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Countdown to counter-revolution: An attempt by Iran's hardline Council of Guardians to ban many pro-democracy candidates from next month's parliamentary elections has caused a storm of protest. Will it all end in victory for the reformists, or repression? (The Economist, Jan 15th 2004)

[T]he conservatives may get away with it once more. But they face one short-term danger and one longer-term one. Their immediate worry is that the students will be galvanised by the MPs’ sit-in. Many student leaders have been picked off over the years and are now in jail, but new leaders may well arise in their place. The young particularly resent the bans or restrictions on dancing, movies, videos, alcohol, women’s dress and indeed all social mixing of the sexes. And like most Iranians, they hate being citizens of a country considered by George Bush to be part of the “axis of evil”. They know that in their aspirations for democratic change they have the moral support not just of Americans but of Europeans too—Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign-policy chief, criticised the ban on pro-democracy candidates during a visit to Tehran on Monday. And, thanks to watching illicit satellite broadcasts and to keeping in touch with a huge diaspora of Iranians abroad (about 1m in America alone), they are well informed about events outside their country, including the international opprobrium brought about by their country’s nuclear programme.

The longer-term danger for the clerics also lies in the dissatisfaction of the young, but this discontent is not confined to students. Two-thirds of Iran’s 70m people are under the age of 30, and half are under 20. Religious rule has given them an education and, in the right to vote (at 16), a taste of and for democracy. It has not given them jobs, nor can it do so in sufficient numbers to satisfy all those now leaving school unless it allows economic change—including foreign investment—and, inevitably, political reform too. Whether this week’s row ends in climbdown, compromise or crackdown, it will not have banished the prospect of Iran’s next revolution. On the contrary, it will probably have brought it closer.

Every form of totalitarianism--Nazism, Communism, Islamicism--is doomed by this same dynamic: the inability to satisfy the material demands of the people because of the fundamental flaw in the system. In confronting the -ism's, time is always on our side and war, though justified, rarely, if ever. required.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 15, 2004 11:20 AM