Iran Erupts, Yet Again

Nov. 4 – Today hundreds of thousands of people staged a nationwide protest on the 30th anniversary of the seizure of the US Embassy. This year, however, the tables were turned, as the mass opposition took aim, not so much against the US, as against the ruling power at home. Chanting ‘Khamenei is a murderer, his rule is null and void,’ or ‘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, they will continue to press their demands. Ironically, the marchers did voice judgment against the US, challenging Obama to take sides; ‘Obama, Obama, either with them or with us,’ because as they chanted ‘A Free Green Iran doesn’t need Nuclear Bomb.’

Because Nov. 3 is also the 31st anniversary of the day that Shah’s security forces attacked and killed student demonstrators on Tehran University, students at both the high school and university campuses have been mobilizing for weeks for today’s events. Truly the youth, specially the female 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. (See video, http://www.youtube.com/united4iran#p/c/EB0181C25D365040/198/XzxbywEuRdk) And yet, despite all security measures to keep students inside campuses, they chanted ‘no fear, no fear, we are all together,’ and were able to break through security forces and join the masses in the streets tearing down bill board size pictures of Khamenei and shouting ‘Free all Political Prisoners’ or ‘Student 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 these same analysts had concluded that months of repression have gutted the movement of its organizational capacity and leadership. As reported by LA Times (Nov. 3) 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 On Line reporter, on Nov. 5, quotes some activists as 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 and 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.” (http://english.mowjcamp.com/article/id/59555)

Yet acknowledging the wisdom of the people does not absolve the leaders of responsibility for the direction of the movement today, and for what happened to the 1979 Revolution. It is true that most of those who seized the US 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 US personnel hostage as a 'second revolution.'

At the time, Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism in the US, who was deeply involved in the Iranian Revolution, 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, called '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 parallel 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 movement not to self-limit themselves solely along constitutional lines.