| I haven't written anything about the protests in Iran. I don't feel like it's my place to comment, really. Popular revolts are powerful and mysterious and thrilling. But I don't know the politics of the country, and, like Matt, feel that symbolic support for the protesters feels hollow somehow. But, like you, I've been riveted by the videos and tweets and blog posts coming out of Tehran. Me, I've been following the protests on Andrew Sullivan's site.
Part of me is wary of the enthusiasm - especially from conservatives - about the protests. Even if they do succeed and manage to topple Ahmadinejad, I suspect Iranian representative democracy won't gibe with neocon fantasy. After all, Ahmadinejad was at his most popular when stoking anti-Western and -Semitic passions.
Still, the protests are hopeful and thrilling. A reminder that government lives at the consent of the governed.
I like this piece in Time by Howard Chua-Eoan:
As a journalist, I cannot say that what I have read and seen today is the whole story: everything is too piecemeal, too unconfirmable, too one-sided. But experiencing the raw feed of history has been chilling. As we try to carve out the truth from the speculation and relentlessly repeated reports of outrage, the overall impression is one of immense sadness and tragedy, of a country seeking to preserve itself by destroying itself....
In the weekend cacophony of messages and videos, one note lingers. A video postedK the night before the crackdown is of a woman reading a poem about Iranians standing up to change their country, afraid but determined to move into the morning, even if it is to face forces that would destroy them. The voice is sad and at one point almost breaks into a sob, and in the backdrop of the Tehran night can be faintly heard protest chants: Allahu-Akbar, Allahu-Akbar. God is Great,God is Great. A Palestinian friend of mine remarked that those words would once have struck fear into the hearts of Americans. Now they inspire. That is a revolution all by itself.
I haven't mentioned this much, if ever, here or elsewhere, but I lived in Germany during the 1989 revolution that brought down the Berlin Wall and reunified the country. I even managed to spend a semester at an East German University during the "in-between time," the period after the Communist Party was ousted from power and before the reunification with West Germany.
During the early stages of the revolt, I hitchhiked to Berlin with a friend. Somehow - the memory is fuzzy - I ended meeting a friend of a friend, an East German student, in East Berlin. She took me to a small protest of students, maybe 500 students, at the Opernplatz, a short distance from Humboldt university and the site of a notorious book-burning by German students and Nazi followers in 1933. It was terrifying. There was no violence, no East German equivalent of the Basiji beating protesters with sticks, no tear gas. And there wouldn't be. But no one knew that at the time. At any moment, they knew, the KPD could unleash the state apparatus and crush the protests. And who knew? Maybe they'd start here, with these students.
It takes a lot courage to stand up with a protest sign against an authoritarian government. Forget Reagan and conservative foreign policy: it was the courage of these students and other protesters that toppled the Iron Curtain, that democratized East Germany. Without millions of East Europeans rising and protesting, the region's Communist dictatorships might still be in power today. |
