The following is an article on the 22nd of Bahman, and some of the lessons I think the Iranian Green movement should learn from the experience. It’s gotten a bit too long to be a single post already, so I will post it in installments. Please come back for the rest.
The great expectations and the diaspora
The demonstrations of the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution of Iran on the 22nd of Bahman in the Persian calendar (February 11th) were anxiously anticipated by most of the leaders and supporters of the Green movement of Iran as a potential milestone in their struggle to delegitimize and ultimately defeat the essentially illegitimate —or as the Greens prefer to put it, the coupe d’etat administration of Ahmadinejad. Now that it’s over, we may finally sit back, relax and reflect on what exactly happened, what did not happen, and the lessons to be taken for the future. Some reports indicate a significant pro-government presence virtually unchallenged by any measurable organized counter-presence. We may have been—as Juan Cole put it, checkmated by the regime. Until the next game, that is, or so we should hope.
As we prepare to move forward, it is important to start off by factually understanding and documenting the event. This is of especially critical importance for the Iranian expats who constitute the bulk of the leadership and the intellectual brain-power of the movement as the domestic cyber-space is practically under curfew by the government and all but the most primitive venues of collective action are inaccessible inside Iran.
We are understandably skeptical of the government’s propogandistic narrative of “The epic display of loyalty to ‘ Velayate Faghih’ “(the guardianship of the jurisprudent), and it’s also true that like anyone undertaking such a treacherous journey, keeping the spirits up is a must.
However, we need to realize that those of us who live abroad are particularly prone to slowly losing touch with the reality on the ground and sliding into a fantasy land of imaginary victories. This— if not already evident in the tactical failures of the expat leadership of the movement (if there ever was such a thing)— is definitely a dangerously real possibility for the future. It is not without a reason that the government is so actively in the business of pushing as many political activists as they can into self-exile (first by making their professional lives impossible by creating a suffocating atmosphere in the political and intellectual scene, and if that fails by simply making their lives miserable by arbitrary harassment and imprisonment until they finally decide they can’t but leave the country). As they have indicated openly, they don’t consider the massive Brain-drain of educated Iranians—which many consider a devastating loss for the country in the long run— a concern either. That frankly scares me immensely and I believe its implications should be carefully analyzed:
By sending dissidents into voluntary or involuntary exile, and cutting off their communication channels with the inside, the government seeks ultimately to “render them irrelevant”, and not without any success.
This is not something to be taken lightly. Even Ayatollah Khomeini may not have been able to conduct his anti-Shah campaign from his exile in Paris and elsewhere, were it not for the already-existing extended network of interconnected mosques and local religious groups which became the main infrastructure for organization, communication and mobilization for his campaign. Unlike his loyalists back then, we may be able to boast the most sophisticated means of communication and organization ever in existence, namely the Internet, but we need to realize on the flip side how easy it is for it to quite literally be “switched off” by the government as soon as it seems to jeopardize its monopoly.
To be continued…
