Persian Legacy

First of all, doesn't Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini look like a cross between Sean Connery and someone from Lord of the Rings?

Secondly, quick explanation on the name. Ayatollah is a title, like doctor or bishop. Ruhollah is his first name. Khomeini is his last name, which also tells us where he was born. Khomeini means "from Khomein". The current Supreme Leader of Iran is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. So, since the revolution there have been two supreme leaders, Khomeini (ho-MA-nee) and now Khamenei (ha-men-AY).

The post-election protests in Iran have been fascinating to follow on so many levels. It is the rarest of things: it actually deserves the hype. Even if the protests end today, the implications from what we've seen so far are revolutionary in the truest nature of the word.

The last time massive street protests and emerging technological innovations merged to undermine an autocratic government was 30 years ago in...Iran.

Iran is a fascinating place. The only continuous civilizations which can compare in terms of longevity are China, India, and Egypt. Iranian civilization has been in place for about 3,000 years, and has been Muslim for roughly half that time.

But Iran (Persia is a way cooler and more accurate name) was the first land converted to Islam that was neither ethnically Arab nor Arabic speaking (Persian and Farsi, respectively). Iran has always been distinct from the Arab world to its West the Indian subcontinent to its East.

So Persia is its own distinct place. And 30 years ago it instituted its own distinct form of government. In Farsi it is called the "Vilayet-e Faqih" which means something like the "governance of the prudent". What this means in practice is that religious figures have veto power over every decision the elected government makes. It also has veto power over who many run for office.

So this whole debate over who really won the election is a bit beside the point; since the ayatollahs cleared every candidate, there were, by definition, no real reform candidates running. What has happened here is that the people seem to have leaped far beyond this minutiae and called into question the very legitimacy of the governmental structure itself.

The last time this happened in Iran was 30 years ago. Back then, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets and STAYED on the streets, even after many hundreds of them were shot dead. And ultimately, that was all it took. When crowds refuse to disperse, the number of soldiers willing to fire upon them suffers from the law of diminishing returns.

But there was a piece of cutting edge technology that helped the protestors in 1979. Audio cassette tapes of the Ayatollah Khomeini encouraging the revolution. Small, cheap, easy, portable, these tapes played a huge role in coordinating and motivating people.

Audio tapes now, of course, are fantastically obsolete, but the Persian public is not. The government has shut down all foreign sources of news, but cell phones, digital cameras, and the internet are creating one of the most democratic spectacles the world has ever witnessed, whether it understands this or not.

When else in history has an expulsion of foreign journalists made a negligible impact on a government's ability to handle a rebellion from a PR standpoint? The people are not only putting their lives on the line, they are taking ownership of their own story, which has never really been possible until now.

There is now no filter between the Persian people and the world. Not even CNN, which has been reduced, or should I say elevated, to simply reading facebook postings from Persia as a way of reporting the news. This is a remarkably democratic moment.

There is danger, of couse, and I personally doubt that any serious change will result from this. And lest we hope for a revolution, let us remember what happened 30 years ago.

Just as in the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, the Iranian Revolution was won by moderates who were subsequently murdered and replaced by thugs. Successful revolutions must succeed without brutalizing its participants.

Whether or not that happens, I do know this: the ayatollahs will think twice before firing into these crowds. In any previous time, they would not. Now, they must. Because the people have the ability to tell their story to the world. And that should make us all feel freer and safer than people like us have ever been.