( 2112 )

Ok so Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, spoke at Tehran University for Friday prayers, [Live-tweets from the speech are here]  he said that the elections are fair and the protests have gone far enough. According to this translation, there’s the predictable crap about “Zionist, American [and] British” interloping, and he called Ahmadinejad the “legal president” who is “trusted by people. ” And he got a bit strange, saying that political rivals like former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani — who’s, apparently, trying to oust Khamaeni — and former parliamentary chairman Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri weren’t personally corrupt but their “relatives” have been accused of “financial misdoings.”

“Unfortunatelly, I can smell blood. People and the student won’t accept dictatorship and won’t give up even if he kill all of us. Please tell the world we (Iranian) are not like him. He is not our leader.  He is againts his country, nation and any other nations in the world. He is just a devil against humanity.”

 

The New York Times reports the following reaction from an anonymous protester:

“The question now is: will Mr. Moussavi rise up as a true opposition leader, or will he demonstrate his allegiance to the system and go away? The question for the protesters is will they remain as opposition or will we stay home, too?”

So, according to @[redacted], a reliable micro blogger in Iran; the government has refused to grant a permit for a scheduled “Sea of Green” protest in Tehran tomorrow that Moussavi has called for. People are viewing this as a line in the sand. If the protest moves forward, it may get bloody. Or it may force the regime to back down.

This is, at least appears to be, as David Brooks says today … “there are moments of radical discontinuity—1789, 1917, 1989—when the very logic of history flips. … At moments like these, policy makers and advisors in the United States government almost always retreat to passivity and caution. Part of this is pure prudence. When you don’t know what’s happening, it’s sensible to do as little as possible because anything you do might cause more harm than good. Part of it is professional mind-set. Foreign policy experts are trained in the art of analysis, extrapolation and linear thinking. They simply have no tools to analyze moments that are non-linear, paradigm-shifting and involve radical shifts in consciousness. As a result, they almost invariably underestimate how rapid change might be and how quickly it might come. As Michael McFaul, a democracy expert who serves on the National Security Council, once wrote: “In retrospect, all revolutions seem inevitable. Beforehand, all revolutions seem impossible.””

 

Here’s something from over at Blogger Interrupted that unfortunately mirrors my thoughts …. 

“I was immediately reminded of Nicolae Ceauşescu, the brutal communist dictator of Romania, who in 1989 ended up riddled with bullets a matter of days after he did something similar. The description of the Romanian Revolution from Wikipedia reads like prophecy:

A mass meeting was staged for the next day, December 21, which, according to the official media, was presented as a “spontaneous movement of support for Ceauşescu”, emulating the 1968 meeting in which Ceauşescu had spoken against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact forces.

Sound familiar?

On December 21, the mass meeting, held in what is now Revolution Square, degenerated into chaos. The image of Ceauşescu’s uncomprehending expression as the crowd began to boo him remains one of the defining moments of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. The stunned couple (the dictator had been joined by his wife), failing to control the crowds, finally took cover inside the building, where they remained until the next day…

I wonder if Khamenei is cowering somewhere thinking of what happened next…

Ceauşescu and his wife Elena fled the capital with Emil Bobu and Manea Mănescu and headed, by helicopter, for Ceauşescu’s Snagov residence, from where they fled again, …The police eventually turned over the couple to the army. On December 25, the two were sentenced to death by a military court…The firing squad didn’t bother to wait for them to be tied up and blindfolded, as is traditional for people to be executed in such a manner, but simply began shooting as soon as they appeared.

 

Khamenei initially called the election “divine”, then backpedalled, and now is rather deliberately making himself an obstacle to reality.  He looks enfeebled, confused, unsure of himself…Khamenei has made himself a target. This just won’t end well.  I expect there will be a bloody crackdown, soon.  The question will then be whether or not the security forces follow Khamenei, and kill their own people in massive numbers, or turn on Khamenei, and kill him.  I don’t think there is any other logical outcome.  Because when the protestors look for a logical end game, Khamenei is part of the problem now, by Khamenei’s own choosing. “

 

I simply don’t have the words to describe my reaction to awe-inspiring courage shown by the people standing up to this man and his regime.  I suppose that I can only pray for them and hope that you will too.

Tags: election, green movement, iran