The Green Revolution?
15 June 2009, mid-morning
Shima’s dad said he couldn’t sleep Saturday, he was up all night following whatever news he could find about the protests in Iran. If you have a lot of time, the Daily Dish has a serious-ass round-up of pretty much anything and everything that has been said about the protests. The best coverage of why the election was probably stolen comes from Juan Cole, Stealing the Iranian Election. When the vast majority of your country is under 30, you probably don’t want to push them too far. Clearly the Iranian regime has. These aren’t small protests. People are angry. What’s perhaps more important is that the protests aren’t isolated to Tehran anymore, they are taking place throughout the country. At some point, if you have enough people out, it’s next to impossible for true suppression to take place. Uneducated teenagers on motorbikes can only do so much. I think the clerics are going to have to backdown, or they’ll lose far more than just this one election.
(As a side note, Twitter once again proves it is by far one of the most interesting pieces of tech to come out in recent years. The coverage of the protests on Twitter is crazy. All the haters need to shut up already.)
Update: God damn this is a big protest.
Update: FiveThirtyEight has some more discussion on irregularities with the Iranian election results. And the Atlantic suggests people follow the news of these events like they were a CIA analyst.
Update: The Big Picture on the Iranian election protests. Robert Fisk’s coverage of the protests is also well worth a read. (He points out why Ahmadinejad is so popular in the rural communities of Iran.)
Update: The armed forces are shooting protesters.
Update 3:11PM: There are reports that protesters have burned down a Basij base. If true, that’s pretty amazing. The Basij need to get their asses kicked. Hard.
Reliable news from Iran has arrived that after the death of one person by Basij, the Basij base in Azadi Sq. has been burned down and the commander in that base has been killed.
Update 4:33PM: Looks like the above report was true.