Iran’s Revolution and the Global Politics of Resistance

Iran’s Revolution and the Global Politics of Resistance
5 April 2012 – By Vinay Lal – truthout

Book Review – The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future edited by Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel

In the euphoria over the “Arab Spring”, which has brought revolutions to the doorsteps of autocratic regimes that only last year seemed unflappable in their resolve to keep the aspirations of their peoples suppressed, it becomes imperative to recall that the first sustained signs of change in west Asia in recent years appeared in Iran. The Arab world seemed so firmly in the grip of monarchs and dictators, many of them bolstered by the United States (US), which has been in the business of exporting the rhetoric of electoral democracy to the world but has feared reform and revolution at every turn, that no one expected the people to take to the streets in millions. And how people have stormed the streets, facing police barricades, braving tear gas and baton charges – and not just in the Arab world! The Arab spring turned into a long summer of discontent, as signs of protest began to appear in other parts of the world, in Athens, Rome, Madrid, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere. As these lines are being written, the Occupy Wall Street movement has even brought dissenters and rebels to the fore in the US, where politics for far too long has been reduced to an exercise of choosing between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Yet, all this was anticipated in Iran’s dramatic political upheaval in June 2009, the outcome of which, perhaps contrary to received opinion, is far from settled.

Road to Revolution

Though nearly everything in Iran is marked by the watershed events of 1979 that led to the ouster of the Shah and the assumption of power by the Ayatollahs, it is possible that some years from now the phrase, “after the revolution”, will resonate with an altogether different meaning. The burden of the present collection of essays, The People Reloaded, which brings together the reflections of some 50 scholars, activists, and observers of contemporary Iranian society, is to suggest that we may be in the midst of another momentous upheaval in Iran’s 30 years after the revolution which replaced the dictatorship of the Shah with the rule of a theocratic elite. Some of the contributors take a long-term view of Iranians’ “bloody and painful march towards democracy” (p 27), commencing with the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and the coup, engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and British military intelligence, of 1953, which led to the deposition of the nationalist hero Mohammed Mossadegh; others hearken back to the Shah’s despotism and the political skill with which Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters orchestrated his removal; and yet others set their sights resolutely on the mammoth protests against the “stolen election” of 2009. But all the contributors are clearly animated by one central question, aptly reflected in the book’s subtitle, “The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future”: how might political action in Iran continue to be steered in directions that would help to secure a future for the country’s citizens that allows for the fulfilment of legitimate political aspirations, the free pursuit of one’s livelihood, economic security, and some commonly agreed upon conception of human dignity?