A very interesting editorial in the Manchester Guardian today is a plea to not judge the mood of the Iranian “street” based on the current Iranian administration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This little editorial is very worth reading to remind us how easy it is to base our understanding of events ina faraway country on sound-bites and pictures:
Iranians are routinely portrayed as frenzied masses that chant “Death to America!” after Friday prayers. Yet according to surveys by Iran’s own ministry of culture and guidance, fewer than 1.4% of the population actually bothers to attend Friday prayers. Angry images of Iranians are used as a fitting backdrop to news items speculating about Iran’s nuclear activities; most recently, to coverage of an attack by a crowd of about 400 demonstrators against the Danish embassy in Tehran.
[snip]
Ordinary Iranian Muslims may well be dismayed by xenophobic images of their prophet dressed as a terrorist, his turban a bomb with a lit fuse. But most did not take part in such a protest. Yet news coverage had us to believe that this 400-strong, officially backed mob, in a city populated by 12 million people, represented the mood of the Iranian street; just as a cartoon exhibition attended by 50 people – predominately journalists – on its busy opening night confirms Iran’s anti-semitism.
[snip]
Ahmadinejad is not the whole story. Among ordinary Iranians, the talk is not about Israel, Palestine or even the nuclear crisis. Most conversations on buses and in taxis are about inflation, economic stagnation, unemployment, corruption, poverty and drugs. To them, Ahmadinejad is not an all-powerful head of a monolithic regime but a toothless president who can be overruled at any time by figures and institutions that constitute a fracturing elite.
It’s easy to forget that even in a totalitarian theocracy there are voices of dissent, and the current rulers of Iran are well aware of the tenuousness of their hold on power. They understand that even they, for all their current power and nuclear ambitions, can endup as Ozymandias.
[LATER EDIT:] I have had several questions about Ozymandias, so I now realize that there is apparently an entire generation that was not compelled to memorize Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.” For these unfortunates, I reproduce it below:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
I like the stat that basically no one even goes to Friday prayers…