« Netanyahu’s Kafkaesque vision of Palestinian statehoodProfiting from Scarcity »

THE GREENING OF IRAN

June 15th, 2009

Allen L Roland

Something important happened in Iran this weekend and its color is green. The idea of adopting the color Green was begun, for the first time in an Iranian election, by supporters of Mr Moussavi, who apparently lost to fundamentalist president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a disputed election. However, in the process, Green has now become the color of national protest:

Something important happened this weekend in Iran's presidential election and it resembled the tactics, organization, mud slinging and perhaps even vote manipulation of recent American national elections.

As the Washington Post reported ~ "As Iranians go to the polls Friday to choose a president, the country is more deeply polarized than at any time since the Islamic revolution that overthrew the shah 30 years ago. After a bitter campaign that included personal attacks on some of Iran's leading families, both sides are preparing to contest the results, and many Iranians wonder whether the social and economic rifts exposed by the election will deepen."

About the candidates for president

" Ahmadinejad had turned the Iranian economy upside down, making sure that advantages flowed to the lower class. His government has increased state wages and pensions and has made health insurance free for 22 million people. He derided economists who blamed him for high inflation and unemployment, saying that they are tied to the higher classes and that his goal is to "spread justice."

His leading challenger was Mousavi, an urbane, soft-spoken architect who was prime minister from 1981 to 1989. Though out of power for two decades, Mousavi was in many ways the Iranian establishment's candidate.

Mousavi's political foot soldiers, in turn, were disgruntled middle-class youths, intellectuals, artists and academics who have been alienated by the current government's radical rhetoric and pervasive restrictions on personal freedom, such as police controls on the way people dress, the banning of books and the disciplining of dissident students.

The result was a confrontation not just between Iran's haves and have-nots, but between the old revolutionaries who seized power from the shah and a new cadre of radicals seeking to dislodge them. "

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/11/AR2009061104106.html?sid=ST2009061104183

Sounds familiar, does it not. It's the disenchanted youth versus the establishment with Moussavi riding that green wave of change.

But do remember, Iran is a Theocracy ~ not a Democracy ~ and it appears, as Newsweek reports, " that the working classes and the rural poor ~ the people who do not much look or act or talk like most Iranians ~ voted overwhelmingly for the scruffy, scrappy president who looks and acts and talks more or less like them. And while Mousavi and his supporters are protesting and even scuffling with police, they are just as likely to be overwhelmed in the streets as they were at the polls." http://www.newsweek.com/id/201934

80% of the people voted and most of them supposedly for Ahmadinejad but, once again, remember Mr. Ahmadinejad, is the first non-clerical president in more than 25 years, and basks in the support of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who called on Iranians to vote for an anti-Western candidate.

The Ayatollah ultimately calls the shots in Iran, where the president can only influence policy, not decide it ~ and that probably extends to who wins an election.

As Juan Cole reports today in Salon ~ " So, there are protests against an allegedly stolen election. The Basij paramilitary thugs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will break some heads. Unless there has been a sea change in Iran, the theocrats may well get away with this soft coup for the moment. But the regime's legitimacy will take a critical hit, and its ultimate demise may have been hastened, over the next decade or two." http://www.truthout.org/061409Z

Democracy is a slow and painful process and most certainly within a Theocracy ~ but this was a giant first step which could eventually lead to the greening of Iran.

Allen L Roland http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2009/06/14.html

Allen L Roland is available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements and private consultations ( allen@allenroland.com )

Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net

-###-

Allen Roland’s weblog: http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/
Website: www.allenroland.com
ONLY THE TRUTH IS REVOLUTIONARY

No feedback yet

Voices

Voices

  • Tracy Turner The Reclamation of the Republic When, in the Course of human events, it shall become absolutely necessary for the People to dissolve the political ties which have united them to a government that has betrayed its trust to obtain their…
  • Tracy Turner SMELE's (Slow-Motion-Extinction-Level-Events). Not yet common in academia, but it should be. I. Introduction: The Timebombs We Ignore "Not with a bang but a bureaucratic shrug, the world ends." - Revisionist reading of Eliot by the…
  • By David Swanson I wish U.S. academics would spend less time fantasizing choices between various murders with trollies, or playing games with theories about how greedy robots might do diplomacy, and more time on the impeachment problem. The United…
  • Cathy Smith Hidden Bombshells in Trump’s “Big Bodacious Pill” “The most dangerous place to be is between power and its reckoning.” —Rewritten maxim of Beltway survival In the dark guts of Trump’s 2025 legislative monolith—cheekily christened the Big…
  • Robert David A global exposé of how corporations distort science, erase truth, and turn human death into quarterly growth. I. Introduction: When Truth Becomes a Liability In an age when algorithms dictate belief and lobbyists author legislation, truth…
  • Robert David Polluters don’t just dump toxins. They dump stories—engineered by billion-dollar PR firms. They Poisoned the Planet—Then Hired Spin Doctors to Make You Forget When a chemical spill poisons a town, when a pipeline ruptures in a fireball,…
  • By David Swanson, World BEYOND War Switzerland got that way through NEUTRALITY Remarks at Neutrality Colloquium: A Call to Action for Active Neutrality & World Peace, June 26-27, 2025 in Geneva, Switzerland. I grew up in a town in the United States that…
  • Fred Gransville I. The Fluoride Question For decades, fluoride has had an uncontested official story: it is a beneficial, even benevolent substance—vital to healthy teeth. In toothpaste tubes to water supplies, fluoride has been presented as a dental…
  • Tracy Turner #SCOTUScorruption #FascistAmerica #EndCitizensUnited Bush started it. Obama enabled it. Trump perfected it. And the Court? It never checked power—it built it. I. Opening Jab: The Judicial Illusion "They wear robes to appear impartial. But…
  • Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic Carl von Clausewitz The focal questions about war In dealing with both theoretical and practical points of view about war, at least six fundamental questions arise: 1) What is war?; 2) What types of war exist?; 3) Why do wars…
July 2025
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
 << <   > >>
    1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31    

  XML Feeds

Online manual generator
FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted articles and information about environmental, political, human rights, economic, democratic, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. This news and information is displayed without profit for educational purposes, in accordance with, Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 of the US Copyright Law. Thepeoplesvoice.org is a non-advocacy internet web site, edited by non-affiliated U.S. citizens. editor
ozlu Sozler GereksizGercek Hava Durumu Firma Rehberi Hava Durumu Firma Rehberi E-okul Veli Firma Rehberi