eccentric Flower
Iran, So Far
The irony is that, for a place whose government is attempting total media crackdown wherever it can, there is almost too much information and misinformation to sort out. This is what unfiltered, unaggregated news looks like. It's the future. I try to tell myself I have to get used to it.
But this much seems clear:
Khameini's speech was very brittle. Very Cotton Mather. It started with the "more in sorrow than in anger" patriarch stance, but underneath it was the clear idea: You have been warned. This is your last chance to repent. Stop protesting the election or we get mean. I'm not the only one who read it and got the clear signals that it was about to turn really nasty.
It turned really nasty.
The nominal government has flat-out called Mousavi a criminal. Mousavi, for his part, has gotten more and more daring in his public announcements - he has made it clear that he no longer has any respect for the mullahs at all, and has come dangerously close to saying that he accords them no legitimacy - a stance which is a death sentence in Iran. Some observers, and some people on the scene, are saying that Mousavi has made his peace with possible martyrdom, that he's acting as if he knows he will not survive this. He may not.
He has also called for general strikes and disruption if this continues. This is a man who now has absolutely nothing to lose. It's entirely true that he is no saint, although I think he is worlds better than Ahmadinejad, who has now been reduced to the ayatollah's lapdog. But Mousavi knows that, for better or worse, his fortune is now tied to the protests; that he stands or falls with revolution.
This has gone too far to stop. If the protesters stop now, it is entirely possible that many of them will be killed. At the very least, living conditions would be intolerable for most of them if they were to stop. They are all marked. The government has said as much.
In terms of the violence, the problem is not so much the regular police, who are severely outclassed and also somewhat conflicted. (Watch this video all the way to the end. For most of it the police are out of frame at the bottom except when they duck in to throw gas canisters. At the end, something very interesting happens.) Nor, despite the fact that they have the big guns, has much of the street violence been committed by the Revolutionary Guard. The real problem is the Basij, the paramilitary "morals police" the mullahs keep around to do their dirty work. Ansar is horrible too, but there's an age gap with Ansar - the students think of Ansar as older people who Just Don't Get It - but many of the Basij come from the same youthful stock as the protestors. (Remember always that Iran is a very youthful country; the median age of the population is like nineteen, or thereabouts.) They are viewed as traitors by many of the student protestors, and tensions are higher there - not helped by the fact that the Basij are apparently loose cannons in a very literal sense.
It was the Basij who produced the protesters' martyr: Neda. This footage is graphic, it shows a young woman dying. But watch it if you can take it. She was shot in the heart by a Basij. She was not protesting at the time, as far as I can tell. Time explains why mourning the dead has always been an important touchstone of political cycles in Iran. The Basij who shot her may have inadvertently written his own downfall. Only hours later people were marching with posters of her and calling her name.
Meanwhile, back in the dark, joyless halls of the theocracy, there are rumblings of trouble. Ali Khameini is not well and has been trying to arrange to have his son succeed him. This is known. Others in the inner circle are apparently not happy with this and are using this opportunity. Reportedly, some of them have gone so far as to challenge the election. Meanwhile, a major figure in the nation, former president Rasafjani, is widely suspected of bankrolling the reformers. In a classic trick aimed at keeping the chiefs in line, the regime arrested his daughter - but was then forced to release her.
Gotta be hurting right about now.
Meanwhile, one very interesting thing - on two levels, which I'll explain in a minute - is the number of women involved personally (and often vigorously) in the protests. It's interesting as a social observation, but to me the even more interesting thing is that commentators like Sullivan seem to find it so surprising.
To me it is not at all startling to find women fighting for revolution in a nation like that. It's like black soldiers fighting for the North in the Civil War: For them this is not an abstract.
