I haven't put up any updates in the situation in Iran this week as yet since now much has happened substantially in favor of the protesters, in fact it seems to be getting worse for them and Mousavi is just a tempid defacto "leader." TBH at this point I don't know if its worth it for these kids to put their lives on the line when the regime is just moving forward with Ahmadinejad while arresting, beating and killing protesters. But some quick notes I yanked from Gawker ...
• In one of the more heartbreaking stories to come out of this whole mess, reports emerged yesterday that the Iranian government was charging "bullet fees" to family members of anyone shot during the protests and demonstrations by Iranian forces. One man said that he had to pay the equivalent of $3000 in order to retrieve the dead body of his son from a local morgue.
• In an effort to prevent him from speaking to his millions of supporters, Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi has been placed under 24-hour guard by the Iranian secret police.
• Iran announced that it has no intention of overturning the results of the recent presidential election there. Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei granted Iran's Guardian Council five additional days to review complaints of fraud in the country's recent presidential election, though it's doubtful that this is anything more than a symbolic gesture. Iran's parliament announced it would inaugurate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president by mid-August.
• Iranian newspapers sympathetic to that country's hardline leadership are calling for the government to prosecute Mir Hossein Mousavi for causing the deaths of many of the young people killed in the uprising there.
• The Iranian government is airing interviews on state television of protesters saying they were coerced by Western governments and the Western media into going out and causing trouble in the streets.
SourceTbh I don't this situation is going to end well, the American media wrote their own narrative about this story and tried to frame in a context of the youth rising up but there's a lot of nuance and context that they don't understand and this article has some good analysis on it ...
Revolutions fail when no one joins the initial segment, meaning the initial demonstrators are the ones who find themselves socially isolated. When the demonstrations do not spread to other cities, the demonstrations either peter out or the regime brings in the security and military forces — who remain loyal to the regime and frequently personally hostile to the demonstrators — and use force to suppress the rising to the extent necessary. This is what happened in Tiananmen Square in China: The students who rose up were not joined by others. Military forces who were not only loyal to the regime but hostile to the students were brought in, and the students were crushed.
A Question of Support
This is also what happened in Iran this week. The global media, obsessively focused on the initial demonstrators — who were supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s opponents — failed to notice that while large, the demonstrations primarily consisted of the same type of people demonstrating. Amid the breathless reporting on the demonstrations, reporters failed to notice that the uprising was not spreading to other classes and to other areas. In constantly interviewing English-speaking demonstrators, they failed to note just how many of the demonstrators spoke English and had smartphones. The media thus did not recognize these as the signs of a failing revolution.
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Later, when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke Friday and called out the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, they failed to understand that the troops — definitely not drawn from what we might call the “Twittering classes,” would remain loyal to the regime for ideological and social reasons. The troops had about as much sympathy for the demonstrators as a small-town boy from Alabama might have for a Harvard postdoc. Failing to understand the social tensions in Iran, the reporters deluded themselves into thinking they were witnessing a general uprising.
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Many powerful clerics like Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani wanted Khamenei to reverse the election, and we suspect Khamenei wished he could have found a way to do it. But as the defender of the regime, he was afraid to. Mousavi supporters’ demonstrations would have been nothing compared to the firestorm among Ahmadinejad supporters — both voters and the security forces — had their candidate been denied. Khamenei wasn’t going to flirt with disaster, so he endorsed the outcome.
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The Western media simply didn’t understand that the most traditional and pious segments of Iranian society support Ahmadinejad because he opposes the old ruling elite.
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