“The bor­ing truth about the Islamic Revolu­tion is that the rich are still rich, and the poor are still poor. The only real change is that the middle class was largely des­troyed. True or not, the poor feel that Iran lost the war with Iraq and the clergy are to blame. What you have left is an alli­ance between rad­ical mul­lahs and the secur­ity ser­vices. Together, these two groups can do things like help ter­ror­ists abroad and try to acquire a nuc­lear bomb– actions which allow them to pro­claim that the revolu­tion is still alive. But their sup­port is increas­ingly thin, and the soci­ety at home is headed in a com­pletely oppos­ite direction.”

In other Words, the battle between East and West was not being fought between the United States and Iran but inside Iran itself, between Iranians.”

…the issue of “fun­da­ment­al­ism” in Iran, and the West’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with it, was about to be over­taken by lar­ger shifts in the political-historical land­scape that few could yet fathom.

This change was a long time com­ing. In fact, some Iran observ­ers were sur­prised by the swell of sup­port for the Mousavi from young, urban, and middle-class Ira­ni­ans. We should not be sur­prised. The move­ment toward cul­tural and polit­ical mod­er­a­tion has long been brew­ing. Shortly after The Ends of the Earth was pub­lished, reformers under Khatami cap­tured 70% of the vote and a major­ity in the Ira­nian par­lia­ment. The women and young people who voted for Khatami’S Second of Khordad Move­ment almost a dec­ade ago are still voters today. Fol­low­ing the dis­qual­i­fic­a­tion of most pro­gress­ive can­did­ates, the elec­tions which brought Mah­moud Ahmad­ine­jad to power were largely boy­cot­ted. This time around, how­ever, things were dif­fer­ent. Although he is more con­ser­vat­ive than most Ira­nian pro­gress­ives, sup­port coalesced under Mousavi. Like in the United States, new tech­no­logy ener­gized and engaged pro­gress­ive Ira­ni­ans, and played a pivotal role in Mousavi’s cam­paign. Urban Ira­ni­ans were ready for change — a smooth, demo­cratic one.

But, as Kaplan says, it is not the city that makes a coun­try mod­ern, it is the town. Rural and urban Ira­ni­ans live in dif­fer­ent worlds. Iran is a coun­try of young people, where the cit­ies mod­ern­ized at an extreme pace under the Shah (even­tu­ally con­trib­ut­ing to the 1979 revolu­tion), and a dis­con­nect exists between the city and the coun­try. At the same time, the city and the coun­try are increas­ingly in contact. Migration has swelled Tehran alone to more than 13 mil­lion and put strain on nat­ural resources. In the last dec­ade, lit­er­acy rates, and the expect­a­tions that go with edu­ca­tion, have risen. Recently, how­ever, infla­tion has hit hard. The con­di­tions seem sim­ilar to those which lead to the 1979 revolution. The elites of Iran are con­ser­vat­ive, coun­try people, who over­threw the Shah. They will not let mod­ern­ism hap­pen easily.

At the time of this post­ing, a crack­down is underway. It appears all per­mits to for­eign journ­al­ists have been revoked and report­ers will face jail if they con­tinue to oper­ate, as did one Globe and Mail reporter. Demon­stra­tions are sched­uled to take place today, and a gen­eral strike tomorrow, with or (likely) without gov­ern­ment per­mis­sion. Young people in Iran will risk their lives to make their voices heard. The world needs to watch, listen, and learn: this is a con­flict that will define how human­ity nego­ti­ates the trans­ition to modernism. Will the regime back down?  Will the assembly of experts (the rul­ing clerics) intervene? How will the needs and desires of the city and the coun­try be balanced?  Will East and West meet peacefully?

For cov­er­age on the state of affairs in Iran, see Andrew Sul­li­van at the Atlantic. The CBC has two report­ers in Tehran.