Things have changed since yesterday and I have to partly revise my opinion from then. Now, all over the blogoshere, voices start to emerge who smell a rat about what is happening in Iran right now and compare it to past color-”Revolutions” or coups.
In Tehran, Mousavi can bring just as large crowds onto the street as Ahmadinejad, which is no suprise since according to official Iranian election office numbers Mousavi clearly won the city of Tehran,( he didn´t win the province surrounding Tehran though.)
The people who are participating in the pro-Mousavi demonstrations have been frustrated and silenced for a long time. They feel that their opinions are not represented in the Iranian media or the Islamaic state.
Criticism concerning economic matters or even administrative matters, like air-pollution and traffic problems in Tehran is permitted, criticism of Sharia law or the mandatory head-scarves and other dress-code laws, are not.
Of course young people, especially educated and professionally trianed young people, are equally frustrated about the high youth and young adult unemployment. Frustrated by the restrictions on free speech and by economic problems limiting their own chances they passionately support for Mousavi as their hope for change.
And still Mousavi´s supporter are only one third of the Iranian people, two thirds do not support him.
One third of the Iranian people are either liberal Muslims of seculars, two thirds are not.
One third of the Iranian people want a more western oriented society, two thirds do not.
Does this mean that this one third should not have an equal right to express their opinion and themselves freely?
From a democratic point of view, surely not.
In a democratic society all people should have the right to free expression and all reasonable large groups should have the right to be represented in the media. And rightly or wrongly, Iran officially professes to be democratic state based on Islamic principles. To not allow the opinions of one third of the population to be voiced publicly, means a lack of democracy.
But, if we look at our own so-called democratic societies, are there really all groups and opinions represented in the mass-media in accordance to their support among the people. As people used to say here before the arrival of the internet and the bloggers:
“The press is only free for those who own one.”
Since mass-media and distributions systems have come to be concentrated more and more in the hands of the financial plutocracy and their paid-for intellectuals, our “free” media represents the interests of this very same plutocracy. And it works efficiently by either marginalizing or even totally excluding opinions or information which might harm those financial interests.
Iranian opposition journalists will tell western visitors that most censorship is journalistic self-censorship. And that is the way it mostly works over here as well, The professional news-people know, that if they either cross the line of “political correctness” once severly or touch it too many times lightly, they´ll be out of a job.
(If the western media would really represent the interests of the majority of the people the “history of money”, as presented by Ellen Brown and others, as well as the proposals of the experts in the monetary reform-movement would be all over the media. It´s objectively true that the current monetary system does not represent neither the will nor the objective interests of anybody, neither on the left nor on the right or the center, except the those of a tiny financial elite.)
The most effective propaganda-myth the west has created is that of a free media, and the Iranian opposition groups are falling for that myth like many other groups from non-western countries before.
Another myth the West is creating at the moment is the one that Mousavi and his “Reformers” actually represent the interests of this one third of the Iranian people who voted for them.
Indeed Mousavi represents the ultra-rich. Considering the connection to Ghorbanifar, the international weapons-trader and a leading participant in Iran-contra dealings, there might even be an American-Israeli interest in the mix.
To understand why the Iranian rich support the “Reformers” we should look at the history of the Islamic revolution in Islam:
According to the BBC documentary “Rageh inside Iran“, during the Revolution against the Shah in 1979, the part of the Islamic business class who didn´t support the Shah, supported Khomeini and the islamic revolutionary groups.
(B.t.w. the British Journalist Rageh Omaar was told by his liberal Iranian hosts that he should not go too much into the more conservative parts of the city, to not get the “wrong” impression.)
Obviously the business classes wouldn´t support the other groups participating in the revolution, which were mainly leftists.
As a result of this support the business classes had for the first 15 years nearly full control over Iranian economic policies. But with the rampant and seemingly growing corruption and inequality, the cleric rulers realized that prayers and good words alone weren´t enough to get those super-rich onto the “straight and narrow” . So finally they put their full support behind a man who had a track-record of being non-corruptible and a champion for the poor, Ahmadinejad.
His government in turn started to crack down on the worst excesses of corruption and put the interests of the lower two thirds of the Iranian population in the fore-front, cutting down on the privileges of the rich.
Then and there the ruling clerics fell out of favor with Iranian financial elite. But the Iranian clerics decided that it was predominantly the poor majority population and their support who put the Islamic regime in power in the first place and so against the will of the financial elites the ruling clerics stood by Ahmadinejad.
And that´s where we are now: The Iranian financial elite with at least the active support from Israeli, if not from American and other western intelligence operatives, want their country back – as they assume, like the financial elites of all countries, that it is they, who are supposed to call the shots always and everywhere.
And the western media in America, Europa, and also the media here in Iceland, mainly agree with this opinion of the Iranian financial elite.
However, since the Iranian coup seems to be mainly Israeli sponsored, there seem to be a few dissenting voices from among non-Israel-minded elites.
The Washington Post has always had a rather cozy relationship with the CIA. That the Post would publish the results of a pre-election poll confirming the high support of Ahmadinejad among the majority population of Iran is a sure sign for this. The poll counters Mousavi´s “fraud” claimes. Done by an BBC award-winning institution and financed by a Rockefeller foundation, it is telling us, that Israel´s self-given “right” to constantly manipulate world-affairs goes no longer undisputed by the non-Jewish power-elites.
Well, let’s hope that “undisputed” gathers some strength behind it, because so far, it’s business as usual in our congress. Not only have these undemocratic forces not been held accountable for the Iraq War, they turned around and started the exact same campaign with Iran. Congress passed and funded a bill for the destabilization of the Iranian government. There’s no reason to think they aren’t doing just that.
[...] Mousavi represents the ultra-rich. One Third of the Iranian People [...]
Tired
I´m also frustrated and tired that the powers that be try the same game over and over again. But maybe it has come a time now, where it no longer works, no matter how many bills Congress passes and how much money is robbed of the American people for these dirty games.
Mani Tabrizi
I never said, that one third of the Iranian people are super-rich. I only think that many of them are manipulated by the the super-rich.
I have followed some of your English language media for now over 3 years. This does not make me an expert, no doubt.
But I also watched several documentaries sponsored be western media. And even there I can see, that the so-called “liberals” of Iran seem to be the westernized people, who shop in western shopping malls and have cosmetic surgery, while the poor of your country are still trying to survive.
I watched some Iranian movies. They are a lot about class-differences. And the differences between rural and urban life-styles.I was very impressed by those movies, and the way the Iranian people with all their problems in coping with a changing society were presented in them.
As for neo-liberal policies:
Ahmadinejad did cut subsidies, but he used the money to directly give to the poor families who are below subsistence level. We have this kind of subsidies for poor families in Europe as well. They are extra tax-returns and in Iceland, they are returns of interest-payments people had to pay for their mortgages during the year.
I also know about the “justice-shares” : According to your constitution the government has to privatize some of the state-owned companies, the Ahmadinejad government made sure that low-income people would get some, as well.
From all I the reading I have done so far, the picture emerges that in Iran it is a matter of Rafsanjani´s people, the super-rich and the intellectual middle-class and their kids, the university students, against Khameni, Ahmadinejad and the majority population.
Sorry Mani, you can´t expect more sympathy from me for the Iranian upper middle class than for the urban and rural poor.
My country has just been a victim of economic warfare by American and British financial interests. With the willing participation of some our own financial elites, our currency was trashed, our economy crashed and our resources are soon to be sold out to foreign “creditors”. And we, the ordinary people here, have to pay for the debts of the rich.
I just discovered this article and I wish to congratulate you for your vision and fairness (all the way from Iceland).
I represent an Iranian diaspora which has not been happy to see the events taking place in these elections and you have very precisely indicated the complexity of the situation.
75 million people live in this country (Iran) and those who have been crying their “misery” are hardly yelling anything plausible, but I guess the next excuse to bomb a country should come from some sort of “logic” and those who cry for some more…. (??? i dont knows) are fomenting this terrible act…
as we were setting to melt the ice in our Western relations, but now we are feeling the heat of the troops and the faint sound of the drumbeats again… all for what?
http://cogentia.blogspot.com/
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