Will the Legitimacy on which Iran’s Revolution and Authority are Based Still Stand?

In its thirtieth year, the Iranian revolution grew old and disclosed “two peoples” that demonstrations do nothing but announce their huge differences in appearance, affiliations, body movements, and political slogans. This, it suffices to say, goes beyond the conflict over the results of the presidential elections and involves a clash over the nature of the authority and the future directions of the country and the people.

As experiences have shown, it is natural for the authorities to stammer in the face of such circumstances: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced from Russia “the end of the American empire”, while his country put its possible demise on the agenda. Talk about external “conspiracy” and muzzling the press came hand in hand with talk about the fact that these demonstrations are a “renewal of the revolution’s youth”, while the authority was offering concessions in the form of “recounting votes”. It is a stumble that is difficult to hide.

The truth of the matter is that revolutionary movements that establish a new legitimacy from illegitimacy carry early on fertile seeds for its demise. Revolutions witness liquidations of companions and the strengthening of the authority and monitoring mechanisms, and such was the case in Iran when the people witnessed the successive toppling of Mehdi Bazerkan, Abou Hassan Bani Sadr, Qotb Zadeh, Ibrahim Yazdi, and others, each in a different manner. But the rise of the revolution at the time was much stronger than the indications of death. The occupation of the US embassy in Tehran, “the nest of spies”, then the enthusiastic response to Saddam Hussein’s war were the source of contradictions that stole the limelight.

Then, in the end of the 1990s, another fierce wave appeared and created doubts from the inside about the legitimacy of the revolution and its authority. However, what was symbolized by Mohammad Khatami and his double election for presidency was dispersed by the dark climates caused by George Bush and the wars he launched in two of Iran’s neighbors. The “axis of evil” theory gathered the Iranians behind an authority and a legitimacy that are the object of a deep division. It is thus that the 2003 ill-organized and leader-needing movements failed to capture interest and died.

Now it seems as if the Khomenei revolution and authority are facing an existentialist challenge amidst a severe economic crisis, an Obama climate that ridicules mobilization against “the Great Satan”, and youth desires that resulted from containment – armed with modern communication means and ideas, most importantly that of freedom, the source of which being that satanic West. There is no better symbolic and actual indication of this than the fact that these “western” communication means became social networking tools for the coordination of the protests.

Can the “nuclear issue” restrain these thousands of people, like the war with Iraq managed to do with the first wave of protesters, then the pretext of Bush’s wars restrained the second wave?

What can be said now is that the export of the protests from Tehran to other cities will be, in case it happens, an extremely significant indicator, especially that it adds the issue of minorities on the protests’ agenda. Half of Iran, as it is well-known, is made up of Persians, while the other half is composed of Azaris, Kurds, Arabs, and other discontented minorities that are marginalized. In this case it will be hard for Mir-Hossein Moussavi and his companions to control the movement and contain it within calculated channels.

What applies on the Iranian internal level is bound to apply on its external level, where currents in reality and in ideas will necessarily explode and reach the whole region. They will compete with the regional and international impact stemming from the Khomeini revolution or the US war on Iraq, even if the impact’s directions and aspects differ. Iran, which has a vital society, will launch a movement of change that doesn’t belong to the Iraqi movement and that constitutes a deviation from the Arab method, where no change trends are expected from the inside but rather from the outside. If Iranians manage to topple their regime and avoid a civil war at the same time, they would’ve established the only revolution for freedom and democracy in the Middle East and the Islamic World. Hence, we saw commentators and observers hasten in spontaneous agreement to remind of the events that took place in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago!

Such a fact, if it is not meet the same repression fate of the Chinese movement, places the Iranian change among the changes witnessed by the countries of the Eastern bloc at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. There, too, Communist totalitarian movements were different from their Nazi counterparts in the fact that they do not consider war a prerequisite for change. Rather, they allow for the appearance of leaders such as Imre Nagy, Alexander Dubček, and Mikhail Gorbachev, who start the process that is continued and crowned by the people.

We must not forget that thirty years constitute a long period for totalitarian regimes. Nazism in Germany only lasted for a little more than a decade. As for Mao’s China, it was turning under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping if not towards complete freedom, then to an aspect of economic freedom where Communism was all but forgotten. As for Stalin in 1947, WWII had saved him by broadening his bloc towards central and Eastern Europe, and such a condition isn’t easily offered to such regimes.

Can Ayatollah Khamenei and the “guards” suppress then all these people and all these facts with the “nuclear issue”?