The People of Iran are awakening...

[Mister Moobs]

educate the masses !!!!!!!!!!

By ROBIN WRIGHT Robin Wright ? Mon Jun 22, 2:25 pm ET

Who would have thought that Iran, a country that has been the nemesis of the past five American Presidents, might actually become a model for what Washington wants to see happen politically in the Middle East?

Who would have thought that a Berlin Wall moment for the region might happen in the strict Islamic republic, where a revolution 30 years ago unleashed Islam as a modern political idiom and extremism as a tool to confront the West? (See pictures of violence used as intimidation in Iran.)

Unlikely as it seems, the rise of a popular movement relying on civil disobedience to confront authoritarian rule - in the last bloc of countries to hold out against the tide of change that has swept the rest of the world over the past quarter century - is almost a diplomatic dream for the Obama Administration.

I'm not talking about the regime's obstinate reaction or the brutality it unleashed on the streets of Tehran this past weekend. Even in his terse comments since the beginning of the electoral chaos in Iran, Barack Obama has made it clear the violence upsets him greatly. But in his speech to the Islamic world in Cairo on June 4, Obama spoke about the same principles that just eight days later galvanized millions of people throughout Iran to take to the streets.

"All people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose," Obama said.

With what now looks like uncanny prescience, he added, "There is no straight line to realize this promise ... Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away."

Yet in the midst of a debate over the U.S. role in Iran - recent past, present and future - Washington can take almost no credit for what is happening. The $400 million allocated by the Bush Administration for intelligence operations and the $75 million the State Department budgeted to promote democracy in Iran had little if any impact in changing the regime's ways or empowering Iranians. Many Iranian NGOs even publicly said they did not want, need or dare to be tainted by U.S. financial assistance.

This is a revolution that has been unraveling steadily over decades, beginning in its early years. Indeed, Iran's social transformation - educating, energizing and empowering a stronger and more demanding society, part of which has now turned on the regime - may offer Washington important lessons about what does lead to change in the Islamic world.

The symbol of Iran's uprising is a young woman named Neda Agha Soltan, reportedly a philosophy student whose death during the first clashes on June 20 was gruesomely captured on an already famous cell-phone video sent round the world on YouTube. A new generation of feisty women has been at the forefront of the protests. And the female factor is at the heart of Iran's reform movement.

But the ruling clerics probably did not understand how it happened until it was too late. During the monarchy, many traditional families were reluctant to send their girls beyond elementary school - or to school at all - for fear of exposure to miniskirts, makeup and westernizing ways during the Shah's rapid modernization programs.

But after the 1979 upheaval, traditional families began sending girls to school - and beyond. Today, the majority of university students in Iran are female - at Tehran University, they make up 65% of the student population - and they have places in virtually every profession. Iran has even had a female Vice President. And women want a bigger say still. (See pictures of people protesting the Iran election around the world.)

The other engine of change is the boomeranging of a policy by the revolutionary regime that in 1979 called on Iran's women to breed an Islamic generation. They complied. Within a decade, Iran's population almost doubled, from 34 million to 62 million.

The theocracy soon realized that it did not have the resources to feed, educate, provide social services for and eventually employ twice the population - and the next generation of children that it in turn would produce. It was the moment the government of God plummeted to earth - because all those young people would also have the vote.

As Iran's baby boomers have grown up, the government has gradually raised the voting age ? from 15 to 16, and more recently to 18. Otherwise, the young would be the only sector of society that really counts in an election. Both better educated and savvier about the world, in large part because of access to technology, many young Iranians want something more than what the system has been willing to provide - politically, economically and socially. (Read "White House on Iran Election: A Diplomatic Plus.")

In an attempt to slow the swelling demographics, in the early 1990s the regime introduced a sweeping family-planning program. It dispatched 35,000 women door-to-door to preach the benefits of limiting the number of children to two or less. It provided widespread and often free access to birth control - the Pill, condoms, IUDs, Norplant, tubal ligation and vasectomies - and made the U.N.'s World Population Day a time for clerics to preach the benefits of small families.

An innovative program also required couples to attend a graphically descriptive sex-education and family-planning class before they could get a marriage license. (I attended one class with several couples - and learned a lot.) Iran has brought down the size of the average family from more than seven children to closer to two, winning a U.N. award for family planning in the process.

The overall impact, however, of each of these issues and many others has been to shift the focus from rigid religious ideology to earthly realities, with solutions based on 21st century ideas like sustainable development - and, gradually, even shades of greater democracy.

The violence is regrettable. Even so, I think it's beautiful to see the Iranian people fighting for their rights and dignity.

Not many changes of this nature occur without violence. Terrible, yes. But more terrible is to see a people cowed and controlled by religious fanatics.

The protesters in the streets of Teheran and elsewhere in Iran are officially my heroes.

[Mister Moobs]

what was CNN doing showing that young Iranian woman who'd been shot in the chest bleeding to death, eyes rolling, blood pouring....what's the agenda there? hardly subtle...

Maybe I'm wrong, but, I think this guy was being sarcastic.

[Mister Moobs]

anyone paying attention to the Muslim world generally and Iran specifically knew that these events were only a matter of time.

The tension against the Muslim overlords is palpable.

The thing that I hate is that the US has placed itself so that I can not help. We should have been with these folks all along. But that would have meant a different set of history books.

[CiaranM]

educate the masses !!!!!!!!!!

By ROBIN WRIGHT Robin Wright ? Mon Jun 22, 2:25 pm ET

Who would have thought that Iran, a country that has been the nemesis of the past five American Presidents, might actually become a model for what Washington wants to see happen politically in the Middle East?

Who would have thought that a Berlin Wall moment for the region might happen in the strict Islamic republic, where a revolution 30 years ago unleashed Islam as a modern political idiom and extremism as a tool to confront the West? (See pictures of violence used as intimidation in Iran.)

Unlikely as it seems, the rise of a popular movement relying on civil disobedience to confront authoritarian rule - in the last bloc of countries to hold out against the tide of change that has swept the rest of the world over the past quarter century - is almost a diplomatic dream for the Obama Administration.

I'm not talking about the regime's obstinate reaction or the brutality it unleashed on the streets of Tehran this past weekend. Even in his terse comments since the beginning of the electoral chaos in Iran, Barack Obama has made it clear the violence upsets him greatly. But in his speech to the Islamic world in Cairo on June 4, Obama spoke about the same principles that just eight days later galvanized millions of people throughout Iran to take to the streets.

"All people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose," Obama said.

With what now looks like uncanny prescience, he added, "There is no straight line to realize this promise ... Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away."

Yet in the midst of a debate over the U.S. role in Iran - recent past, present and future - Washington can take almost no credit for what is happening. The $400 million allocated by the Bush Administration for intelligence operations and the $75 million the State Department budgeted to promote democracy in Iran had little if any impact in changing the regime's ways or empowering Iranians. Many Iranian NGOs even publicly said they did not want, need or dare to be tainted by U.S. financial assistance.

This is a revolution that has been unraveling steadily over decades, beginning in its early years. Indeed, Iran's social transformation - educating, energizing and empowering a stronger and more demanding society, part of which has now turned on the regime - may offer Washington important lessons about what does lead to change in the Islamic world.

The symbol of Iran's uprising is a young woman named Neda Agha Soltan, reportedly a philosophy student whose death during the first clashes on June 20 was gruesomely captured on an already famous cell-phone video sent round the world on YouTube. A new generation of feisty women has been at the forefront of the protests. And the female factor is at the heart of Iran's reform movement.

But the ruling clerics probably did not understand how it happened until it was too late. During the monarchy, many traditional families were reluctant to send their girls beyond elementary school - or to school at all - for fear of exposure to miniskirts, makeup and westernizing ways during the Shah's rapid modernization programs.

But after the 1979 upheaval, traditional families began sending girls to school - and beyond. Today, the majority of university students in Iran are female - at Tehran University, they make up 65% of the student population - and they have places in virtually every profession. Iran has even had a female Vice President. And women want a bigger say still. (See pictures of people protesting the Iran election around the world.)

The other engine of change is the boomeranging of a policy by the revolutionary regime that in 1979 called on Iran's women to breed an Islamic generation. They complied. Within a decade, Iran's population almost doubled, from 34 million to 62 million.

The theocracy soon realized that it did not have the resources to feed, educate, provide social services for and eventually employ twice the population - and the next generation of children that it in turn would produce. It was the moment the government of God plummeted to earth - because all those young people would also have the vote.

As Iran's baby boomers have grown up, the government has gradually raised the voting age ? from 15 to 16, and more recently to 18. Otherwise, the young would be the only sector of society that really counts in an election. Both better educated and savvier about the world, in large part because of access to technology, many young Iranians want something more than what the system has been willing to provide - politically, economically and socially. (Read "White House on Iran Election: A Diplomatic Plus.")

In an attempt to slow the swelling demographics, in the early 1990s the regime introduced a sweeping family-planning program. It dispatched 35,000 women door-to-door to preach the benefits of limiting the number of children to two or less. It provided widespread and often free access to birth control - the Pill, condoms, IUDs, Norplant, tubal ligation and vasectomies - and made the U.N.'s World Population Day a time for clerics to preach the benefits of small families.

An innovative program also required couples to attend a graphically descriptive sex-education and family-planning class before they could get a marriage license. (I attended one class with several couples - and learned a lot.) Iran has brought down the size of the average family from more than seven children to closer to two, winning a U.N. award for family planning in the process.

The overall impact, however, of each of these issues and many others has been to shift the focus from rigid religious ideology to earthly realities, with solutions based on 21st century ideas like sustainable development - and, gradually, even shades of greater democracy.

The violence is regrettable. Even so, I think it's beautiful to see the Iranian people fighting for their rights and dignity.

Not many changes of this nature occur without violence. Terrible, yes. But more terrible is to see a people cowed and controlled by religious fanatics.

The protesters in the streets of Teheran and elsewhere in Iran are officially my heroes.

no doubt there will be violence. ppl wielding power and infuence rarely give it up easily. ESPECIALLY when they know there will be a day of reckoning when they r no longer in control.

increase standards of living and improve education across the board and the ppl will generally do the rest !!!

[Mister Moobs]

by the way, Ciaran, I agree

Profanity DOES make talking fun...

[Admin_2]

no doubt there will be violence. ppl wielding power and infuence rarely give it up easily. ESPECIALLY when they know there will be a day of reckoning when they r no longer in control.

Or they will just move their riches to another country and try to create unrest via videophone...

:roll:

[Mister Moobs]

June 23, 2009 | In the summer of 1968, as Soviet tanks rolled into communist Czechoslovakia to end the brief period of liberalization known as the "Prague Spring," W.H. Auden composed a poem titled "August 1968":

The Ogre does what ogres can,

Deeds quite impossible for Man,

But one prize is beyond his reach,

The Ogre cannot master Speech:

About a subjugated plain,

Among its desperate and slain,

The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,

While drivel gushes from his lips.

Watching the scenes of bravery and brutality that are being played out in Iran brings Auden's poem to mind. Another line comes to mind as well: the observation by W.E.B. DuBois in 1903 that "the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line." Racism has not been extinguished, but it has been corralled, by the now-universal principle of the separation of race and state. The demise of political racism leaves political religion standing as the most widespread form of tyranny in the world. The problem of the 21st century is the problem of the creedal line. If the problem is solved, it will be solved by universalizing the principle of the separation of religion and state.

Secular government is the basis of both liberty and democracy. It is important to emphasize this, because of the tendency to portray the struggle in Iran in terms of a global conflict between democracy and dictatorship. Set aside, for a moment, the fact that former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi was one of four candidates, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who were approved to run as presidential candidates last May by the clerics of Iran's Guardian Council. It does not take away from the heroism of Mousavi or his followers to point out that if Ahmadinejad stole the election he stole an election that was already rigged.

The larger issue is the question of what comes first: separation of church and state, or democracy. America's Founders had no doubts on that score. Democracy requires citizens who are free from "superstition" and "priestcraft," to use 18th-century language. Americans have usually believed that religion can play a constructive role in a democratic republic by encouraging moral behavior. But in the traditional American view, theocratic democracy is nothing more than majoritarian tyranny, whether the clerics have a formal role in the state or merely tell the voters how to vote. And even secular democracy is not a goal in itself. It is merely a means to an end: the protection of natural rights.

The idea of universal, basic natural human rights is incompatible with theocracy in any form. While Christians and adherents of other religions can believe in natural rights, the theory of natural rights itself, influenced by ancient Greek sophists and Epicureans, is inherently secular. Natural rights by definition are those that ordinary people, using only their reason, can agree upon -- things like life and liberty and property or happiness, meaning access to subsistence. The list of natural rights varies from thinker to thinker, but they all have one thing in common -- they are not revealed by a divine intelligence to a prophet or priests.

The natural rights tradition is radical in another way. Authority flows upward from the individual to the government, not downward from God to the individual via the government. The government is not God's viceroy on earth. It is nothing more than a territorial mutual protection society. In natural rights theory -- though needless to say not always in the practice of liberal regimes -- the governors are the employees and agents of the governed.

Combine the two ideas of natural rights -- the governed as the bosses of the governors, the rights of the governed identifiable by reason -- and you get a conception of government as something that is limited in its purposes, if not necessarily its means. In the words of Thomas Jefferson in his "Notes on Virginia": "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

A government, in short, is a limited-purpose, secular, worldly agency, not a divine institution. It is more like a property-owners association than like a church. There would be no point in a property-owners association that sought to do its limited, straightforward business according to the precepts of Catholic natural law, or Baptist theology, or Orthodox Judaism. Likewise, from the natural rights liberal perspective the very idea of a Christian state or an Islamic republic seems absurd, like a Buddhist municipal water utility district.

But what if 100 percent of the people in a water-utility district are Buddhist and want the district's charter to promote Buddhism? It doesn't matter what they want. Promoting Buddhism is beyond the legitimate scope of the activities of a water utility district. Buddhist monks are free to promote Buddhism privately, but the water-utility engineers should stick to keeping the water clean and safe for everyone, Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike.

Excellent article and it's written by one of those damn liberals.... :wink:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/06/23/religion_iran/

[Mister Moobs]

Is it "cultural imperialism" to insist that natural rights be the basis of limited and secular government? That cultural-relativist argument can hardly be made by theocrats, who claim that the legitimacy of governments depends on their conformity to the will of God, as interpreted by their scriptures and their clerics. Pakistan's Ministry of Religious Affairs takes its motto from a Quranic verse: "Islam is the only religion acceptable to God." Those who hold this view cannot argue that their version of government is the only divinely sanctioned one and then defend it by claiming to be defending their local traditions and customs, as though their would-be universal religion were just a local style of costume or cuisine. Religious tyranny today predominantly is found in Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran. But that does not make critics of religious tyranny "anti-Muslim," any more than the fact that white supremacy was found, obviously, in white nations and white-ruled empires made criticism of racism "anti-white."