Dan

Calabrese

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June 18, 2009

Is It the Tehran Spring? Tyrants Discover You Can’t Give Fake Freedom

The mad mullahs who run Iran appear to have remembered – possibly too late to save themselves – what Leonid Brezhnev understood all too well in 1968:

Tyrants can’t afford to give their subjects a little freedom. By the same token, tyrants in the age of lightning-fast information can’t get away with pretending to give their subjects a voice, only to reveal the entire thing as a cynical fraud when the people actually try to take them up on it.

The millions of Iranians taking to the streets of Tehran, protesting the sham “election” that purportedly gave nut job president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term, call to mind the events of 1968’s Prague Spring in then-communist Czechoslovakia.

Like Iranian challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi, who once served as prime minister under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Communist Party leader Alexander Dubček was far from a likely reformer. A long-time party apparatchik, Dubček was not proposing the end of communism. But he recognized that many of its characteristics were unworkable in a nation that sought a strong economy and a viable role in the world.

Dubček decided to allow freedom of the press, including the right to criticize the government, and sought to introduce a mixed economy that combined free-market activity with socialist central planning. It was hardly an ideal model, but give an open-minded commie credit for trying considering the pushback he was sure to get from Moscow.

And pushback he got, in the form of an invasion by the Soviet Union, Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary – all designed to end any attempt at liberalization, and to quash the idea that freedom could have any place within the Marxist paradise of Eastern Europe. Having embraced the new freedoms, the people of Prague took to the streets in protest – one famously set himself on fire – but there was no turning back the invading forces.

Dubček was rewarded for his efforts with a new job in the forestry service, and the Soviets swiftly found a new party leader who immediately reversed all of Dubček’s reforms, returning Czechoslovakia to its former status as a communist hell – until the people of Eastern Europe were able to take down the entire enterprise in 1989.

Brezhnev’s objective was to nip in the bud any nod toward liberalization, because if it took hold, he knew it would spread like wildfire and even the Soviets’ military might wouldn’t be able to keep the people under their thumbs.

Fast forward 41 years. Iran’s mullahs clearly care nothing for democracy, but they recognize that their own people want it, and that the rest of the world sees your regime as more legitimate if freely chosen by the people. So what could be better than an “election” in which the outcome is pre-ordained, but the people are fooled into thinking they had a voice?

Oops.

Somewhere along the line, just like the people of Czechoslovakia circa 1968, the people of Iran seem to have gotten a clue about what real freedom is like – and this ain’t it.

Where did they get this knowledge? Apparently the mullahs don’t control the influence of the Internet as well as they think, which is probably why they are now threatening to crack down on anyone who tells the truth via Facebook and Twitter, as the demonstrators have done with such dramatic effect during these past few days.

And oh, by the way, wasn’t there an American president not too long ago who suggested that one free, democratic nation in the Middle East would inspire others in the region to demand the same rights? Didn’t that president’s critics scoff at the notion, explaining that freedom and democracy were somehow not part of the culture of the Middle East? Come to think of it, didn’t some people once say the same thing about Eastern Europe?

And didn’t that recent president’s critics insist that the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq had merely tilted the balance of power in the region in favor of Iran, which, they now believed, wielded major influence over events in Iraq?

Know what? There was recently an election in Iraq too – a real one, thanks to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion – and pro-Iranian candidates got their clocks cleaned. It appears that it’s Iraq influencing Iran. Freedom is contagious, and you can’t maintain your tyranny over people by pretending to give them some. Once they see it for real – as they did in Prague in 1968, and as the Iranians see now in their own backyard – they will accept nothing less.

President Obama, who obviously doesn’t have the slightest idea what to do or say in the face of all this, isn’t helping with his weak pronouncements of “concern.” But the people of Iran may be discovering they’ve always had the power to free themselves, and even a weak, indecisive, feckless America won’t prevent them from going the distance.

God support them.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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