Iran

How can we help those who are demonstrating and dying on the streets?

I think that what we are already doing — paying rapt attention — is the most powerful thing Americans can do to empower Iran’s popular uprising. If the USA is preceived to be attempting to interfere, we empower repression. If we become a factor in the process, we muddy the waters. But if we simply pay attention, with open hearts and minds, and if we let ourselves be affected by what we see, and if we speak publicly about our human and moral perceptions, in public forums that Iranians can access, we help. It will be obvious that we are paying attention, that we are emotionally involved in witnessing their cultural confrontation, that we are moved and inspired by their courage, dignity, and restraint, that we are learning from their examples.

Mutual awareness involves taking new perspectives. That tends to serve growth into more nuanced structures of awareness. In this moment, the world’s simple witnessing awareness is making a subtle, but fundamental and benignly transformative difference. We are helping by sympathetically identifying with their symbolic martyr, Neda, her family, and her nation.

When the whole world is watching, heroes are seen, and thus empowered. (At least their sacrifice does not go unnoticed.) The world’s rapt attention makese a difference. The observed is changed by the presence of the observer. This intersubjective connection, this imperfect empathic urge unites us with Iranians in a larger “we-space.”

It is a subtle difference, and it doesn’t necessarily change behavior, except as new understandings naturally evoke new behavioral choices. But this simple shift might prove to be the “iota” of difference, the “straw” that tips the balance scales (which may tip only over months or years) in favor of reform and progress in Iran.

The uprising is fragmented. Its unity only concerns outrage against the clumsiness of the vote fraud. Ali Laranjani’s public statement questioning the vote tally was very mild, and buried in a series of denunciations of foreign powers for their public statements condemning the Iranian government. In the moderately arch-conservative no-man’s-land between Mousavi and Khamenei are perhaps dozens of potential kingmakers, including Laranjani.

Americans should not be confused into thinking that anti-Americanism will go away after this uprising reshapes the regime. Iranians have grown up hearing stories of how the U.S. plotted and financed the Shah before the overthrow of Mosaddeq’s fledgling democratic government in 1954 (after he nationalized BP’s Iranian oil holdings), how the US supported the Shah even when he brutally suppressed and exploited his subjects, how the US winked, financed, and even sold ingredients for chemical weapons to Sadaam which he used to maim thousands of Iranians in the Iran-Iraq war, including thousands of wounded veterans who are visible heroes who can be seen throughout Iranian society.

Mostly Iranians are fiercely proud of Iran. Nationalistic rhetoric resonates. This uprising is one enacted by nationalists against other nationalists. But it is not united and fueled by resentment of foreign imperialism.  Iranians’ common cause is their stand for their human dignity, their refusal to be bullied to give lip service to what they see as transparent electoral cheating. Will this prove strong enough to prevail? We’ll soon see.

As brutal as are their divisions, all Iranian players are nationalists, motivated by patriotic feelings. Persia has a strong national strain of mystical intensity. Their ethos celebrates feats of strength, endurance, sacrifice, and bravery that are enacted in passionate, intense, altered states of consciousness. These high states are linked to passionate emotions. If the cause is clearly righteous, and volunteers are seen to be noble and needed, there are thousands of potential martyrs in Iran.

Thus, there will be a compromise, or there will be disaster.  Anything but compromise would require Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to tear apart their country with purges of most of their best-educated countrymen, in something analogous to China’s cultural revolution. Every institution of Iranian civil society contains large numbers of people who question the election and the Supreme Leader.

There are just too many people who might think for themselves. Meanwhile, Iranians of all stripes are getting a huge dose of new experiences of the very kind that is most likely to stimulate them to rethink a lot of things.
Iranians are being empowered by current events. The eyes of the world have been on Iran in a whole new way — sympathetically, admiringly, appreciatively, not as hostile pariahs. And the star of the show during this great moment of history has been Iran’s ordinary Iranians. How will it affect a whole nation to experience this change of perceptions. What is it like, under these cultural and historical circumstances, to go from  being seen as the “axis of evil” to the most admired and heroic of the world’s citizens?

There are millions of people who saw the rigged election results as an unacceptable insult to their intelligence and dignity. “We’re smarter than you think!” they are saying. Mousavi, Montezeri, and Khatami have said it too. But then, a popular movement spontaneously erupted, and the crowds pushed Mousavi further than he would have ventured on his own.

The demonstrations were spontaneous, emotional, and yet still patriotic, still using the traditional symbols and gestures. They marched holding copies of the Koran, they shouted “Allah-o-Akbar” from the rooftops, they declared days of mourning. They very naturally adopted much of the rhetoric and tactics of the revolution that brought the Islamic Republic of Iran into existence. They wanted their experience of justice to be seen.

And what is being mirrored back by the “whole world watching” is respect and congratulations.

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An Overview of the Transformative Events of June 2009

I think the events we have been seeing this month —June 2009 — represent a seismic shift, a great exclamation point in the punctuated evolution of the Islamic Republic. It is not just a political shift. This week of demonstrations, involving the shutdown of much of Iran, including the government’s intermittent shutdown of its whole communications infrastructure, have affected people who previously were not terribly activist, or reformist. Many have been radicalized. Many more have been forced to think. And feel.

Perceptions so far, politically:

Ahmadinejad seems to have been weakened tremendously. He can no longer pull off his “man of the people” act in the same way as before. He appears suddenly crude to his countrymen. He can still do damage, but his larger influence will be in decline.

Khamenei has probably lost his aura of legitimate, overwhelming authority. He has been publicly discredited in the eyes of at least half the people, and many of the members of the clerical establishment. The very function of “Supreme Leader” is no longer secure.

Mousavi has become the man of the hour — the righteous leader wronged by corrupt authorities, the “Hossain” archetype of martyrdom that is the central theme of Persian Islam. This makes him dangerous, and puts him in serious danger.

Former President Rafsanjani is the wiliest and most powerful of the big players, and he’s been the only one who has been publicly silent — and very active behind the scenes. Through the Assembly of Experts or the military, he could become the new kingmaker, or he may be in a difficult struggle for his political survival.

Former President Khatami, the also-ran Presidential candidates Karroubi and Rezai, Grand Ayatollah’s Montazeri and Saanai, and Ayatollahs Javadi Ameli, Amini and Ostadi have all publicly challenged the accuracy of the electoral results announced by the Ministry of the Interior. More and more stakeholders in the Islamic Republic have been alienated by the regime’s violent repression of its own citizens.

Even Ali Laranjani, the former nuclear negotiator and arch-conservative architect of the brutal suppression of the student demonstrators of 2003, has publicly questioned the official tally (which makes sense, given his history of conflict with Ahmadinejad.

Although the regime has the guns and the will to use them, there are real limits to the regime’s ability to exercise this power.

Even if there is no evidence of centrally-organized-and-executed fraud, everyone knows the elections system was staffed with Ahmadinejad’s political employees. If any disgruntled employee of the elections system goes public with stories of electoral fraud (even anonymously, with a well-told story in a local blog, which is almost sure to happen) Ahmadinejad and Khamenei  will both be even more fatally weakened.

All this is happening at a time when all Iranians have been deputized as journalists and historians by their mere possession of a cell phone with text capabilities or a still or video camera. People who would never before have used their cameras now realize they are holding a weapon. How will this affect their neighbors who worked in any humble position and observed something “fishy” at any of the polling places? Even if all participants were carefully screened, this society is too divided for the regime to feel arrogantly certain that even minor electoral cheating will not be exposed in the weeks ahead.

Worse yet, it is likely to go viral, further wresting control of the narrative from the leaders, like the martyrdom of the young Iranian woman, Neda, who was shot dead by the Basij in front of a video camera and the eyes of the world. She is becoming a heroine, the most visible martyr of this uprising.

Political and Cultural Undercurrents

Meanwhile, Laranjani and Rezai are military men, and Rajsanjani has many military supporters, so the entire military is not in lockstep unity with Khamenei and Ahmadenijad. The basij and the Revolutionary Guard (Ahmadinejad’s original constituency) are controlled by true-believer Islamic neoconservatives. But the regular Iranian Armed Forces are public institutions, containing fighting men from every segment of Iranian society. Right now all the guns on the streets belong to the regime’s guys. But that monopoly is not absolute. Ultimately, all parties know they are vulnerable. 

This is also a generational confrontation, with Ahmadinejad’s youthful faction emboldened by its momentum. But most young Iranians are equally passionate, and better educated. Ahmadinejad’s cohort overplayed their hand. Their best option now is to retain power and minimize losses.

Many of the senior leaders in Iranian society have serious misgivings about Khamenei’s harsh response to the demonstrations. They and the people behind the opposition movement (most of them young and impassioned) cannot all be purged and marginalized. They are too many, too pervasive. The regime cannot simply suppress and purge all of its opponents. The nation cannot sustain the economic injuries that would come from long shutdowns of Iran’s Internet and text messaging systems.

The long-term momentum belongs to the opposition. The regime cannot completely suppress this citizen uprising because the opposition sees itself as heroic in a broad new struggle. The opposition has been energized and ennobled, while the regime has become angry, brutal and unimaginative. It’s hard to estimate how big a factor this advantage (in energy, style, and panaché) will prove to be.

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