America & Iran: Why moderates fail and fanatics rise to power

Mikaela writes:

I'm reading Daughter of Persia, written by Satti Farman Farmaian, a woman social worker, about growing up and working in Iran. She comes from a well-connected, rich political family, whose patriarch believed in educating all of his children – mostly in Western schools.

(For feminists: There’s a lot of cool stuff in the beginning about the mutual support of women in a polygamist marriage.)

For me, though, the book’s main importance is the insight it offers into Iran, which has always been simply the vilified (sometimes backward, sometimes evil, sometimes rich) country that is the “other” to Iraq in America’s eyes.

Satti tells a story of a poor country whose overwhelmingly poverty-stricken citizens are at the mercy of the often violently-shifting political winds. She herself is a moderate who believes in democracy, freedom, dissent, and social programs to better the lives of every Iranian citizen, not just those from certain families or certain faiths. Her Western education gives her objectivity in some ways, and blindness in others. In some ways, being a bit of both makes her neither. She’s not the typical Iranian and can’t speak for them, nor is she the typical Westerner. In other ways, she has insights into both that should offer a bridge for understanding.

What I’m fascinated by at the moment is her discussion of the rise of fanatical Islam after years of dictatorship under a monarch who was secular and embraced all things Western – to the point of throwing out all things Islamic. Ayatollah Khomeini offered the opposite view and was able to argue that the excesses of government and corruption went hand-in-hand with being in the pocket of American corporate interests, and the only solution must be to repudiate all things Western. What gets left out are all the moderates who want stability AND democracy AND religious freedoms AND education AND equality for citizens AND women’s rights.

She tells incident after incident of watching in frustration as more and more people assume the mantle of fanaticism at the peril of their own liberty (especially women). At the same time, she herself sees the problems with the opposite form of government and wants to be rid of the worst kind of crackdown on political dissent and increasing corruption.

She laments often about the lack of powerful leaders who can argue from the middle about keeping the best of both worlds – the freedoms of a secular government and the emphasis on family, community, stability, equality and tolerance of Islam.

Tehran aerial courtesy www.ordoesitexplode.com

Her story shows the power of rhetoric and visceral buy-in of extreme positions. It’s much harder to speak passionately about moderation, even if that’s where freedom lies.

I see the same happening in America today. The division between red states and blue states, conservatives and liberals, republicans and democrats are hardly ever about reasonable positions but instead about what can be passionately argued. The moderates and the nuanced thinkers and those who think across platforms to the values that support them… we end up having to vote for the lesser of two evils. The country is therefore left to jolt pendulously from one side to the other, leaving everyone feeling defensive, unsure, enraged, frustrated, and unheard.

I hope that what happened in Iran – huge sea changes that still left the main problems of poverty and misery for millions of its citizens untouched if not worsened – doesn’t predict what happens here. Moderate has come to have bad connotations of “those without real values” or “those sitting on fences” or "those who just won't speak truth to power" or "political opportunists" rather than what I would argue its meaning should be: “those who can describe what the optimum balance of freedoms and responsibilities should be.”

In my mind, we have to get pretty far to the perceived “left” before we start finding “moderate” positions in America. We’ve gone way too deep into the red if Bush can argue without shame that secret CIA prisons with “tough” interrogation techniques and indefinitely-held, innocent-until-proven-guilty-except-they’re-“enemy combatants” are actually necessary for our freedom. If that’s freedom, I don’t want it. It’s bloody and immoral and wrong, and I’d rather take my chances against a mostly unarmed shadow enemy.

What’s helpful to me about reading the book is understanding that all the subtlety of our own political process – the fact that so many Americans don’t really approve of Democrats OR Republicans right now – is also true of all these countries we’re so afraid of. Most of Iran’s educated citizens feel like most of us do in America – alarmed at our own governments and systems of power. And those uneducated in Iran and America? They’re just worried about how they will live. I am, too.