FIRST ARTICLE: “Invoking the Arab Spring, Iran Rewrites its own history.”
EXCERPT:
…Brigadier General Rahim Yahya-Safavi summed up the sentiment when he said: “The revolution of the people of Tunisia and Egypt is modeled after Iran’s Islamic Revolution.”
The underlying message here is clear: The government of Iran welcomes the fall of a key Arab adversary, Hosni Mubarak, and the Tunisian Zine El Abedine Ben Ali , but wants to guide the narrative of these revolts into one that will not threaten Iran’s own ruling elite.
These “Islamic awakenings”, the emerging Islamic Republic party line suggests, recall Iran’s own revolt against the Shah of Iran in 1979. And the message to the Iranian people now seems to be: you already had your “Islamic awakening”; the Arab world is simply catching up.
There is just one problem with this line of reasoning: it’s not true today, and it wasn’t true in 1979, either…
(For my comment on that, see subpost below).
LINK: http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/…
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SECOND ARTICLE–“Iran’s Blue Collar Revolution: Has President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lost his working class support base?
EXCERPT: …hubristic pronouncements once made Ahmadinejad popular among his base of lower-working-class supporters, who benefited from government handouts. But these days, the president’s exaggerations are running up against economic reality… So stark is the contrast between the government line and reality that, for the first time, Ahmadinejad’s perpetual optimism is losing — rather than winning — supporters.
COMMENT: Everyone knows that the security forces on whom the regime depends come from the working class–the last segment to turn against the regime. Workers were all too was willing to be duped so long as the regime‘s lied about other groups who complained previously. Now that workers are getting a taste of how it feels, their reaction appears to be, “How stupid does this regime think we are?” Maybe they’ll rethink the earlier lies now and reach the same conclusion that everyone else reached long ago–that nothing this regime says can be believed–not a word!
Ahmadinejad imagines such whoppers will go over in this context as easily as they worked in the past. People who believed in this regime have been burned too often to believe anymore. The entire ruling clique is so out of touch with the people. Khamenei actually imagines those who hate him consist of a tiny number of greens and with everyone else he’s beloved. That’s the trouble when you surround yourself with yes men.
Everything is working to deprogram the “robots” upon whose allegiance Khamenei and his flunkies depend. The nice thing is there is nothing the Bad Guys can do about it at this point.
No conspiracy, real or imagined, whether by foreign agents, by the media or by the Greens could possibly do one tenth as much to discredit this regime and destroy all trust in it than the regime itself through word and deed. It’s not just the brutality, economic incompetence and corruption but the whopping nature of its lies about everything imaginable-an insult to everyone’s intelligence.
This regime now come accross to Iranians the way Hitler’s claims of impending victory came across to Germans as Soviet armies reached the outskirts of Berlin in April of 1945.
LINK:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/06/irans_blue_collar_revolutionpagefull
