Dissidence in Iran

An insightful and sometime exhaustive look at dissidence in Iran. Many parallels are drawn with the Czech dissident movement and India's own independence movement.
The anti-Shah revolution was not hijacked by the clerics, he said, just as the Bolshevik revolution was not stolen by Stalin, as Trotsky had claimed. “We began revolution, in order to create a paradise, but we created hell.” An unjust regime can be changed only by civil disobedience, nonviolently, he holds. Invasion cannot export or impose democracy either.

The basic thrust of the article is the claim that the fight in this world is not between civilizations, but between open secular societies and religious worlds. This fight happens, according to the author, in all societies including the western ones.

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