Quietening Down, By Coercion

THE STREETS of Iranian cities have been cleared, and the protests, at least for the moment, are over. The tens of thousands of women who took to the streets on a daily basis for months protesing their treatment in society, which until just a ffew weeks ago were gaining enthusiasm and posing a real threat to the authoritarian Iran theocratic government, have quietened. By putting sustained presure on the protestors by maintaining a constant military presence and repeatedly interfreing with and breakign up gatherings of protestors day after day, finally had the desired effect; of sufficiently inconveniencing, frigthening, harming, and discouraging the protest movement into what one can only hope is only temporary submission. The protest movement has, in effect, gone underground. However, it still exists, and indeed it is likely that a majority of Iranians are disenchanted with their own government, its deprivation of liberty and questionable foreign and domestic policies. The authoritarian theocratic government of Iran, in power since the revolution of 1979, when the Shah of Iran, a puppet of the United States, was overthrown, is, to say the least, anachronistic. Governments of this sort belong in the fourteenth century, or maybe the fifteenth, but certainly no later than the sixteenth...The women of Iran log onto the internet, or watch or listen to or read international, western media sources, and they cannot but help notice how much freedom, power, and feminine glamour European and American women enjoy, as the strictly limited Iranian women go about with their faces and bodies completely covered, powerless, their only purpose, seemingly, to serve men. Iranian women want the same educational, economic, and social opportunities that women in the western world have, now. Iranian culture and society can serve as a warning to Americans, a warning about the disastrous impact "Christian nationalism" would have on the United States, if it were to come to power. Even now, a majority of Republicans are Christian Nationalists, a frightening fact. The imposition of Christian law and culture upon American civic society would doubtless eventually engender great resistance, and even demonstrations, portest movements, and revolution, if necesary to remove it. (Let us pray that it would.) Few revolutionay movements succeed. Most are ultimately squashed by the forces they oppose,, by the entrenched powerful, the establishment. However, sustained support for just and righteous causes by large segments of society over a long period of time can and indeed often does yield real change and progress. Examples abound, particularly in America. The black Civil Rights movment in America. The Women's rights movements in the United States, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries both. The gay rights movement. Progress requires change. As Goethe said: "The World advances only because of those who oppose it". In the United States, blacks, women, and gay people, among other "minorities", ares till fighting for the equality they have earned, deserve, and yet still do not completely possess. The women of Iran and other benighted countries, countries burdened with cruel religions, their progress stymied by religious domination, have perhaps farther to go than we do in America, but, if nothing else, they are on their way, and have, if nothing else, begun their journey of a million miles with a few positive first steps.