Old coup d’état vis-a-vis new coup:

The Iranian summer episode of peaceful demonstrators confronting armed revolutionary guards and militia who shoot at them with live ammunition, beat them, and arrest them goes on in Iran. Some 2000 intellectuals, journalists, and civil rights activists have been arrested in the last four weeks, including three friends of mine. Many have been killed in the streets or during violent interrogations and torturing. Amnesty estimates that the number of deaths goes into the hundreds.

This coming Saturday, the 25 of July, has been announced as a Global day of solidarity with the Iranian people and their quest for freedom and democracy. In more than 90 cities all around the World there will be gatherings and demonstrations. You can find detail information about 25th of July at http://united4iran.org. (For information about the Netherlands, you can go to http://united4iran-nl.org) With this personal letter, I want to invite you to respond to the call of the Iranian people for Global solidarity. They need and appreciate any sign of support. But also I would like to share my personal ideas about what is going on with you.

Iran went through a comparable summer episode in 1953. Then it was a coup d’état against the democratically elected, liberal-oriented Prime Minister Mossadeq. The coup was executed and led by a top CIA agent and three Iranian generals. This successful coup became a seed of shame for the Iranian collective consciousness. There was this shared feeling of moral corruption: “How did we let them just do this to us without doing anything?” The coup was also the starting point for serious collective doubts about democracy as a possible destiny for Iran. Last but not least, because of the clear and visible involvement of the CIA, it also was the seed of blind Anti-Americanism. The proud nation of Iran lost its self-confidence.

[ Watch this beautiful youtube fragment with English subtitles from a recent movie by Iranian-American artist and director Shirin Neshat. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjT2IeYSxY4 ]

After the coup, as a result of the repression it brought to Iran, utopian, violent fantasies of radical revolution became more and more popular in Iran. By the1970s, young activists felt that anything was better than liberal democracy whether it was the utopian fantasy of Leninism, Maoism, or Islamism. They simply didn’t want to be associated with something as pragmatic and “soft” as democratic liberalism which was defeated so easily. They turned their backs on what they saw as the illusion of their parents’ generation. The seed of shame resulted in a harvest of tough political.

One of those tough ideologies was Islamism. It was not only a utopian ideology with leaders orating about a society to come, it is also comes with strict moral and personal codes for each individual, and provided what seemed like a recipe for a life of dignity for people who had the feeling that by accepting tyranny they had lost their moral value. Islamism had the answer to understanding relations between America and people of Iran. America was the Great Satan and the (Shia) people of Iran could be its most important challenger.
In short, Islamism fit a morally and politically traumatized and defeated nation, like Nazism fot a post World War I Germany. Three decades of the Islamic Republic brought indeed a sense of independence from the great world powers to Iranians. It gave them their sense of pride and independence back. In addition, it brought many, many miseries. It brought bloodshed, torture, and the use of violence against the people. The Islamic Republic brought collective repression and the individual hypocrisy of “playing the public Muslim” vis-à-vis being secular at home and brought about a collective and continuous act of self-censorship. These are just some of the harvests of a revolution which was in its origin driven by a collective need to get over the trauma of 1953.

Now, thirty years after the Islamic Revolution, the Iranian people refuse to fatalistically accept this new coup within the state against their legitimate choice of the pragmatic and liberal-oriented presidential candidate Mousavi. Their peaceful and gentle struggle is for a noble cause and driven by the lessons of history. More importantly, it is driven by a consciousness of how history can become a nightmare for the following generations.

I hope that you will attend one of these solidarity gatherings this coming Saturday in your city or country. If not that, at the very least you can wear something green on Saturday, talk to your friends and network about Iran, and show and declare your solidarity. It will be heartwarming for me if my friends all around the globe would join me in this. And it would be a simple, yet important act to support Iran in it quest for freedom and democracy

Warm regards ,

Yours,

Shervin Nekuee

cross-posted at voteforiran

Filed under:
be a hero by Tori