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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 14-Jun-2009
Iran: Violent street demonstrations follow Ahmadinejad's landslide election victory

Web Log - June, 2009

Iran: Violent street demonstrations follow Ahmadinejad's landslide election victory

Opposition supporters are claiming massive election fraud, after the Interior Ministry announced an overwhelming victory for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with 62.6% of the vote, against 33.75% for the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi. The turnout was a record 85 percent of Iran's 46.2 million eligible voters.

Opposition leaders point out that polls had indicated a very close election, and Mousavi had a good chance to win if turnout was high. The turnout was in fact extremely high, with millions of new voters, but the announced election results would seem to indicate that all the new voters voted for Ahmadinejad. This appears very unlikely, in view of the huge election rallies for Mousavi in the last few days.

Whatever the truth is about whether election fraud has occurred, the perception is that it HAS occurred, and this has infuriated supporters of Mousavi and other opposition and reform leaders.

As we explained a few days ago, from the point of view of Generational Dynamics, Iran is almost exactly at the same point on the generational timeline as America was during the 1967 Summer of Love.

The riots and demonstrations in Tehran on Saturday can be compared to the riots and demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, and are generated by the same kinds of emotions -- enormous frustration among young people at the rules and restrictions imposed by their parents, who are still traumatized by the preceding crisis war.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, there is one major, significant difference between America in 1968 and Iran today: America's previous crisis war was an external war (World War II), while Iran's previous crisis war began with a civil war (the Islamic Revolution of 1979). This is a significant difference in the generational theory approach to understanding Awakening eras.

We see it in play today in Iran. This is the height of Iran's generational Awakening era, which means that there is absolutely no possibility whatsoever that the current unrest will spiral into a full scale civil war.

But since the last crisis war began with a civil war, the mullahs who run Iran don't know that. All they know is that today's unrest by youth looks almost EXACTLY the same as the unrest by youth by mullahs in 1979. In fact, it's exactly these mullahs who were the youth that caused the unrest in 1979.

Thus, there's a significant possibility that the mullahs will panic and overreact. If the mullahs become convinced that a governmental overthrow is possible, then they could overreact and use the army to end the demonstration through massive slaughter, as happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

I heard one Iranian commentator on the BBC respond to the question "Will the demonstrations continue?"

He said, "It depends on how the government responds, whether they're firm and fair."

This is completely wrong. These demonstrations will continue to grow irrespective of how the government responds. That's what happened in America after the Summer of Love, and that's what happens in every country during a generational Awakening era at any time in history.

However, things can go badly wrong, and generational theory tells us that this is what might happen when the previous crisis war is a civil war.

There's one exception to this: If the government overreacts, fearing a new civil war, and responds with extreme violence, killing thousands of demonstrators, then the demonstrations will end, and the government will have laid the groundwork for a future civil war.

Even if the demonstrations are permitted to continue with little violence, as happened in America in the years following the Summer of Love, there will still reach a point where the government will be forced to change, just as Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were driven from office. In fact, some Iranian government officials have already expressed concern about a "velvet revolution," and indicated ominously that such activities will not be tolerated.

The Summer of Love began a decade of bitter generational political conflict in the US, conflict that included riots, demonstrations, assasinations, and occasional bombings by the terrorist group Weather Underground.

Iran is about to enter a similar period, and it's hard to believe that the mullahs in power will tolerate the kind of political conflict that occurred during America's Awakening era. Thus, a big military crackdown is a real possibility in the next few days, weeks and months in Iran.

Update. I've learned on the Sunday news shows something that I hadn't fully realized -- that Washington considers the Iran election to be a referendum on President Obama's recent speech in Cairo. Thus, if Mousavi had won, it would have been a major foreign policy victory for Obama, but now it's a defeat. This is total insanity. I doubt that even a single Iranian voter changed his mind in either direction because of Obama's speech. The fact that people in Washington believe otherwise is a sign of how completely out of touch the Washington politicians are. (Paragraph added - 14-June)

(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the Iran thread of the Generational Dynamics forum.) (14-Jun-2009) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 14-Jun-2009 Iran: Violent street demonstrations follow Ahmadinejad's landslide election victory

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 14-Jun-2009
Iran: Violent street demonstrations follow Ahmadinejad's landslide election victory