Several days ago, over a Christmas drink in Moscow, the Parallax Brief was talking to a Russian friend about corruption in the Moscow’s mayor’s office. “But, really,” asked my Russian friend. “What can I do? Protest? They’ll just use the OMAN [special, paramilitary police] to break it up and I’ll maybe get arrested. And getting in touch with local politicians and writing letters won’t work at all. They’ll just not listen.”
This is likely true enough, and it made the Parallax Brief realize that real political change comes only when people are willing to take big risks. Yet doing anything, let alone risking arrest, is beyond most people. How many of you have grumbled but not written to a politician out of sheer laziness? How many of you have felt strongly in the past about a specific issue but have in the end not protested or even joined activist groups?
The Parallax Brief knows he falls into this category.
If this is the case in a liberal democracy like ours, think of the incredible bravery it must take to stand up to a brutal and cold-hearted regime like that in Iran. Young Iranians are currently risking everything for freedom and the right to hold to account those who rule their country. For this, they are being beaten, arrested, tortured, and killed. And still they will not be silenced.
These Iranian freedom fighters are heroes, and we should remember this as news from Iran develops over the holiday period.
Yet, the nascent Green Revolution should also have taught us in the west an important lesson.
The Parallax Brief thinks it’s fair to say than when John McCain danced onto stage singing “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys hit Barbara Allen, most sensible people would have felt a combination of juddering horror at the depth of geopolitical aggression in some quarters in the US and mirth at the senile, slobbering old warmonger.
That may be, but there was then, and there is now, a growing chorus of US foreign policy hawks arguing that — at the very least — tactical bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities is now, or in the very near future will be, necessary to deal with the threat that Iranian nuclear weapons ambitions.
The Iran protesters are making apparent just what folly that thinking is. If US or Israel had dropped bombs on Iran, those young man would be currently venting their not insignificant frustrations at the west, rather than their own, disgusting government — and worse, their government would have a rallying call to unify the country.
Meantime, Iran isn’t the only place in which revolution may be formenting. That most oppressive regime of all — the one which was seemingly named with a nod to George Orwell — the “People’s Democratic Republic” of Korea, is also in trouble. For those who haven’t heard, Kim and his cronies have decided to devalue the currency. First, this serves the useful purpose of lopping a few zeros off the Won, but more important, it will flatten the entrepreneurs who have set up black markets in a variety of goods — taking away their savings and cutting the incentives to enter into free-marketeering. But North Koreans with access to the markets often relied on them as the only reliable source of certain essentials, such as food and clothing, and are therefore unhappy with the devaluation.
Blaine Harden of the Washington Post explains:
Grass-roots anger and a reported riot in an eastern coastal city pressured the government to amend its confiscatory policy. Exchange limits have been eased, allowing individuals to possess more cash.
The currency episode reveals new constraints on Kim’s power and may signal a fundamental change in the operation of what is often called the world’s most repressive state. The change is driven by private markets that now feed and employ half the country’s 23.5 million people, and appear to have grown too big and too important to be crushed, even by a leader who loathes them….
The currency episode seems far from over, and there have been indications that Kim still has the stomach for using deadly force.
There have been public executions and reinforcements have been dispatched to the Chinese border to stop possible mass defections, according to reports in Seoul-based newspapers and aid groups with informants in the North.
Still, analysts say there has also been evidence of unexpected shifts in the limits of Kim’s authority.
“The private markets have created a new power elite,” said Koh Yu-whan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. “They pay bribes to bureaucrats in Kim’s government, and they are a threat that is not going away.”
Orwell may have proven in his crushing masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four that there is nothing logically finite about dictatorships, but experience tells us that they all fall eventually.
Sooner rather than later the international community is going to find itself faced with an agonising decision. Iran is developing nuclear weapons. None of us should want to live in a world where the fundamentalist religious autocracy in Iran has nuclear weapons. Even ignoring the horrifying thought that it might use them, or worse, pass them on to one of the terrorist orginasaitons it funds and controls, the geopolitical and strategic consequences are awful. And beyond this, Iran going nuclear would basically spell the end of the non-proliferation treaty as a credible, binding, legal commitment. The number of nuclear-capable countries would multiply in the following decades.
Comments [ 3 ]