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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2009
Total challenge to the regime persists in Iran
On Nov. 4 hundreds of thousands of people staged a nationwide protest on the 30th anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Iran. This year, however, the tables were turned, as the mass opposition took aim not so much against the U.S. as against the ruling power at home. Chanting "Khamenei is a murderer, his rule is null and void," and "Down with tyranny, whether that of Shah or the Leader," the marchers throughout Iran made it clear that despite unprecedented security measures and all the threats against them, they will continue to press their demands. Ironically, the marchers did voice judgment against the U.S., challenging Obama to take sides: "Obama, Obama, either you're with them or with us." They also chanted, "A Free Green Iran doesn't need Nuclear Bombs."
Because Nov. 3 is also the 31st anniversary of the day that the Shah's security forces attacked and killed student demonstrators at Tehran University, students at both high school and university campuses have been mobilizing for weeks for today's events. Truly the youth, especially the girls and women students who bravely created a human shield between the security forces and the male students, were the vanguard of today's activities. The anti-riot guards and the Basijis were particularly brutal against women as they abducted hundreds and beat them viciously.
Yet despite all security measures to keep students inside campuses, they chanted "no fear, no fear, we are all together," and they were able to break through security forces and join the masses in the streets tearing down billboard-size pictures of Khamenei and shouting "Free all Political Prisoners" and "Students will die but won't accept degradation."
Just as during the Carter administration, when the CIA analysts kept dismissing the coming of the revolution, today analysts concluded that months of repression have gutted the movement of its organizational capacity and leadership. As reported by the Nov. 3 Los Angeles Times, one such analyst, Mark Fowler, stated that "Our view is that the regime has largely neutralized the opposition…It seems to us that they have pretty much decapitated the opposition in terms of leadership. I don't think the government is particularly worried about it." Nothing could be further from the truth, as the masses boldly displayed.
A Times Online reporter on Nov. 5 quoted some activists saying, "This is a people's movement that the system can't destroy. We have again sent a message to Ahmadinejad and the Leader that society has not forgotten what they've done. They have beaten, raped, tortured and threatened the people, but we still showed up." Perhaps it was in reference to the arrests and torture of thousands of opposition leaders and student activists that Mousavi felt compelled to issue a statement for the occasion, saying, "People should find such wisdom that they can lead themselves at any time and under any circumstances. Our people, today, are leaders."
Yet acknowledging the wisdom of the people does not absolve the leaders of responsibility for the direction of the movement, or for what happened to the 1979 Revolution. It is true that most who seized the U.S. Embassy are either in jail or out of power now. But it is not true that they are listening fully to the voices from below. Instead, they, along with Mousavi himself, have not distanced themselves from equating the taking of low-level U.S. personnel hostage with a "second revolution."
At the time, Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S., was deeply involved in the Iranian Revolution and issued a challenge to all the Left not to tail-end that kind of pseudo anti-imperialism. Such action, she argued, may give Khomeini a "red" coloring, but it is a retreat from the original revolutionary perspective. In a Political-Philosophic Letter, "What is Philosophy? What is Revolution?" she warned all revolutionaries against the new grave contradictions within the revolution. "Concrete, in the Hegelian sense of the synthesis of diverse elements into a concrete totality, would show that, by no means coincidentally, the occupation of the Embassy paralleled the completion of the counter-revolutionary Constitution." (Available in the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, #7219, along with the Farsi edition, #7266.)
Today the masses have clearly expressed judgment against that Constitution, which established the office of the Supreme Leader with veto power, as nothing but the restoration of dictatorship. It is high time for the leaders of the movement not to be self-limiting solely along constitutional lines.
--Raha
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