Voice from the Commonwealth
Commentary, World Views and Occasional Rants from a small 'l' libertarian in Massachussetts

"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest for freedom, go home and leave us in peace. We seek not your council nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams
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Saturday, August 03, 2002

Jmaes Woolsey does a fine job here of taking all of the evidence available about the situation in Iran now and places it in historical context to bring about a theory that Iran is now in a pre-revolutionary state. Just as the USSR was in the mid-late 80's (or France in 1788). Unlike the editorial in the NY Times today he takes the facts that we have, influential Ayaytollahs speaking out against the regime, students and workers protesting (sometimes violently) against the regime (the regime then turns around and teirs to fob these protests off as pro-regime anti-America), the refusal of the army and police to crack down necessitating the imprtation of foreigners to be riot control, forced (and often now, small) crowds to protest America, new harsh crackdowns by the ruling Ayatollahs and a number of others and ties this to the history of Iran and Shiite Islam.

All of this placed against the backdrop of pre-revolutionary Russia offers some interesting parallels. Especially intriguing is the added factor that the people of Iran well know what a popular uprising is capable of doing, as witnessed in 1979. Whereas the piece in the Times foucses on one item and applies the apparent talking points memos of the Ayaytollahs to show that far from pre-revolutionary somehow in their oppression the people of Iran have been galvanised by Bush's call for the freedom and self-rule of those oppressed, to come out in support of the very Ayatollahs oppressing them. That's an interesting proposition.

But as is always the case with post-moderninst, who have no need for history (I wonder why, it couldn't be because they usually turn out to be wrong?) when the revolution comes the NY Times will assert that they have always stood by the people of Iran and completely discount the effects of Bush's exhortations to the Iranians.

< email | 8/03/2002 12:37:00 PM | link




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