Bloody confrontations erupted again yesterday between the Iranian government and pro-reform activists. As often happens in such circumstances, otherwise sober analysts become intoxicated on the fumes of revolution, leading them to reject realism in favor of ahistorical analogies. Robin Wright, a senior Fellow at the US Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C, provides a prime example in an article titled, “Is this Iran’s Berlin Wall moment?”
It is time to start wondering out loud whether Iran’s uprising could become one of those Berlin Wall moments.
This is not yet a counter-revolution. And the new “green movement” is a coalition of disparate factions — from former presidents to people who have never voted at all — who view the issues through vastly different prisms. Yet the pattern of public outpourings since the disputed election six months ago is setting historic precedents. . . .
But the green movement is far more than simply sporadic eruptions. This is the most vibrant and imaginative civil disobedience campaign in the world.
[. . .]
So far the green movement has insisted on non-violence. Perhaps the ultimate irony in the Islamic Republic today is that a brutal revolutionary regime suspected of secretly working on a nuclear weapon faces its biggest challenge from peaceful civil disobedience. And even such a militarised regime has been unable to put it down.
A more realistic assumption is that the current regime does not feel sufficiently threatened—at least not yet—to resort to even greater levels of violence. Once the order to suppress the protests is given, the efforts at peaceful civil disobedience will be crushed. As history has repeatedly proven, non-violent political movements are only effective against regimes that refrain from shooting their own people.
This is why Tehran in 2009 is not like Berlin in 1989. During the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German border guards called their superiors for guidance and found that none of them dared take personal responsibility for issuing orders to use lethal force against their fellow citizens. The Iranian authorities have no such qualms.
Indeed, as some news reports have noted, “demonstrators had not anticipated such harsh tactics by the authorities, despite police warnings of tougher action against any protests on the sacred day.” Such an attitude appears incredibly naive and may stem from a dangerous belief in the power and effectiveness of non-violent civil disobedience. Rather than the Berlin Wall, the most applicable historical analogy is likely to be Tiananmen Square, in which the Chinese government killed and arrested hundreds in their suppression of anti-government protest.
We may respect their cause and cheer their bravery. But as long as the Iranian government holds all the weapons, we should have no illusions that peaceful protestors will be effective in unseating Ahmadinejad.
December 28th, 2009 | 11:14 am
Our Founding Fathers were both excellent students of history and fairly well experienced in their own lives in the rugged colonies. They knew from personal experience and what they knew from ancient and biblical history that most governments ruled from brute power, not consent, and that those who were ruled rarely were able to escape the bonds a King or ruling faction was able to forge for them.
So, they committed themselves to forming a divided government and spoke repeatedly of the whole people being the ‘militia’ that would rally around a small professional cadre of officers rather than a standing army.
The point here is that they were right: Most of human history is the story of tyrannical governments ruling via terror and brute force and the mass majority of humanity being ruled by repression, fear, and persecution of an armed elite.
Pacifism and non-violence has worked rarely….indeed it only seems effective when the rulers are both conscientious and feel vulnerable to outside intervention.
Rwanda, Yugoslavia, East Timor, Burma, Darfur, Cuba, Venezuela….Detroit…. all show that unarmed, non-violent protesters don’t stand a chance of changing the blood lust of criminals or regimes based on power, not consent.
As Catholics, we pray every Mass for “world peace”. But have we ever had “world peace”? Does the Bible promise a world without war this side of the 2nd coming? Unless the whole People of God is actively praying for the conversion of evil-doers to Christianity and not merely to “being nice”, we are fools to believe the world will take care of itself without the just being armed and ready to defend the tranquility of order.
We must pray for our enemies. We must love them enough to seek to evangelize them, pursuade them, convert them. But we also must love them enough to deter them from being tempted to brutality. Thus the counter-intuitiveness of an armed citizenry and armed Christian. If sheep were armed, the wolves would either not attack them at all, or only rarely.
Instead we get the either/or…either we pray for peace and go about unarmed….or we arm up and go about bloodthirsty and warmongering…. has no one considered the history of the 3rd possibility: that we go about armed and so deter hostility and injustice or that a swift invasion not only liberates millions from oppression but also deters other would-be tyrants from oppressing their people?
December 28th, 2009 | 3:02 pm
“We, a number of Officers, Soldiers and personnel of the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran, hereby declare our readiness for rise to the armed defense of our nation against the forces of the criminal, illegitimate, transgressing and occupying current Government of Iran, and hereby inform our brothers and sisters serving with the armed security forces of Iran, invite them to join us, request their support and ask them to provide cover for us in this moral & national act. A special request for support & cooperation goes to our brothers of the Military Police.”
Looks like this is going to be settled Romania style.
December 28th, 2009 | 4:22 pm
India at the time of Gandhi is another example of what you are talking about Joe. To be sure, Gandhi’s politics of non-violence are to be commended. But his tactics worked only because the British were morally sensitive. If the Nazis had won WWII, things would have been very different, as Harry Turtledove imagined in his short story, “The Last Article.”
December 28th, 2009 | 7:28 pm
As non-violent protests go, this one is pretty violent. Amid the images of burning police stations, of individuals being set upon by that dangerous beast, the mob, and rescued by groups within that beast, of a police van being stopped, its windscreen smashed and the police inside being dragged out, the one that stands out for me is the group of the hated Basij, cowering in full riot gear against a wall behind their burning motorbikes, being stoned from a few yards by a crowd of protesters.
When the enforcers lose the initiative, when they start to doubt their previously unquestioned power and learn themselves the fear which they have previously inspired, the outcome becomes very uncertain.
The comparison of Tiananmen and the Berlin Wall is no so straightforward. The East German regime, represented by the Stase and the army, was not “morally sensitive” by any measure. They did, however, respond the the perception and reality of power. They had lost the hold of fear, and the wall came down without a shot being fired because the government lost its nerve.
The Iranian regime, like the Chinese, is unlikely to lose its nerve; but the police and the Basij may. If they decide that it is too dangerous on the streets, the government will have lost control. Possibly the Revolutionary Guard can re-establish control, but who knows?
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