[Marxism] NY Times op-ed contribution from an Iranian

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, June 19, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
A Different Iranian Revolution
By SHANE M.

This article was written by a student in Iran who, for reasons of 
safety, did not want to be identified by his full name.

Tehran

WE look over this wall of marching people to see what our friends in the 
United States are saying about us. We cannot help it — 30 years of 
struggle against the Enemy has had the curious effect of making us 
intrigued. To our great dismay, what we find is that in important 
sectors of the American press a disturbing counternarrative is emerging: 
That perhaps this election wasn’t a fraud after all. That the United 
States shouldn’t rush in with complaints of democracy denied, and that 
perhaps Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the president the Iranian people truly 
want (and, by extension, deserve).

Do not believe it. Those so-called experts warning Americans to be leery 
of claims of fraud by the opposition are basing their arguments on an 
outdated understanding of Iran that has little to do with the reality of 
what we here are experiencing during these singular days.

For instance, some American analysts assert that the demonstrations are 
taking place only in the sections of Tehran — in the north, around the 
university and Azadi Square — where the educated and well-off reside. Of 
course, those neighborhoods were home to the well-to-do ... 30 years 
ago. The notion that these areas represent “the nice part of town” will 
come as a surprise to their residents, who endure the noise, congestion 
and pollution of living in the center of a megalopolis.

People who haven’t visited a city in decades are bound to give out bad 
directions. But their descriptions of where the protests are taking 
place, and why, also draw on pernicious myths of an iron correlation 
between religion and class, between location and voting tendency, in Iran.

This false geography imagines South Tehran and the countryside as home 
only to the poor, those natural allies of political Islam, while North 
Tehran embodies unbridled gharbzadegi (translated as “Weststruckness” or 
“Westernitis”) and is populated by people addicted to the Internet and 
vacations in Paris. It is as if political Islam withers north of Vanak 
Square and the only residents to be found are “liberals” who voted for 
the opposition leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi.

We must not assume that the engagement of members of society with their 
religion is uniform or that religious devotion equals automatic loyalty 
to a particular brand of politics. To do so is certainly to deny Iran’s 
poor the capacity to think for themselves, to deny that the politics of 
the past four years may have made their lives worse — and plays right 
into Mr. Ahmadinejad’s dubious claim to be the most authentic 
representative of the 1979 revolution. Mr. Moussavi was, let’s not 
forget, a favored son of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and a member of 
Iran’s original cohort of revolutionaries, and he remains a firm 
believer in the revolution and the framework of the Islamic Republic.

But the United States seems able to view our country only through 
anxieties left over from the 1979 revolution. In the “how did we lose 
Iran?” assessments after the overthrow of the shah, many American 
intelligence agents and policy makers decided that their great mistake 
was to spend too much time canoodling with the royal family and 
intellectual elites of the capital. Commentators now are worried that, 
by siding with the opposition today, the United States will once again 
fall into the trap of backing the losing side.

But the fact is, Tehran is not the Iranian anomaly it was 30 years ago. 
It has become more like the rest of the country. Internal migration, not 
just to Tehran but to other major cities, has accelerated, driven in 
part by the growth of universities in places like Isfahan, Tabriz, 
Mashad and Shiraz, and now nearly 70 percent of Iranians live in cities. 
The much vaunted rural vote represents not a decisive bloc for Mr. 
Ahmadinejad but a minimum, one that was easily swamped by the increased 
turnout of city dwellers, who normally sit elections out.

And, of course, Iran in 2009 — better yet, Iran on June 12, 2009 — is 
not the same as Iran in 1979. Just as Tehran’s neighborhoods cannot be 
fixed in time, the cultural lives of Iranians have greatly changed in 
the past 30 years. The postrevolutionary period has seen the expansion 
of education, the entry of women into the work force in large numbers, 
and changing patterns of marriage and even of divorce. These have all 
shaped Iranian society. The pseudo-sociology peddled by so many in the 
West would easily dissolve with a week’s visit.

Let’s also forget the polls, carried out in May by Terror Free Tomorrow: 
The Center for Public Opinion, that have been making the rounds this 
past week, with numbers that showed Mr. Ahmadinejad well ahead in the 
election, even in Mr. Moussavi’s hometown, Tabriz. Maybe last month Mr. 
Ahmadinejad was indeed on his way to victory. But then came the debates.

Starting on June 1, the country was treated to an experience without 
precedent in the 30 years of the Islamic Republic of Iran: six 
back-to-back live and unscripted debates among the four presidential 
candidates. Iranians everywhere were riveted, and the poll numbers began 
to move.

By the Wednesday before the election, Mr. Moussavi was backed by about 
44 percent of respondents, while Mr. Ahmadinejad was favored by around 
38 percent. So let’s not cloud the results with numbers that were, like 
bagels, stale a week later. (And let’s ignore the claim that polling by 
Iranians in Iran is “notoriously untrustworthy.” A consortium of 
pollsters and social scientists working for a diverse range of political 
and social organizations systematically measured public opinion for 
months before the election.)

Such a major shift has happened before. A month before the 1997 
elections, the establishment candidate, Ali Akbar Nategh-Nouri, was 
trouncing his opponents in surveys. Then, a week before the vote, the 
tide changed, bringing to power a reformer, Mohammad Khatami.

The reason for this fluidity in voter preference is simple. Iran has no 
real political parties that can command a fixed number of predictable 
votes. With elections driven primarily by personality politics, Iranians 
are always swing voters. So Mr. Moussavi, hampered by a lack of access 
to state-run news media and allowed only two months to campaign, began 
to make inroads into Mr. Ahmadinejad’s lead only during the final days 
leading into the election, his poll numbers rising with his visits to 
provincial cities and the debate appearances.

One final note: the election does reveal a paradox. There is strong 
evidence that Iranians across the board want a better relationship with 
the United States. But if Mr. Moussavi were to become president and 
carry out his campaign promise of seeking improved relations with 
America, we would probably see a good 30 percent of the Iranian 
population protesting that he is “selling out” to the enemy.

By contrast, support for Mr. Ahmadinejad’s campaign was rooted in part 
in his supposed defense of the homeland and national honor in the face 
of United States aggression. Americans too-long familiar with the 
boorish antics of the Iranian president will no doubt be surprised to 
learn that the best chance for improved relations with the United States 
perhaps lies with Mr. Ahmadinejad. But Mr. Ahmadinejad is perceived here 
as being uniquely able to play the part of an Iranian Nixon by 
“traveling to the United States” and bringing along with him his 
supporters — and they are not few.

In other words, Iranians believe they face a daunting choice: a 
disastrous domestic political situation with Mr. Ahmadinejad but an 
improved foreign policy, or improved domestic leadership under Mr. 
Moussavi but near impossible challenges in making relations with the 
United States better.

The truth is, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. The open-air 
parties that, for one week, turned Tehran at night into a large-scale 
civic disco, were an accident. People gathered by the tens of thousands 
in public squares, circling around one another on foot, on motorcycle, 
in their cars. They showed up around 4 or 5 in the afternoon and stayed 
together well into the next day, at least 3 or 4 in the morning, 
laughing, cheering, breaking off to debate, then returning to the fray. 
A girl hung off the edge of a car window “Dukes of Hazzard” style. Four 
boys parked their cars in a circle, the headlights illuminating an 
impromptu dance floor for them to show off their moves.

Everyone watched everyone else and we wondered how all of this could be 
happening. Who were all of these people? Where did they come from? These 
were the same people we pass by unknowingly every day. We saw one 
another, it feels, for the first time. Now in the second week, we 
continue to look at one another as we walk together, in marches and in 
silent gatherings, toward our common goal of having our vote respected.

No one knew that it would come to this. Iran is this way. Anything is 
possible because very little in politics or social life has been made 
systematic. We used to joke that if you leave Tehran for three months 
you’ll come back to a new city. A friend left for France for a few days 
last week and when he returned the entire capital had turned green.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Until last week, Mr. Moussavi was 
a nondescript, if competent, politician — as one of his campaign 
advisers put it to me, he was meant only to be an instrument for making 
Iran a tiny bit better, nothing more. Iranians knew that’s what they 
were getting when they cast their votes for him. Now, like us, Mr. 
Moussavi finds himself caught up in events that were unimaginable, each 
day’s march and protest more unthinkable than the one that came before.

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: 
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40archives.econ.utah.edu