This is Potkin’s piece in full
It is of course always heart warming to see people any where in the world overcoming despotic regimes. As the Iranian historian Kasravi said ‘Nothing is as rapturous as when the people win their freedom’. The recent events in Tunisia and in Egypt, the people power challenging a despotic regime, had many similarities with the events in Iran last year, but there are stark differences which may explain why it seems the concessions won in Tunisia and Egypt have been gained so much quicker.
Watching the pictures from Tunisia and Egypt, it looks the crowd sizes in Iran were much larger. None of the protests in Egypt or Tunisia came any where near the three million crowd who came to the streets in Tehran, six days after the fraudulent elections in June last year. The repression by the regime in Iran was many times more brutal and savage than that in Tunisia or Egypt however. People in Egypt and Tunisia were not attacked in their homes and pulled from their roof tops for simply chanting Allah Akbar at night. The injured protesters in Tunisia and Egypt were not attacked in hospitals and dragged from their hospital beds. Protesters were not arrested and bused into detention centres like Kahrizak and raped in Tunisia and Egypt like they were in Iran.
The Iranian regime is one that seized power through a revolution and is thus well experienced in how to avert a revolution. As a friend of mine in Iran quoted his revolutionary guards commander “we will do everything the Shah didn’t do and not do any thing that the Shah did during the 1979 revolution. Just one concession will open the floodgates and increase people’s confidence in overthrowing the regime, we will not give one concession to the protesters”
Just one reminder of how brutal the repression in Iran was, watch the video of attack on student dormitories here, which resulted in five students killed:
Foreign journalists were not kicked out in Egypt and Tunisia as they were in Iran quickly after the protests erupted.
When Iranian protesters used social networking tools like Facebook and twitter and citizen journalists uploaded their mobile phone pictures and videos, the Iranian protesters were quickly labeled by rich Western Left-wing intellectuals as “affluent North Tehran kids” who did not represent the country.
Had these pictures been taken in Iran, these girls would have been labeled as middle class elite:
In Tunisia, Trade Unions with several thousand members existed and could be used to organise the protests. In Iran, the smallest gathering and organisation which is not sanctioned and controlled by the official channels is impossible to survive.
Obama and other Western leaders were quick to condemn violence in Egypt and Tunisia, yet when it came to Iran, they dithered and fretted in case their condemnation of killings was interpreted by the Iranian regime as Western interference!
Overthrow of any fierce dictatorship needs the broadest possible coalition, but many Iranian expats did all they could to undermine such coalition and propagate divisions.
Watching all this perhaps nothing was more annoying than the filthy Press TV hypocrite, Yvonne Ridley claim “What the Egyptian people are doing is so courageous because what they are facing, as we can see on our screens, is this terrible machine which seeks to instil fear and brutalises the people.”
Yvonne Ridley of course ignores the courageous people who rose up against the terrible state terror machine of her pay masters in Iran.
Stop the War Coalition who through out the protests in Iran refused to express any solidarity with the Iranian protesters by using the excuse that “we are only concerned with war situations” did not lose any time to express solidarity with the people of Egypt. Next Wednesday, they will hold a public meeting in Conway Hall in solidarity with the Egyptian uprising, with speakers like George Galloway and John Rees, God help the Egyptian people from such solidarity expressions!
As Mark Urban said on BBC tonight, “all such revolutions are of epic importance and consequences, the outcome however is uncertain and any extremist violent minority group could seize power as they did in Iran in 1979 and in Russia in 1917”
The chances of a violent minority group ceasing power through protests in Iran last year was always much more remote, because of the tolerance and peacefulness displayed by the protesters throughout the protests:
