COURAGE AND COMPLACENCY

Read the report at Juan Cole’s Informed Comment and marvel at the display of mass and nonviolent courage displayed by people in Tehran. One suspects that numbers help.

The comparison with our sunny land could not be more stark, especially the myth that is created that the uninformed and non-couragious are the ballast of our liberal democracy, and possess a special folk wisdom. Ordinary citizens might judge their peers, but only after listening to full contending evidence. The further contention is that it has always been so, ignoring among other issues the struggle for rights at work. The essence of democracy is practice, and not institutions as helpful and necessary as they might be. Democratic rights are always and everywhere hard won, and easily lost by recourse to fear and complacency among other reasons.

The problem with rigging elections is that if it is done clumsily then the favoured government is delegitimated. The smartest thing to do is to suppress the vote, and use voting machines capable of tampering. Then the outcome can be placed before the Supreme Court, without street protests. Mass demonstrations should be avoided at all costs, if only because control over all the media is difficult and transparent. In these matters, the world looks in awe and respect to its greatest teachers.

ELSEWHERE:

Unlike the ABC, BBC Online is continuing to report events from Iran.

Advertisements