For the mullahs, the Singularity is here
In his work, the futurist Raymond Kurzweil proposes the idea of the coming singularity, a technological shift that makes the present unrecognizable to the past. In Iran, something similar is happening, with tragic consequences. The old revolutionaries, holding on to old ideas about Iran’s place in the world, the perfidy of the West, and the dangers of modernism, are coming up against a generation of savvy digital natives who see themselves as full citizens of the world, and who want to same rights and responsibilities as other good global citizens. Their peaceful protest to the denial of those rights in a rigged election, led elements of the government to show their true face the world and to their own people: violent, repressive, power-hungry, and and stupidly merciless.
The generation of Iranians born after the 1979 Revolution are the vanguard of the current protests, which have gone far beyond the questionable results of a presidential election, and become an expression of a people’s desire to cast off the stifling political environment controlled by the mullahs.
Roger Cohen has posed the problem in his piece today, The End of the Beginning:
Thirty years from the revolution, the core question of this election was: Must Iran stand apart from the forces of economic and political globalization in order to preserve its Islamic theocracy?
Or is it confident enough of its Islamic identity, and its now firmly established independence from America, to trash the nest-of-spies vitriol and an ultimately self-defeating isolation?
The answer has been devastating.
So now we must wait. The Iranian government under the “leadership” of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has decided to go the route of Myanmar and try to silence the people with violent repression, but the effort seems doomed to failure. His government has lost all its legitimacy as a “guardian of human rights” as its leadership has long claimed, or as a democracy. It now functions in opposition to its own people, and, as in Myanmar, only its own brave people can change it.
The US has some real security concerns to address with whatever government Iran has in place, and dealing with the nuclear program and Khamenei and Ahmadinejad’s support for terrorism around the globe must be addressed. Cutting off the government’s gas imports is one option the internation community has to respond to the current crackdown, and further sanctions are another, but neither of these will go very far in addressing the international community’s issues with the regime. Using these sticks before entering into dialogue, precludes their use later. The system has shown it doesn’t care about international isolation or its own people. The United States’ security concern is with the ruthless government of Iran and sadly, they are the ones with which we must engage for now.
As we do, however, we can also pray for the courage of Iran’s civilains to continue to stand up against the thugs, and pray that members of Iran’s security forces find their moral voices and refuse to attack their fellow countrymen, who want only to be a nation like any other, with its failings and opportunities and self-interests. We can continue to speak out against the violence, and we can continue to provide whatever technological aid we can to help Iranians get their messages out to the world and to communicate freely with each other. But the current crisis is an Iranian problem, two visions comepeting.
The older generation sees Iran as a messianic cult, the wellspring of the next Islamic age, while the younger generation largely wants to leave all that messianism behind and simply be equal members of the global community. As President Obama said in a press conference this week, “Ultimately, this is up to the Iranian people to decide who their leadership is going to be and the structure of their government.”
Both groups with competing visions of the kind of Iran they live in are “patriots,” in the sense of being loyal to their country, but only one has a future. Getting to that future, as we are seeing, is ugly.
