As the Iranian people shuffled in to vote this past Friday they probably had some suspicions as to what the current regime would do with their vote. Past elections in Iran have not been without their controversy, but there is no way one could have predicted the incredible response of the Iranian people to the simple truth: the Iranian government fixed the results, stole the election, and made it so blatantly obvious a child could see it. From this chain of events, a revolution was birthed.
In the run-up to the election, two candidates eventually emerged as the favorites: incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and reformist candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi. On Friday, January 12th, nearly 45 million Iranians cast their votes. If we are to believe the Iranian regime, 67% of eligible voters cast their votes in favor of Ahmadinejad. However, we cannot believe the Iranian regime because the Presidential election was not an election at all. Christopher Hitchens shared his thoughts on the election on Slate.com:
"Iran and its citizens are considered by the Shiite theocracy to be the private property of the anointed mullahs. This totalitarian idea was originally based on a piece of religious quackery promulgated by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and known as velayat-e faqui. Under the terms of this edict—which originally placed the clerics in charge of the lives and property of orphans, the indigent, and the insane—the entire population is now declared to be a childlike ward of the black-robed state. Thus any voting exercise is, by definition, over before it has begun, because the all-powerful Islamic Guardian Council determines well in advance who may or may not "run." Any newspaper referring to the subsequent proceedings as an election, sometimes complete with rallies, polls, counts, and all the rest of it, is the cause of helpless laughter among the ayatollahs. ("They fell for it? But it's too easy!") Shame on all those media outlets that have been complicit in this dirty lie all last week. And shame also on our pathetic secretary of state, who said that she hoped that "the genuine will and desire" of the people of Iran would be reflected in the outcome. Surely she knows that any such contingency was deliberately forestalled to begin with."
The Western media got a hold of the real results of the election, and they are almost comically contrary to what the fascist regime expects its people and the world to believe:
Eligible voters: 49,322,412
Votes cast: 42,026,078
Spoilt votes: 38,716
Mir Hossein Mousavi: 19,075,623
Mehdi Karoubi: 13,387,104
Mahmoud Ahmadi-nejad (incumbent): 5,698,417
Mohsen Rezaei (conservative candidate): 3,754,218
This is how fascism functions. The government says whatever it wants to its sheep, because it expects its people to listen. However, as many Iranians have been screaming at the police who have been beating them, the people are not sheep. The Iranian government overshot its reach and the people have reacted. Over the past few days the protesting has become so relentless that this is no longer about the results of a stolen election, it is a declarative statement to the fascist regime: you cannot abuse us any longer.
"Meejangam, Meemeeram, rayam-o-pass meegeeram." "I will fight, I will die, I will get my vote back." This was just one of the chants being screamed in Farsi on the streets of Tehran this weekend. The people of Iran are drinking from the wellspring of liberty, and they are using the water to put out the fire of despotism. God bless them. But as the world watches one can only wonder what the future has in store for the people of Iran and the democratic movement they are trying to birth. It is easy to be skeptical about the reality of a fascist regime stepping down, but it was also easy to be skeptical about the chances of a small group of colonies rebelling against a tyrant hundreds of miles away and starting the world's first liberal democracy.
The current struggle of Iran no longer belongs only to that special country in the Middle East, but to the Western World as well, especially the United States. When someone fights for freedom, no matter where they are, be it Asia, the Middle East, or Eastern Europe, the U.S. stands with them, because we know that liberty is the natural state for mankind. No government has a right to rob a person of their autonomy, and that need not be written in any holy book or decree; it is fundamental to who we are as human beings.
When Thomas Jefferson chose to support the revolutionaries in France, many of his colleagues were puzzled. Jefferson had befriended many of those in the elite class and in the French government; why would Jefferson turn against them? He did so because he believed in the cause of the revolution, for the people to remove the boot of aristocracy from their face, lest it keep them subdued forever. When Jefferson told his friend John Adams, "Long live the revolution," Adams, puzzled, asked Jefferson, "Theirs or ours?" Jefferson responded, "They are one in the same." When the Iranian people fight fascism, they do it not only for their sake, but for ours as well. Fascism does not stay dormant; it seeks to spread out and make itself known. Their freedom is ours as well, and just as other countries stood with us in our fight, we should also stand with the Iranians in theirs.
The people of Iran are fighting this tyranny with their own blood and sweat. The United States should support this revolution, support the Iranian people, and pray for the overthrow of a tyrannical regime. We must pray for their safety, because the move from despotism to freedom is not done in a feather bed. For now, we can do nothing but pray, hope, encourage, and wait, but we can take solace in the fact that the disease of liberty is catching.
ازادى, استقلال, معافيت, اسانى, روانى
"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty." - Thomas Jefferson, 1796
A version of this post appeared in the June 16th, 2009 print edition of the New York Legal Review.
