News

How
many revolutions can one generation manage? With poetic precision,
angry demonstrators are challenging Iran’s aging revolutionaries.

Paradoxically,
many are their own children, disillusioned by Khomeinism and the system
of the supreme guardian. Revolutions devour their own children. The
Islamic Republic spat out its ideological offspring once in the bloody
score-settling immediately after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s return
to Iran in 1979, and once again last summer when it instructed the
security forces to kill, torture and sexually abuse rebellious youths,
many of whom are the sons of khodis (insiders).

On
February 11, thousands of Green protesters were violently suppressed
when they sought to march alongside a government-sanctioned
demonstration marking the 31st anniversary of the revolution. Hijacking
a pro-regime protest to publicly condemn the Islamic Republic was until
recently unthinkable. It suggests that a sea change in mentality is
sweeping society. Is it too late for the current ruling system to
defuse it?

The current
incumbents of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s vacated palaces have
demonstrated that rather than learning from history, they are repeating
it. They smear t... >>>