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Generational Dynamics World View
*** 26-Jun-18 World View -- Massive Tehran riots strike deep into Iran government's legitimacy

This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
  • Massive Tehran riots strike deep into Iran government's legitimacy
  • Tehran demonstrators attack Iran's foreign policy
  • Brief generational history of Iran's protests

****
**** Massive Tehran riots strike deep into Iran government's legitimacy
****


[Image: g180625b.jpg]
Protester in Tehran, Iran, on Monday with banner, 'We Want Democracy!' (Getty)

Thousands of Iranians on Monday took to the streets of Tehran, Iran's
capital city, to protest rising prices and a sinking economy, with
unemployment rates above 24%. Traders at Tehran's Grand Bazaar closed
their shops and joined the demonstrators, protesting the sharp fall in
Iran's rial currency versus the US dollar.

The prices of imported goods have skyrocketed because of the loss in
value of the rial. The official exchange rate is 42,000 rials per US
dollar. But in April, the black market exchange rate was 60,000.
Just one week ago, the exchange rate was 80,000. On Sunday, it shot
up by another 10,000 rials, to an exchange rate of 90,000 rials per US
dollar. This kind of increase means that the cost of an imported item
has now more than doubled in price, in just a few weeks.

It's apparently Sunday's apparent collapse in the value of the rial
that triggered the mass protests on Monday. Shopkeepers joined the
protesters chanting "Strike!" and "We don't want the dollar at 100,000
rials!"

In desperation, Iran's central bank plans to set up a "secondary
currency market" by next week. The details have yet to be released,
but the idea seems to be that new regulations would prevent merchants
from raising prices when the value of the rial fall.

Needless to say this is infuriating to merchants and shopkeepers who
can see that they're going to be required to pay more for imported
goods, but that there will be new regulations forbidding them from
charging higher prices for the same items. This is the same kind of
thing that has been tried in Venezuela and Zimbabwe with disastrous
results.

In late December of last year, there were similar economic protests
that spread to some 75 cities and towns, resulting in 25 people killed
and nearly 5,000 arrested. NBC News and BBC and
Tehran Times and Radio Farda

****
**** Tehran demonstrators attack Iran's foreign policy
****


As happened in December's massive demonstrations, the protests
quickly spread from economics to foreign policy and to questioning
the competence of the entire government.

In my article on the December protests,
I listed about 20 of the protests that were being
chanted, many of them quite vicious. One chant that was
prominent on Monday that didn't appear in my previous list
is "Death to Palestine!"

This is a particularly ironic chant because it cuts into the entire
ethos of the Islamic government. The two supreme leaders, Ayatollah
Rouhollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, used a variety of
artifices to justify their mass slaughter, torture, rape, and
extrajudicial arrests of innocent peaceful protesters, but the main
ones have always been to blame Iran's problems on the Big Satan (the
United States) and the Little Satan (Israel). As I've been reporting
for years, the young generations of Iran are generally pro-Western and
pro-American, and this chant makes it clear that they're pro-Israel --
or at least not anti-Israel.

The protesters' objections to Iran's foreign policy ties back again to
the economy. Iran is spending enormous amounts of money supporting
Bashar al-Assad in Syria, supporting the Houthis in Yemen, supporting
Hezbollah in Lebanon, and supporting Hamas in Gaza. After the nuclear
deal was signed in 2015, and Iran received a billions of dollars in
released funds, instead of spending the money on the economy, the
perception among Iranians is that they wasted the money on Syria,
Yemen, Hezbollah, and Hamas.

I particularly have to shake my head at Iran's support for Hamas,
using Iranian-supplied weapons to attack Israel. Hamas is a Sunni
terrorist group, and they will never accept hegemony from Shia Iran.
They're happy to take any free money and weapons supplied by Iran, of
course, but it shows the depth the delusions suffered by 78-year-old
Khamenei that he thinks he can govern the Sunni Palestinians -- or
even more delusional, if he believes that al-Mahdi, the hidden Imam
from Shia theology, is about to return and convert the world to Islam,
rewarding him for supplying arms to Hamas.

With the Trump administrations imposing new sanctions, the huge stream
of money that Iran started receiving in 2015 is now going to be
sharply reduced. This is providing the government with the
opportunity to blame Iran's economic troubles on the US, when in fact
the economy would be in much better shape if the stream of money
hadn't been wasted on foreign wars.
Jerusalem Post and Times of Israel and Asharq Al-Awsat (Saudi Arabia)

****
**** Brief generational history of Iran's protests
****


One of the many ironies of Monday's protests is that they were led by
merchants and shopkeepers in Tehran's Grand Bazaar. Merchants and
shopkeepers were strong supporters of Khomeini at the start of the
Great Islamic Revolution in 1979, because they were highly critical of
the economic policies of the secular but autocratic government of
Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Not surprisingly, after 40 years of the
hardline extremist Sharia law imposed by Khomeini and Khamenei and the
resulting economic disaster, two of the chants that could be heard on
Monday were "Death to the dictator!" and "Reza Shah, Bless Your Soul!"

But the significance of Monday's protests goes back much farther
than that.

During the 1800s, Iran (Persia) was repeatedly humiliated in border
clashes with Britain and Russia. So the public had had enough when
Iran's government granted a tobacco concession to Britain in 1890.
This concession gave granted a monopoly on both the purchase and sale
of tobacco within Persia to an English company for a period of fifty
years. The tobacco concession struck at the heart of Iran's culture.
At this time, nearly everyone in Iran, both men and women, used
tobacco products, as they gathered to smoke and drink coffee. The
tobacco merchants felt their livelihood threatened, and enlisted the
help of other bazaar merchants to organize anti-government protests.
In the northern regions of Iran under Russian influence, including
today's Azerbaijan, support for the protests was strong because the
monopoly had been granted to the British, locking out the Russians.

The result was the Tobacco Revolt (1890-92). The Shah was forced to
rescind the tobacco concession, but the protests continued, and dozens
of protesters were killed before the protests fizzled. The Tobacco
Revolt was a major event in Iranian history, with implications far
beyond the income of tobacco merchants.

In the end, the issues raised by the Tobacco Revolt were not about
tobacco production, but about the right of the Shah to have the power
to grant concessions to other nations without the approval of the
people. Muslim countries had had Sharia law for centuries, based
on Roman law but merged with the core concepts of Islam. But Sharia
law had to do with rules for ordinary people, and placed no
restrictions at all on the what the Shah could do.

That's when the people of Iran looked across the Atlantic and saw what
America had done in 1789, ratifying the Constitution of the United
States, and the related document, the Bill of Rights. Becoming aware
of the US Constitution, and of the French Revolution, the people of
Iran began to demand their own constitution.

Iran had two generational crisis civil wars during the 1900s, the
second one being the Islamic revolution in 1979. But the first one
was the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-09.

The Tobacco Revolt provided a template to the public in 1905, when
there were protests over an increase in the price of sugar. The
government blamed the sugar merchants, and several sugar merchants
were beaten and tortured. A leading preacher and radical
constitutionalist, Seyyed Jamal al-Din Isfahani attacked the
government from the pulpit, leading to public protests, especially
from students, merchants and shopkeepers.

By January 1906, the Shah agreed to the public demands, including
formation of a house of justice, or consultative assembly. The Shah
did not follow up on his promises, leading to a confrontation
involving a group of clerics and their students in which a student was
killed. This triggered wider protests, with over 12,000 protesters
demanding the formation of a majlis, or parliament. The first majlis
convened in October 1906 and set about the task of writing a
constitution. An ailing Shah decreed the document they produced into
law in December 1906, a few days before his death.

The Shah's son became the new Shah in January 1907. He was against
the constitution of 1906 ratified during regime of his father. Iran
was still under occupation of Russian forces in the north and British
forces in the south, and both the Russian and British forces supported
the Shah in opposing the constitution and the Majlis. On June 23,
1908, Russia's Cossack Brigade shelled and plundered the parliament
building, executing several constitutionalist leaders. The Shah and
the Cossack Brigade ruled until July 1909, when pro-Constitution
forces marched from Iran's province of Azerbaijan to Tehran, defeating
the Cossacks, deposing the Shah, and re-establishing the constitution.

That was the climax of Iran's Constitutional Revolution. So finally,
over a century after America's written constitution and the French
Revolution and its imposition of law, Iran had officially become a
country ruled by law, not by leaders who are above the law.

They say that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Just as
the Tobacco Revolt was a precursor to the Constitutional Revolution,
the protests arising from the White Revolution of 1963 were the
precursor to the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

The White Revolution was actually a government program instituted by
the Shah. It included land reform, the nationalization of forests,
the sale of state-owned enterprises to the private sector, a
profit-sharing plan for industrial workers, and the formation of a
Literacy Corps to eradicate illiteracy in rural areas. The White
Revolution also granted Iranian women the right to vote, increased
women’s minimum legal marriage age to 18, and improved women’s legal
rights in divorce and child custody matters.

These reforms were opposed Iran’s clergy, in particular Ayatollah
Khomeini. Khomeini led the June 5, 1963 uprising, opposing the Shah
and the White Revolution. In the course of this uprising, the
authorities quelled resistance among the religious students in a
seminary in the city of Qum, and a number of students lost their
lives. Khomeini’s activities eventually led to his exile to Iraq in
1964.

The protests of both the Tobacco Revolt and the White Revolution were
led by élites. In 1890, the élites were the tobacco merchants. In
1962, it was religious leaders who feared that they would lose their
influence and control over sectors of society where they were
preeminent. Things like land reform, improving literacy through
better education, and granting women additional rights could all be
viewed as threatening to the clerics and imams and their areas of
traditional authority.

The leader of the insurgents in Iran's 1979 civil war was Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini, who had led the anti-government protests in the
1963 White Revolution, and ended up seeing hundreds of his followers
killed, after which he was sent into exile by Mohammad Reza Shah
Pahlavi. When Khomeini made his triumphant return from 16 years of
exile to Tehran on February 1, 1979, he was ready for revenge.

Khomeini had already gotten his revenge on the Shah. Although he had
been in exile, he was able in 1978-79 to incite widespread anti-Shah
uprisings based on discontent with a populist ideology tied to Islamic
principles and calls for the overthrow of the Shah. The uprisings
forced the Shah's government to collapse and, suffering from cancer,
the Shah went into exile and left Iran on January 16, 1979. He lived
in Egypt, Morocco, the Bahamas, and Mexico before going to the United
States for treatment of lymphatic cancer, where he died.

Thousands of people were killed in Iran's civil war, including
thousands who were jailed or executed by Khomeini. Khomeini claims
that 60,000 people were killed. Here's a paragraph from the preamble
to Khomeini's 1979 constitution:

<QUOTE>"After slightly more than a year of continuous and
unrelenting struggle, the sapling of the Revolution, watered by
the blood of more than 60,000 martyrs and 100,000 wounded and
disabled, not to mention billions of tumans' worth of property
damage, came to bear fruit amidst the cries of "Independence!
Freedom! Islamic government!" This great movement, which attained
victory through reliance upon faith, unity, and the decisiveness
of its leadership at every critical and sensitive juncture, as
well as the self-sacrificing spirit of the people, succeeded in
upsetting all the calculations of imperialism and destroying all
its connections and institutions, thereby opening a new chapter in
the history of all embracing popular revolutions of the
world."<END QUOTE>


However, analysts outside of Iran question the 60,000 figure, and give
much lower estimates of 3,000-4,000.

But that wasn't the end of it. Ayatollah Khomeini's bloodthirsty
lusts reached a kind of peak in 1988 when he ordered the massacre of
tens of thousands of political prisoners and political enemies,
especially those in the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI
or MEK). He issued this decree in July 1988:

<QUOTE>"Whoever at any stage continues to belong to the PMOI
must be executed. Annihilate the enemies of Islam immediately!
...Those who are in prisons throughout the country and remain
steadfast in their support for PMOI are waging war on God and are
condemned to execution.... It is naive to show mercy to those who wage
war on God."<END QUOTE>


That wasn't the end of it either. When students protested in 1999,
Ayatollah Khamenei ordered huge, bloody massacres, rapes, torture, and
other atrocities. The same happened in 2009, to students protesting
the election.

The 1999 protests marked a major turning point in Iran's government,
because it was the first time that it was clear that younger
generations would not accept the extremist rule of Khamenei, and that
the Great Islamic Revolution was a complete failure as an Islamic
ideal, and instead was just another cheap, vicious dictatorship, led
by an old geezer who has abandoned righteous Shia theology for bloody
oppression.

Ever since the Constitutional Revolution, the people of Iran have
demanded that their leaders follow the law, as defined in the
constitution. Here's one more excerpt from Khomeini's 1979
constitution:

<QUOTE>"Islamic Government is designed on a basis of
"religious guardianship" as put forward by Imam Khomeini at the
height of the intense emotion and strangulation (felt) under the
despotic regime. This created a specific motivation and new field
of advance for the Muslim people; and opened up the true path for
the religious fight of Islam, pressing forward the struggle of the
committed Muslim combatants, inside and outside the country. ...

The publication by the [Reza Shah] regime on [January 7, 1978] of
the letter which insulted the sacred order of the clergy, and in
particular the Imam Khomeini, hastened this movement. It caused
the people's anger to explode all over the country. In an effort
to control this volcano of popular anger, the regime tried to
suppress the protest uprising by bloodshed. This very fact set
more blood pulsing through the veins of the Revolution. Continuing
revolutionary passion at the time of the seven-day and forty-day
commemoration of the martyrs of the Revolution, added on an
ever-increasing scale to the vitality and ardor and fervent unity
of the movement throughout the country. It continued and extended
the people's upheaval in all the country's organizations by a
general strike and joining in street demonstrations while actively
seeking the downfall of the despotic regime. Widespread
co-operation of men and women of all classes, and of religious and
political groups, in this struggle, took place in decisive and
dramatic fashion In particular women joined openly on all the
scenes of this great Holy War, ever more actively and
extensively. Such a scene would be a mother with a child in her
bosom hastening to the battlefield and facing machine gun fire
This large section of society took a main and decisive part in the
struggle."<END QUOTE>


Reading this excerpt from Khomeini's own 1979 constitution makes it
clear that he has a great deal to fear. Iran is coming full circle.
The students and merchants of today have read the constitution, and
are following its prescriptions -- popular anger, uprisings, strikes,
street demonstrations, even facing gun fire -- while actively seeking
the downfall of this new despotic regime. It's something that
Khomeini himself should have predicted. Homa Katouzian and Iran's Constitution

Related Articles


KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Iran, Persia, Tehran, Grand Bazaar,
Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei,
Palestine, Israel, Hamas, Gaza, Hezbollah, Syria, Lebanon,
Houthis, Yemen, al-Mahdi, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi,
Britain, Russia, Cossack Brigade,
Tobacco Revolt, Constitutional Revolution,
White Revolution, Islamic Revolution

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John J. Xenakis
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26-Jun-18 World View -- Massive Tehran riots strike deep into Iran government's legit - by John J. Xenakis - 06-25-2018, 10:48 PM
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