These aren't just protests. This is a revolution.
The Khomeinist regime will fall. It's only matter of when. We should be helping Iranians hasten the moment.
There’s very little any of us can do to directly support the Iranian revolution underway at the moment, but those of us fortunate enough to live in advanced democracies like Canada can make use of ourselves in a very important way.
We can force our own governments to stop accomodating the revolution’s enemies. Let’s start with that. This work is perhaps especially necessary in Canada, where the Khomeinist regime’s jet-setting swindlers and kleptocrats have had the run of the place, as I pointed out two weeks ago in the National Post and in the Ottawa Citizen and in greater detail in this here newsletter.
This newsletter’s out later than I’d planned today because events in Iran are unfolding very quickly. A great unraveling is underway across the country. We’re now into the eighth day of riots and confrontations with the authorities in at least 50 cities and towns across the country following the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini while in the custody of the notorious Morality Police.
Iranian state media places the death toll at 41. The Oslo-based Iran Human Rights Organization says 54 civilians have been killed. Women have been at the forefront of the marches and rallies, burning their mandatory hijabs and cutting their hair. They’ve been met with tear gas, water cannon, batons and live fire.
The regime has shut down internet access almost completely and arrested at least 1,200 people, including journalists and human rights monitors. The country’s mass-executioner president Ebrahrim Raisi has instructed Iran’s police and paramilitaries to "deal decisively with those who oppose the country's security and tranquility."
As for making ourselves useful to the people of Iran, my old friend Kaveh Shahrooz has some very clear, carefully-considered ideas.
First we have to get our heads around what is actually going on here. “This is a total revolution,” Kaveh told a Cyrus Forum panel on Saturday. “This is a revolution to overthrow the Islamic Republic.” The cause of the revolutionaries is just, the regime is a menace to its neighbours and to the world, and if we can get our heads around these things, here’s what to do.
There has to be an open channel of communication between western leaders and credible Iranian opposition leaders, some of whom are still in Iran. We need to support the families of the 176 victims of Flight 572, shot down by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in January, 2020, who are bringing the regime before the International Criminal Court. The families of the Canadians who were killed on that flight say they’ve given up waiting for Justin Trudeau’s government to take action, so they’re pursuing justice on their own.
Western intelligence agencies should highlight the corruption of officials and identify where they are - they’re “living it up” in the NATO capitals. The regime has persisted for more tha 40 years because of these collaborators and “Vichyites,” Kaveh said. We should identify them, embarrass them, make it costly for them to continue being mouthpieces for the regime.
Here’s Kaveh:
So there we have it. Amazing times.
“Of all the astonishments pouring forth from the Islamic Republic,” Dexter Filkins writes in the New Yorker this weekend, “perhaps the most remarkable is the fact that Iran was brought to this point, at least in part, by an unpaid forty-six-year-old mother working from an F.B.I. safehouse in New York City.”
He’s talking about Masih Alinejad. Here she is now, making the point in this newsletter’s lead paragraph better than I ever could:
“I am not asking Biden or any western country to bring democracy for us, She says. “We, the people of Iran, are brave enough to bring democracy for ourselves. We don’t want them to save us. We want them to stop saving the regime.”
Meanwhile, in Russia, there are signs that discontent with Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is starting to come closer to the surface.
There have been open protests in several cities across Russia - a dangerous thing for people to do - now that Putin is making attempts to mobilize up to a million reservists to send them into the gates of hell in Ukraine. The Russian human rights project OVD-Info says 16,500 Russians have been arrested over their opposition to Putin’s war so far.
And now, Russians are fleeing the country by the thousands.
More later. All for now.
I tend to be a nuts-and-bolts type of guy. We need information about organized dissident Iranian groups in Canada (and the U.S.) and how we can help then. I'm not sure our Canadian government is doing all that much to help dissidents in Iran. That's why the Canadian public should get directly involved.
One would really like to believe this news. But we all have to wait for more information. No doubt the CIA finger prints together with Israel’s will be all over this news. 🤨