TURN OFF YOUR CELL PHONES, THEY CAN DETECT YOU....
NOT SINCE THE 1979 Iranian Revolution that deposed the Shah (our ally who then-president Jimmy Carter turned his back on) and installed the dreadful mullahs (again, thank Jimmy) has there been such an outpouring of protest and pent-up anger in the streets of Tehran. Holy Moses, what a crowd! An estimated 1.5 million people took to the streets to demonstrate against the fraudulent re-election of the little man who would soon be known as Atomic Ahmadinejad.
Maybe I've been too focused on the Fed's antics and stock market sideways trading to see it coming, but this amazing, dazzling show of resistance and protest literally takes my breath away.
And you know what? We should take some BIG lessons from these brave Iranians and gear ourselves up to march on Washington, D.C if things continue to go downhill with out-of-control government spending and bureaucracy.
We should go and make a huge, huge scene---blocking traffic, causing business-as-usual to-grind to a halt until we've re-established some accountability with our elected officials. Karl Denninger tells why we taxpayers in the U.S. we should be outraged and then go and do something loud and unruly about it.
Meanwhile, The Washington Times has more on the growing unrest in Tehran:
Opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who many here think was the real victor of Friday's elections, emerged from seclusion for the first time since the vote to address the crowd, which was estimated to number as many as 1.5 million people.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Muslim cleric who initially confirmed an Ahmadinejad victory, abruptly changed direction and promised a probe into allegations of ballot-rigging, although it was not clear whether the action was merely a ploy to curb unrest.
I doubt anything is going to curb this soon. The mullahs never counted on Twitter, the horizontal platform that shakes and rattles vertical tyranny and oppression.
Michael Ledeen writes at Pajamas:
What’s going to happen?, you ask. Nobody knows, even the major actors. The regime has the guns, and the opposition has the numbers. The question is whether the numbers can be successfully organized into a disciplined force that demands the downfall of the regime.
Yes, I know that there have been calls for a new election, or a runoff between Mousavi and Ahmadinezhad. But I don’t think that’s very likely now.
The tens of millions of Iranians whose pent-up rage has driven them to risk life and limb against their oppressors are not likely to settle for a mere change in personnel at this point. And the mullahs surely know that if they lose, many of them will face a very nasty and very brief future.
If the disciplined force comes into being, the regime will fall. If not, the regime will survive.
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Thanks, Greg for Tweeting my interest.
I trust they will be able to see this through. I must confess that seeing the Iranians protest like this makes me upset that Venezuelans have not done more of this.
ReplyDeleteRita, perhaps Latin Americans are less inclined to fight (after years under Roman Catholism??) At any rate it appears Chavez has sent some help to Ahmad who's also called in Hezbollah thugs and killers from Syria and Lebanon. Michael Ledeen writes today at Pajamas:
ReplyDelete"The young Islamic revolutionaries of the late 1970s are now middle aged, and do not wish to slaughter their neighbors. That is why the mullahs have imported killers from abroad: the five thousand or so Hezbollahis who, according to Der Spiegel, have been brought in from Lebanon and Syria. Dissidents on Twitter report clashes with security forces who do not speak Farsi, and there are even some rumors suggesting that Chavez has sent some of his toughs from Venezuela. Who knows?
The other great threat to the regime comes from the upper reaches of the clergy. Do not be surprised to see some senior ayatollahs denounce the regime; many have done so in the past (Ayatollah Montazeri has been under house arrest for years, and Ayatollah Boroujerdi has been subjected to horrible torture for criticizing the lack of freedom in Iran). We are still quite early in this process.
But the key element is the people. They are only just beginning to understand the reality of their situation. Virtually none of them imagined that they would be in a revolutionary confrontation with the regime just two days after the electoral circus, and few of them can realize, so soon, that they can actually change the world. I think the Mousavis now understand it (they know that they are either going to win or be destroyed). It remains to be seen if they can instruct and inspire the movement.
Much will depend on their ability to communicate. The regime has been waging a cyberwar against the dissidents, shutting down websites, cell phones, Facebook, and the like. As most people have learned, the basic communiations tool is Twitter, which somehow continues to function. Bigtime Kudos to Twitter, by the way, for postponing its planned maintenance so that the Iranians can continue to Tweet. Would that Google were so solicitous of freedom.
Besides Gateway Pundit and The Strata-Sphere, most of the reporting I've seen has come from Michael J. Totten, who is currently posting much of his Iran stuff at Commentary.
ReplyDeleteHope all the links came through, as he is well worth checking out.
FYI.
(P.S. - Someone griped about a floating ad on the Commentary site. It has a closing "X" at the upper right hand corner, and I had no problem making it go away. Please, DON'T blow off the site just because of that.)
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Thank you Paul for these excellent links...great addition to the conversation....it's no longer about an election...it's about mass tyranny of a people and a people who have been pushed to their limits...our government had best take note of this.
ReplyDeleteOn another blog, a commenter, on a post about "Freedom in Iran", observed...
ReplyDeleteI have to say right now that we should be very cautious about depicting the Iranians as liberal-thinking Westerners who want total freedom. This is a mistake that we make all the time.
Perhaps, but…
How many times have we partnered with, or dealt “pragmatically” with, some oppressive regime, using the justification that their people weren’t “READY” for freedom (as if they were sub-human or something). I really think this is an EXCUSE for preserving status quo.
Can it be possible, just possible, that after recent events, there could be some Iranians wondering, “If the Iraqis and Afghans can pull off genuine elections, WHY THE HELL CAN’T WE?!!!”
(Just saw, over at Gateway Pundit, an Iranian protester holding a sign that translated into, “DON’T FORGET WHAT HAPPENED TO SADDAM!!!.)
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Great stuff, Paul, thanks.
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