Thomas Jefferson once said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." We are about to see how refreshed that tree really might become in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The disputed results of Iran's June 12 presidential election, in which electoral fraud has been widely claimed, have sparked massive social protests unmatched in the country since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Much of the citizenry is livid with what they perceive to be an outright refusal of their will at the ballots, where official results handed a hardly-believable landslide reelection to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
And that citizenry has responded in the most profound way possible for a public body: by taking to the streets. The country's government, under the leadership of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, has responded by attempting to crush the public outcry. Hundreds of people have been arrested, several killed, and dozens more beaten, all for simply speaking out against the perceived electoral fraud.
However, no moment in the crisis will ever resonate more than when the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, at the hands of her own government, was caught on a phone camera by a nearby onlooker. A young woman with an entire lifetime ahead of her, and merely voicing her political concern for Iran, was gunned down by Basij paramilitaries - who are under the command of the national guard - and lost to this world in an instant.
I think this is where the current Iranian crisis becomes something larger than a case of civil unrest where casualties are invariably bound to occur. This to me is a further sign of how much our world is changing.
There have been many well-documented conflicts throughout history between a people and its government. The American and French Revolutions of the 18th century, the Russian Revolution of the early 20th century, and the aforementioned Iranian Revolution of 1979, are all prime examples. But in those conflicts, and in many other cases where imperial or dictatorial hubris was abundant, it often took far too long for any opposition forces to curb the gross injustices that they or others were being subjected to (think Nazi Germany). In all times before the most recent era in human history, the free flow of information was severely prohibited by technological limitations, law, or a combination of the two. And the results were often devastating when you think of the difficulties involved in rallying populations where people had no way of knowing what was going on a mile away from them, much less in other parts of their country.
However, this video of the death of Neda Soltani, taken on a cellular phone by an onlooker who quite possibly had never seen her before, represents a new era in the dynamics of social protest.
This country that is ruled first and foremost by a religious leader who is not beholden to the people in any way, that has state-controlled television and radio networks, and that refuses to let any outside media cover the protests, still cannot prevent some of the most harrowing live-action footage in human history from displaying to the world how oppressive its leadership truly can be. That is the power of technology.
One component of the current Iranian crisis is nothing new; as brave and admirable as the Iranian people have been in protest, humans have taken up the cause of challenging corrupt governance since the beginnings of civilization. This much-needed spirit will always reside within us, fully prepared to take charge when leadership oversteps its bounds.
But when the forces of technology allow masses of citizens, and indeed the entire world, to remove the veil that censorship so tightly clings to, the brutality of dictators and tyrants becomes clear for all to see. Hopefully that is what we will remember most when looking back thirty years after this Iranian crisis.