The following video of the fatal shooting of Neda is becoming a rallying cry across Iran. Neda who was out on a peaceful protest with here father in Tehran on Saturday was shot by a Bassij rifleman from a rooftop. The Bassiji are religious fanatics who perform the same role for the clerical-fascist regime as the Nazi stormtroopers fulfilled for Hitler. Now the proteters are using Neda's name as their new battle cry along with "Death to the Dictator", by which they now mean Ayatollah Khamenei not just Ahmedinejad.
The video is graphic.
I have been reading your Iran posts with great interest and you present some excellent analysis and some disturbing images of the brutality of the regime.
ReplyDeleteOne major piece of information you seem to be negleting is that Ahmadinejad won the election and despite the discrepancies, by what appears a respectable margin. The demonstrations, instigated by Mousavi supporters, amounts to an attempted coup and installing him as the new president amounts to the disenfranchising of Ahmadinejads supporters.
Your analysis lacks this perspective, which will undoubtedley play a major part in how this situation develops.
Even the Guardian Council has today said their were several million votes gone missing! Ahmedinjad is a fascist. His regime is reactionary clerical-fascist regime. I'm all in favour of the Iranian workers disenfranchising that regime and its supporters. Pity it didn't happen sooner!
ReplyDeleteIf these demos are successful the new regime will have to get rid of elections, how can it credibly run any elections when it cannot accept the result of the current election?
ReplyDeleteA period of dictatorship will have to be the outcome of this revolt but whose dictatorship will it be?
What is your take on this?
You have contrasted this situation with many other situations but what about the comparison with Allende in Chile, or Franco in Spain or the Korean war. All examples of where the will of the people has been ignored and the counter revolution has prevailed.
What exists in Iran already IS a Dictatorship! It holds elections, but the decision even on which parties can stand is taken by the theocratic Dictatorship!!!! It not only rules out socialist parties standing, but even liberal bourgeois parties! It is a reactionary, clerical-fascist Dictatorship. To speak of counter-revolution under those conditions is absurd. To compare the Iranian people who are opposing that Dictatorship with those like Franco or Pinochet, who are, in fact, the ideological twins of the Iranian regime is grotesque!
ReplyDeleteHow will the success of the protests against the regime mean an end to elections???? The immediate demand is FOR elections. Not the sham elections run by the Dictaorship of the mullahs, but real elections. I have no doubt that those like Moussavi who are thesmelves tinged with the blood of the regime, will not want such elections to include socialist parties either, but it is the job of socialists in Iran to take the leadership of these protests to take them past what Moussavi and his ilk want, and forward to demands that actually meet the needs of Iranian workers, including free and fair elections.
Better still, the means by which Iranian workers and socialists win that leadership and take the protest forward, should be by building Factory Committees, Peasant Committees, Neighbourhood Committees and Workers Councils that her and now go beyond the limits of bouregois demcoracy, abd place decision making instead directly into the hands of the workers.