I’m absolutely enthralled by this, both emotionally and intellectually. My passion is driving me to reason that we’re in the midst of one of history’s great moments. Historians a century from now will yearn to imagine what it was like to actually experience these changes (I mean the large-scale shifts). Let’s not squander this.
We’ll see — maybe within hours — whether I’m just being melodramatic again.
The election in Iran — not to mention its aftermath — feels even more compelling than the US election because it is part of a distinct narrative that has gradually built up, specifically to this climax, over the course of years, if not decades.
Going back to the “axis of evil” days, before the Iraq War, there has been discussion in our newspapers and magazines about how Iranian demographic and cultural shifts would eventually bring about more progressive democracy — without intervention — and beyond that, strategists have argued that US-led intervention could actually backfire and destroy that momentum.
No doubt, the “hands-off” approach would not have been easy for many Americans to accept — especially with the nuclear threat involved.
Just as intuitions about the relationship between attempts to control and the effects those have are changing in business (going from the industrial-age drive for more-and-more control to the counterintuitive notion that you get more of what you want by relinquishing control), politics is getting turned inside-out.
(Aside: Could Iran leapfrog Canada in this? Don’t dismiss it without consideration. Last time I checked the Globe & Mail’s website, just after 11:15 pm, the history-making upheaval in Iran was not in their 10 most popular stories. Three of the top 10 are about hockey — two of those are about the fight over the Phoenix Coyotes — and two more are about Harper and Ignatieff’s game of parliamentary chicken. Those five stories essentially boil down to grown boys playing 20th century control games. That’s what Canadians are interested in right now, that’s what we’re learning, that’s the attitude being enabled and reinforced: playground shit. Meanwhile things are surging elsewhere…)
There’s a lot being written and said (and tweeted and ff’d) about this being a Twitter revolution (whether or not social mobile media has much to do with the actual events, it is certainly affecting how we watch).
We’re getting deeper into the Age of Openness — deep enough that it seems like a cliché to a lot of us, but not so deep to have gained ubiquity or lost its novelty. We’re still explaining it to ourselves, leaders are just now learning how to practice it — speaking directly to people rather than to abstract policies.
It’s reassuring to read this, about Obama, from George Packer for the New Yorker (via Wells):
The new President understood that the U.S. could no longer take a high-handed approach: the world had long since stopped listening, and the language of freedom and democracy had been so deeply tainted that the cleansing will take years. That’s why the passages in the Cairo speech on human rights and women’s rights came after extremism, after Israel and Palestine, after nuclear weapons, and had a careful tone. There’s too much wreckage to sort through before an American President can tell other countries to live up to a standard set by us.
The key phrase in Obama’s remarks on the world stage is “mutual respect and mutual interests.”
I’m sure everyone will have their eyes open by tomorrow, regardless of what they know or care about the historical significance of all this.
Only 24 hours ago, this was what was being written about the uncertain situation:
Unless the street protests achieve unexpected momentum, the election could cast the pro-reform classes — especially the better off and better educated — back into a state of passive disillusionment, some opposition figures said.
“I don’t think the middle class is ever going to go out and vote again,” one Moussavi supporter lamented.
Well the street protests certainly achieved that unexpected momentum. This, this, this and this are anything but passive disillusionment — and keep in mind the people at those rallies have supposedly been conditioned all their lives to expect a swift beating (or worse) for public displays of disrespect. Also keep in mind, as The Lede pointed out at NYTimes (where I saw those videos, and probably the best place to follow the ongoing developments),
Considering that today’s protest was supposedly called off, and resulted in a crowd in Tehran five miles long, you have to wonder what tomorrow will bring, when a general strike is in the cards. Persiankiwi passes the message: “Moussavi – calling national strike tomorrow – all Iran.”
Again, I’m elated to be experiencing this moment of history — even if not first-hand.
Stay tuned, there’s still a hell of a cliffhanger (though it took me so long to get around to writing this that by the time anyone reads it will already know some of the next day’s outcome), as Ramin Ahmadi wrote at Forbes.com (via The Lede):
There are at least two possible outcomes for the current crisis…
In either case, the Islamic Republic we have known for the last three decades is gone.
Shifting, even if only slightly, the “axis” of our global, historical narrative: adding more weight to the momentum towards post-industrial openness — whatever that turns out to mean, exactly.
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