Speaking to a government-organized throng bused in from around Tehran and as far away as Qom, Iran’s religious capital, and other cities — a crowd, no doubt, vastly inflated by dutiful members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the fascist, mosque-based Basij thugs — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei threw down the gauntlet against the Green Wave. Make no mistake: it’s by far the most serious, even existential crisis for the Islamic Republic since its founding in 1979. By blatantly rigging the vote, and by their heavy-handed crackdown in the wake of the travesty, the regime has shattered its legitimacy. Its leadership, including Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, are isolated from virtually every important segment of Iranian society — students, workers, intellectuals, the business class, and even the very clergy that is at the heart of the system — and they stand revealed as a repressive, reactionary military dictatorship. What remains to be seen is whether the opposition will back down in the face of that repressive power.
